Taking Back the Land...

 The Agrarian Revolution?

Jacobin’s latest issue, Summer 2024, is on the agricultural and rural question. They do not include fishing.  From their redoubts in the apartments of Brooklyn, they opine on country music, Marxist policy on peasants, farming situations in South Africa, Tanzania, India, Brazil, Gaza and Italy, progressive rural opinions and the good ‘ol days of rural insurrections, Capital “P” Populists and Southern CP sharecroppers.  Thomas Frank even pops up in this eclectic potpourri.  Their main complaint is that the Democrats do not have a progressive rural program, much as the Democrats have mostly ignored working-class issues. Their overall intention is to pressure the Democrats.  What is missing from them is any class analysis of the country-side, especially in the U.S., and what specifically rural demands to make.

Living in a small corn-belt town and a smaller forest town has made agriculture a concern of mine. I’ve seen the small 80 acre farms disappear.  I’ve run from cows.  I’ve had romance in the haylofts. I’ve tracked through corn fields. Let’s look at how agriculture has changed in the U.S. and how this impacts any attempt at a rural revolution. 

    1.    The U.S. has 2.9 million agricultural workers (NCFH). These are rural proletarians and close allies of the urban working-class.  In Italy it is around 500,000; Germany 300K; France 275K; Spain 150K; U.K. 75K.  I am ignoring their legal status, but nearly all are migrants to these countries.  In the U.S. figures show 85% settled and 15% migratory ‘within’ the U.S.

     2.    In 1935 there were 6.8M farms, declining steadily after the Depression; in 1975 there were 2.5M; in 2007 there were 2.2M and in 2023 there were 1.89M farms/ranches in the U.S.  Texas has the most farms/ranches presently, which figures (USDA).

     3.   The average farm size now is 464 acres.  Averages hide the actual number of large farms and ranches. In 1910 the avg. was a bit more than a 100 acres.  Large-scale farms ($1M+) have 51.8% of production; medium size have 19.1% ($300k to $1M); non-family have 10.4%; and small family farms have 18.7% - though comprising 88% of all farms. I'm assuming 'non-family' means corporate ownership. Many lease their land to others. Small farmers make $300K per year or less (USDA).

     From these statistics it’s clear that farms/ranches are larger, there are fewer farmers and the weight of large farms in production is obvious.  The latter’s production is based on unsustainable levels of pesticides, fertilizers, expensive machinery, animal agriculture and water usage, which is relevant to any revolutionary agricultural program.  So is the domination of farming by an oligopoly of ag giants – firms like Cargill, ADM, Monsanto, Bunge, Tyson and Deere.

The romantic images of subsistence peasants and self-sufficient small farmers in Europe and the U.S. is gone. The ranks of sharecroppers are almost non-existent.  Cooperatives have grown to the point where they are more like large businesses.  There are only a few communal farms and worker-owned businesses left. Even the ‘family farm’ is barely hanging on. Nostalgia is not going to be very useful.  Crops are different too.  Most corn is for ethanol (40%) or animal feed (36%), not for human consumption. Alfalfa, an animal feed, sucks up the vast majority of water flowing into the dying Great Salt Lake, while the Colorado River is 50% used by animal feed. Water-thirsty crops like almonds and alfalfa take part of the blame.  Of the 75% of land in ‘oil seeds’ and meat, 40% of that was for meat production. This shows the domination of meat in the production system. So how does this lay out in politics?

Jacobin points out that the phrase about the ‘idiocy of rural life’ in the Communist Manifesto did not refer to peasants, small-holders or rural people being stupid. “Idiocy” at that time meant that rural areas were isolated, apolitical and private.  In a sense this is still true today, though with the internet it is difficult to keep the young ‘down on the farm’ anymore, as it doesn’t take Paree.  55% of the world now lives in urban areas, which reflects a world-wide movement of dispossessed or broken farmers into the cities.  In 2022 in the U.S. 56.3M live in so-called ‘rural’ areas out of a U.S. population of 333.3M.  3.4M of these were considered ‘farmers’ – this includes family, renters, managers, tenants and share-croppers but not hired ‘hands.’  So most people in rural areas are not on farms, they live and work in the towns servicing the ag industry. This is crucial as this means truck drivers, maintenance workers, health and education personnel, clerks, office workers, grain mill workers and the like.  Capitalists have been moving factories to rural areas too, in a big way.  So there are large collections of workers in certain towns. These are potential allies, though under the thumb of their local employers, dispersed and few in number or unreached by unionism.

