The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1930-10-14
Class Differences On Farms and
Communist Tasks

denying that they can be or should be organ
ized This is wrong. We must show the
farmer that he is the victim of finance capital,
must sit down and work out demands with
him that are comprehensive to him, that if
gained would improve his present conditions at
the expense of finance capital, and get him or
ganized and into actual struggle.
General demands are given in our Thesis,
but we must also work out demands for the
various sections with the various comrades in
the districts Only on this basis can we do
concrete work. We must know the conditions
in your district, and it is no credit to you that
after instructions of the Central Committee
through the Organization Department over
four or five months, not one district has
formed agrarian department that would get
US this information and do concrete work.
Now to have an alliance with poor farmers
they should, obviously, be organized The
United Farmers League should be made into
a real organization on the basis of struggle,
united front organization of masses on the
basis of widespread fight to lower rents and
taxes, to fight evictions, to battle against the
mortgage bankers, and so on. This is in our
Draft Thesis and we think that the U. F. l..
should advocate the formation of committees
of action on the farms, perhaps by townships.
We should push this idea and try to dispel
the false idea among farmers that they can
not do anything themselves, but must elect
someone to Congress and wait for some Moses
to deliver them from their misery. I have
nothing against abolishing the Farm Board,
nothing against farmers demanding it, but if
they are going to merely put this up to the
Farm Bloc politicians to get for them and do
nothing themselves, / am against it.
We have terrific agrarian crisis. 1t occurs
in the Third Period, or it does not. We must
draw conclusions that result in action, not in
mere antediluvian agitation and propaganda.
We must show poor farmers that they, too,
must strike, the same as workers do, against
bankers, landlords, tax collectors, capitalist
state authority. That they should and can or
ganize on a mass scale and refuse to pay high
rents, high taxes. And once you set this idea
loose among the bitterly disconnected agrarian
masses there will be one hell of fight, and
the Farm Board will be dissolved, all right
But they must get the idea of looking to Con-
gress for saviors out of their heads, and de-
liver physical blow at Re rule of finance
capital.
There is much dynamite in agrarian discon-
tent in the South. And when these struggles
against the remnants of feudalism in the South
are linked, as they must be linked, to the slo-
gan Of self-determination for the Negroes,
there will be a great reservoir of revolution
airy energy to aid us overthrow capitalism.
Comrade Lenin said that rational agriculture
is impossible under capitalism and this is pro-
foundry true. We have dealt at length on err
roneous theories because it is necessary that
we get thoroughly clarified on just what we
are doing. In rallying the poor agrarian bour-
geoisie, we will secure great ally, and let us
not worry because they are petty bourgeois
and they will vacillate. If we do not, as Lenin
has said, vacillate ourselves, they won't vacil-