Below is the second in a four-part series the Militant is running on "Communism and Labor's Transformation of Nature." The series was occasioned by a letter to the editor from Karl Butts, a farmer from Florida, commenting on an article in our July 2 issue, "Cubans celebrate 40th anniversary of farmers organization."

That article, Butts said, provided a good summary of what Cuban farmers have accomplished over the past four decades as a result of the socialist revolution and land reform in that country. But he was concerned that a sentence in the closing paragraph could be read to imply that communists lend credence to the concept that organic agriculture is "preferable to that where 'chemicals' are used" and even that "Cuba generally chooses not to use chemicals in agricultural production."

The first installment in this series clarified that the anti-science prejudices of concern to Butts have nothing in common with the views of the communist workers movement, either today or at any time since its origins in the days of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The article reviewed Marx and Engels's materialist explanation of the relationship between human labor and nature. And it reported on a discussion of these issues at a leadership meeting of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) held in New York City in May.
 

In his conference talk, Barnes called attention to the statement of purpose at the beginning of the constitution of the Socialist Workers Party. "The purpose of the party," it says, "shall be to educate and organize the working class in order to establish a workers and farmers government, which will abolish capitalism in the United States and join in the worldwide struggle for socialism."

Barnes pointed out that winning that goal--joining with workers and farmers of all lands "in the worldwide struggle for socialism"--necessitates closing the enormous gap in economic, social, and cultural conditions among working people of different countries, and toilers of city and countryside. These inequitable conditions are inherited from millennia of class society and have been reproduced and often widened by the imperialist world order for more than a century.  
 
A world perspective
Roughly 2 billion people, for example, have no access to modern energy--either to electricity, or to modern sources of fuel for cooking and heating. Candles and kerosene for lighting, and wood, dung, thatch, and straw for fuel (all with their noxious fumes, harmful both to humans and the earth's atmosphere) are the reality for at least one-third of the world's population. And the World Bank, which is the source of these statistics, notes that "even this figure may understate the number without access, because some countries (India, for example) count all households in a village as being electrified if the village has one streetlight and one electric water pump"!

Altogether the imperialist countries of North America, Europe, and the Pacific, with 14 percent of the world's population, consume 57 percent of the electricity. Excluding Japan and China, on the other hand, the countries of Asia and the Pacific, with 31 percent of the world's population, consume only 10 percent of the electricity; and the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, with nearly 10 percent of the world's population, consume only 1 percent of the electricity.

Another indication of this global inequality perpetuated by the world capitalist system can be seen in the application of the most productive farming techniques. While in the imperialist countries there are 16 tractors in use for every 1,000 acres of farmland, there are only three in use on average elsewhere in the world. And with the exception of the rice-producing Third World countries of East Asia, the application of fertilizer per acre is much higher in North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.

This imperialist-imposed backwardness in agriculture and industry has devastating effects on the economic, social, and cultural conditions of working people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. According to even the understated estimates of big capital's own international agencies, some 47 percent of the world's population--nearly half--subsist on less than $2 a day. Forty percent have no access to basic sanitation.

Very conservative estimates count at least 1 billion adults as being illiterate worldwide--more than a quarter of all adults in the oppressed nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This includes 60 percent of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa and 55 percent in South Asia, with much higher rates for women both in these regions and most of the rest of the world.

And as Butts notes at the close of his letter, some 800 million people worldwide are estimated by the United Nations World Food Program to be chronically hungry, with many more suffering from malnutrition.  
 
Continuity with bolshevism
The preconditions to advancing the struggle for socialism on a world scale today remain fundamentally the same as those presented eight decades ago by Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin. In explaining the centrality of the effort to advance the industrialization of the young Soviet republic in February 1920, Lenin said:

We must show the peasants that the organisation of industry on the basis of modern, advanced technology, on electrification which will provide a link between town and country, will put an end to the division between town and country, will make it possible to raise the level of culture in the countryside and to overcome, even in the most remote corners of the land, backwardness, ignorance, poverty, disease, and barbarism. ("Report on the Work of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee," Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 30, p. 335.)

The construction of socialism, Lenin said in late December of that year, requires more than just literacy among the toilers engaged in that historic effort. "We need cultured, enlightened and educated working people," he said, so that not only urban workers but "the majority of the peasants [are] aware of the tasks awaiting us." ("Speech to the Eighth All-Russia Congress of Soviets," Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 31, p. 518).  
 
Traditional methods?
Karl Butts is correct that the fetish of "organic" farming "has nothing to do with the fight to feed the world."

Those who would reject progress in agricultural chemistry and technology in favor of so-called natural or traditional methods of farming should recall three things:

First, life expectancy at birth in the earliest agricultural communities some 10,000 years ago was well under 30 years of age.

Second, as a result of scientific advances in plant breeding, fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, and mechanization, world grain yields have doubled since 1960, while it took 1,000 years in England for wheat yields to quadruple to their current level.

Third, there are few methods so destructive to the environment and inimical to sustainable food production as slash-and-burn agriculture and overgrazing, both typical of so-called traditional farming in much of the world. The application of relatively modern methods of crop rotation, feedlots, and use of fertilizer and pesticides register enormous and "unnatural" progress in recent centuries for both human beings and the environment in which we live and labor.

