The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1930-01-11
Steps to Settlement of
This Problem

what their lives are, driven by the
speed-up and stretch-out at low
wages and long hours in industry.
Of this 42,105, there were 1,460,-
Ais who left the farm of their fam
lily, the cold home farm" so tenderly
spoken of by poets and other fools,
but which, with the agrarian crisis
making it impossible for the farmer
to pay wages to his grown or youth
full children, caused the great exodus
and thousands of family quarrels,
discomfort and humble heartbreaks.
But we must look to the wage
workers still remaining on the
farms. The Trade Union Unity
League must most particularly
launch fight to organize the wage
workers on highly capitalized farms
in the most accessible divisions of
the agricultural industry: dairy,
truck gardening and small fruits,
and in the South the cotton and
tobacco farm workers.
At Our Elbows.
The comfortable illusion, tanned
with opportunism, which relegates
such work to the West alone, and
ignores the eastern and Great Lakes
regions, must be combatted. New
York State has far more than twice
the farms as North and South Da-
kota combined. Wage labor on 10000
New Jersey farms is vital to the life
of New York City. We do not have
to travel to find the agrarian wage
worker. They are at our elbows and
all that we need is to open our eyes.
But while it is of extreme neces-
sity that we establish the new Agri-
cultural Union of the T. u U. L.,
the poor farmer who is tenant, a
debt-ridden mortgaged farmer or
the farmer who, without capital to
hire labor or buy machinery works
himself and his family to death try
ing usually in vain) to keep from
falling into hopeless debt and ten
ancy in an effort to keep alive in
the race with the mechanical farmer
capitalist-these present US with
"poor farmer" POLLEN that is
sharper, more full of explosive, than
even the problem of the agrarian
proletariat.
Bourgeois authorities admit
that 10 per cent of the farmers
are "miserably and desperately
poor" that go per cent are "ntod-
erotely poor" and only 10 per
cent moderately 1oeU off," Fun
damemtalIy, the poor farmer is
robbed IN three principal 10ays:
1. By landlords IN rents. Q. By
nsury, chiefly interest on mort
cages and loans for capital he
simply must haze to produce
crops. s. By lack of control over
marketing his product, which is
held and will be held so long as
capitalism lasts, in the hands of
marketing monopoIies dominated
By the banks.
Progress of Poverty.
The percentage of tenant to all
farmers grows: In 1880 it was
1850; in 1900, $3.50; in 1910,
37.03o; in 1920, 1910; in 1925,
1850. What a toll they pay to
landlords in rentals is enormous. The
exact figures are not obtainable,
however. AS to mortgages and other
debts: The farm debt has trebled
since 1914. And the power of finance
capital is ever welded tighter around
the farmer with marketing monopo-
lies which rob him under the dis
guise of "co-operatives." At the bot
tom Of the scale are the millions of
pauperized "share-croppers" of the
South. This is absolutely a serfdom,
in no wise different than the con-
dition suffered by the Russian peas
ant under Tsarism. Share cropping
is feudalist vestige that was be-
slowed as blessing upon the South
ern farm poor, both black and white,
by the abolition of slavery! What
an emancipation!
The tenants are said by the Labor
Research Bureau, to have harvested
more crop land than full owners in
1924. In the west south central