I appreciate the point but I think this is a bit of an ultraleftist position - the basis of any economy is production. Even if the mine owners are taking the surplus value of labor, hundreds of workers were still making a wage, and spending those wages at local shops, supplied by local light industry. Even if they're just barely scraping by, the wealth created by a single miner sustains an entire community of clerks, porters, drivers, engineers, bureaucrats. The issue today is that the Appalachian economy has no productive base. Capitalists extract the surplus value of labor from every industry.

The difference between then and today is that artisanal mining is no longer profitable. Like with many industries, automation has reduced the number of jobs provided by mining at the expense of the environment. I'm not a Luddite - automation isn't bad, per se - but it does put Capitalism into an overproduction crisis, and without distributive justice it is now impossible to base an economy on coal extraction in Appalachia.

I wasn't trying to say that coal mining in West Virginia was some kind of golden age, but what it was was a functional economy.