Cooperatives still in the U.S.

MARX et al.

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin and Kautsky all supported the voluntary gathering of peasants and farmers into cooperatives, collectives and communes.  Marx was very clear on this, even suggesting the communal Russian mir could be a gateway to socializing the countryside. At the time of the revolution the Bolsheviks adopted breaking up the landed estates and distributing the land to small-holders. Later Stalin came up with forced collectivization, a method the Soviet CP exported to eastern and central Europe. Initially famine was one of the results in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.  In Soviet Europe these farms were slowly dismantled by local CPs due to their failures.

Jacobin goes into detail on the rural program of the early communists in Poland, Ireland and elsewhere, which was intimately tied to the national question.  Marx warned “not to hit the peasant over the head” with ultra-left demands in a response to Bakunin.  Because Kerensky’s Provisional Government dragged its feet on land reform, this led the Russian peasantry into revolution.  The land question is still key.               

What about divisions within the U.S. rural population?  As Marx noted, peasants in rural France were oppressed by money-lenders, mortgages and bourgeois capital.  This is still true in rural areas, as the banks, farm equipment manufacturers and large oligopolies control the markets and inputs, putting even middle-farmers into economic chains.  The Farm Bills are dominated by these forces too, as is the Agriculture Dept. from Earl Butz to the present sad-sack, Tom Vilsack. For instance Zuckerberg’s ‘farm’ in Hawaii earns massive tax breaks, as most government aid goes to large farms owned by ag corporations.  Gates, Bezos, Buffet and Turner all own large tracts of land, while nations like Saudi Arabia are buying up African lands.   

Small farmers are small businessmen and capitalists, trying to make it perhaps with heirloom tomatoes, organic produce and CSAs. Some rent their land to windmills and solar farms. Some of these are young, new farmers.  They, like so many, are in debt. They can certainly be allies, and they might practice environmental and agro-ecologic or veganic methods. They might closely rely on personal connections with businesses and customers in the cities.  Yet if they really make $300K it's a stretch, as it seems even small farmers are not so small anymore.  Most of this probably goes to debt payments, but not all.

‘Middle farmers’ on the other hand are making up to $1M a year.  They are the rural success stories and most are closely aligned to the businessmen and firms that run small rural towns and dominate isolated town workers.  This even though they are in debt, with a net worth that would be millions if not for their outstanding loans and locked-in delivery contracts.  At present this layer is not winnable and probably make up the hard base of Republican voters in rural areas. Large corporate farms, feedlots, slaughter houses and ranches are another story and use large amounts of proletarian labor, which makes them ripe for class struggle and later, socialization. 

A sketch of a socialist program for rural areas could include:  1. Debt relief. 2. Land should be socialized overall, with land leases initially. 3. The takeover of corporate farms by workers and state. 4. Encouraging small and even medium farmers to join cooperatives.  5. The primacy of sustainable agricultural practices. 6. A lessening of meat production. 7. Infusing rural areas with aid to hospitals and schools, which are closing at a rapid pace.  Though as Jacobin notes, spending money alone is not effective in changing class relations. 8. Using government policy (a progressive Farm Bill) to encourage environmental changes and cooperation in the countryside.  9.  Unionizing ag workers.  10. Repopulating rural areas with ag workers as mono-crop farming reliant on massive machines is reduced. 11.  Studying the productivity of small versus large farms.  There are indications that small farms are more productive for many crops. 12.  Socialize the large Ag companies.

I spent several years after a divorce listening to country.  Yeah, I know, that's funny.  Jacobin missed a number of progressive country songs – two are “Working Man’s Ph.d” by Aaron Tippin and “Seminole Wind” by John Anderson.  Others are “We Shall Be Free” by Garth Brooks, “The Revolution Starts Now” by Steve Earle (among others) and “The Pill” by Loretta Lynn.  Citing Woody or Pete all the time is a dodge.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism,” “From Commune to Capitalism,” “The Robbery of Nature” (J.B. Foster); “What is the Matter With the Rural U.S.?” “Vegan Freak,” “Oneness vs. the 1%” (Shiva);  “The Worst Hard Time,” “Foodopoly” “The Emotional Lives of Animals,” “Animal, Vegetable, Junk,” “Grocery Activism” or the word ‘agriculture.’  

And I bought it at May Day Books excellent periodicals section!

Red Frog / August 3, 2024