The communist movement understands that the history of capitalist agriculture has been one that combines advances in the productivity of farm labor, on the one hand, with, on the other hand, profit-maximizing methods that exhaust and erode the soil, pollute water sources, and poison farmers, workers, and consumers.  
 
What we can learn from Marx
Marx wrote about these questions at length in Capital, at a time when big advances in the knowledge of the chemistry of soil fertility were making possible the application of synthetic fertilizers to counteract the exhaustion of fields and substantially increase yields. The first factory producing "superphosphate" fertilizers began operating in Britain in 1843, to be followed in Germany, France, and the United States over the next three decades.

Marx answered various early bourgeois writers on farming who, "on account of the state of agricultural chemistry in their time" made the false claim that "there is a limit to the amount of capital which can be invested in a spatially limited field." To the contrary, Marx said in Capital, the earth "continuously improves, as long as it is treated correctly."

In fact, he said, agriculture has an advantage over factory production in this regard. New machinery depreciates with use, he pointed out, and investments in new industrial technology tend to make prior improvements obsolete. With the soil, however, "successive capital investments can have their benefit without the earlier ones being lost." (Capital, Penguin Classics edition, vol. 3, pp. 915-916.)

At the same time, Marx recognized that the application of all scientific and technological advances under bourgeois social relations is subject to the competition of capitals to maximize profits. In the very next chapter of Capital, "The Genesis of Capitalist Ground-Rent," he pointed to the consequences of capital's growing domination of agriculture, which drives more and more small, family farmers into hopeless debt and off the land.

This process, Marx wrote, "reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns.... The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil." Marx continued:

Large-scale industry and industrially pursued large-scale agriculture have the same effect. If they are originally distinguished by the fact that the former lays waste and ruins labour-power and thus the natural power of man, whereas the latter does the same to the natural power of the soil, they link up in the later course of development, since the industrial system applied to agriculture also enervates the workers there, while industry and trade for their part provide agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil. (Capital, vol. 3, pp. 950.)

Marx had made the same point, perhaps even more compellingly, in a section of Capital entitled, "Large-scale industry and agriculture." He wrote:

A conscious, technological application of science replaces the previous highly irrational and slothfully traditional way of working. The capitalist mode of production completes the disintegration of the primitive familial union which bound agriculture and manufacture together when they were both at an undeveloped and childlike stage. But at the same time it creates the material conditions for a new and higher synthesis, a union of agriculture and industry....

While capitalism "creates the material conditions" for such an advance, Marx continued, the propertied families' ruthless exploitation of both human beings and nature create an insuperable obstacle to the progress of civilization. He wrote:

In modern agriculture, as in urban industry, the increase in the productivity and the mobility of labour is purchased at the cost of laying waste and debilitating labour-power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility.... Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth--the soil and the worker. (Capital, volume 1, pp. 637-638.)

Frederick Engels, Marx's lifelong collaborator in the leadership of the communist movement, also described this process in many of his writings, including the 1876 article "The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man." It is published as an appendix to Engels's book, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State.

"What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba," Engels wrote, "who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertilizer for one generation of highly profitable coffee trees--what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the now-unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock!

"In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the first, the most tangible result; and then surprise is even expressed that the most remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be of quite a different, mainly even of quite an opposite character...." (Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, pp. 238)  
 
Imperialism, the pyromaniac
Engels's example, drawn from the early years of capitalism in the 18th and early 19th centuries, remains an apt description of the rapacious and destructive course of international finance capital to this day. It calls to mind the 1986 speech to an international conference on trees and forests in Paris, presented by Thomas Sankara, the leader of the 1983–87 popular revolutionary government of the West African country of Burkina Faso, a former French colony.

Sankara described the "creeping desert" in Burkina and a number of other countries at the northern edge of Sub-Saharan Africa. Exhaustion of the soil--which advances month by month, year by year across an entire swath of the continent--is contributing to the hunger, disease, and economic and social devastation of millions. "I have come to join with you in deploring the harshness of nature," Sankara told the conference, whose participants included the president of France and other top figures in the imperialist government. "But I have also come to denounce the one whose selfishness is the source of his neighbor's misfortune. Colonialism has pillaged our forests without the least thought of replenishing them for our tomorrows." Sankara continued:

The unpunished destruction of the biosphere by savage and murderous forays on the land and in the air continues.... Those who have the technological means to find the culprits have no interest in doing so, and those who have an interest in doing so lack the necessary technological means. They have only their intuition and their firm conviction.

We are not against progress, but we want progress that is not carried out anarchically and with criminal neglect for other people's rights. We therefore wish to affirm that the battle against the encroachment of the desert is a battle to establish a balance between man, nature, and society. As such, it is a battle that is above all political, one whose outcome is not determined by fate....

As Karl Marx said, those who live in a palace do not think the same things, nor in the same way, as those who live in a hut. This struggle to defend the trees and the forests is above all a struggle against imperialism. Imperialism is the pyromaniac setting fire to our forests and savannahs. (Thomas Sankara Speaks, Pathfinder Press, pp. 154-156)

To be continued next week
 
 
Related article:
Working-class fight for peace and a livable environment  
 
 
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