BY BILL KALMAN
DES MOINES, Iowa - Patrick Buchanan's strident "America
First" nationalism has been getting a growing hearing among
middle-class layers and from many workers and farmers looking
for radical answers to the failure of liberal bourgeois
democracy.
This was the case in Iowa recently, as the "Buchanan Brigades" fanned across the state trying to get out the farm vote and recruit fresh troops to their master's incipient fascist movement. The ultrarightist politician came in second in the February 12 Iowa Republican Party caucuses for the presidential nomination, and then swept to first place in the New Hampshire primary eight days later.
In Iowa Buchanan campaigned throughout the state, particularly in the rural areas, with his 10-point program dubbed "Family Farm Bill of Rights." He also peddled his "Small Business Bill of Rights." Buchanan's appeals were filled with demagogic attacks on big business.
Picking up on the description used by working farmers struggling against the encroachment on their livelihoods, Buchanan told the audience at a convention of the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation last December that the increasing number of hog confinement facilities "are not really farms at all, they're giant factories.... They stink for miles away."
He also expressed sympathy with 20 protesters who blocked the entrance to a hog facility under construction by Iowa Select farms in Maloy, Iowa, in late November.
"This is one area where we can get together with people who have different philosophies than we do in some areas on the grounds that we all want to preserve the family farm," Buchanan stated.
A close examination of Buchanan's farm program, however, reveals a calculated but concealed defense of capitalist farmers and a course toward deepening divisions in the countryside to the detriment of working farmers. It is but another aspect of Buchanan's more and more openly national socialist program - phony anticapitalism.
In using the term "family farm," Buchanan makes no distinction between a modest 500-acre operation worked by a farm family and huge sprawling estates where the owning family employs dozens of agricultural wage workers.
While appealing to the "little guy," or the "working men or women," Buchanan covers up the real divisions that exist between working farmers and capitalist farmers. These are not a single class with common interests, but represent a wide spectrum of class layers comprising both exploiters and exploited. This span includes owners of large, mechanized capitalist farms and ranches; proprietors of small capitalist farms employing wage labor; exploited working farmers who employ little or no wage labor; agricultural wage workers, who work for capitalist farmers; and, at the bottom of the ladder, migrant laborers who follow the crop, many of whom are undocumented.
These layers have different relationships to capitalist production and often counterposed class interests.
Working farmers and taxes
It's useful to review each of Buchanan's 10 points. Let's
look at the first three together.
"1. A Balanced Budget Amendment with a tax limitation provision.
"2. Abolish the inheritance tax on family farms.
"3. Abolish the capital gains tax on family farms."
First of all, balancing federal and state government budgets is the problem of the ruling rich. It's not the problem of workers and farmers. For the capitalist class, "balancing the budget" means cutting back the social gains working people have won over the years. Topping the list of programs on the chopping block are welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, and eventually Social Security. It's the toilers in the cities and in the countryside who will be hit with the biggest blows in this assault on the social wage.
On the question of taxes, Buchanan appeals demagogically to the opposition among many small farmers to being squeezed by taxation.
But again, the ultrarightist politician covers up class distinctions. It is ludicrous to compare the proportionately low taxes paid by agribusiness giants like Premium Standard Farms in Missouri or Murphy Farms in North Carolina - who enjoy cozy relationships with state governments and are armed with lawyers probing every tax loophole - to the taxes heaped on small livestock and grain producers barely scratching out a living.
When Buchanan renewed his call for repeal of federal inheritance taxes during a visit to northwestern Iowa, the "family farm" he toured to make his point was the Wells Dairy plant in Le Mars, a large manufacturer of ice cream and other dairy products.
In the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Frederick Engels explained that the communist program of the working class in power includes "abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes," as well as "abolition of all right of inheritance."
In other words, socialists oppose the "right" of the capitalist ruling families to pass on their ownership of land and the means of production to their heirs. This is the main way the capitalist class perpetuates itself as a small ruling minority.
At the same time, socialists defend the right of exploited farmers to use the land. This may include the right to transfer the family's land title to a single heir, as is the case in Cuba, where the land is nationalized.
Socialists oppose capital gains, sales, or value-added taxes. These all work to the benefit of the ruling rich. If anything, small farmers need immediate relief from the crushing tax burden that is part of their exploitation - one of the ways through which the capitalist class robs a portion of the surplus value working farmers produce.
The existing bourgeois tax system has been cobbled together over decades to disguise and protect an antagonistic set of class interests and relations. Its purpose is to mask the shifts of wealth and income distribution against the interests of working people, as well as to reinforce bourgeois values.
Socialists advocate the abolition of all taxes and their replacement by a single tax: a steeply graduated tax on income from capital. All exploited producers in the countryside, such as working farmers, would be exempt from such a tax. But agribusiness and capitalist farmers who exploit wage labor would be taxed steeply.
Pressure to produce
Buchanan's next two points seem to be about the
environment, but are really about increasing agricultural
production and expanding the U.S. export boom:
"4. Roll back the wetlands regulations that have been imposed on private property owners by federal courts and bureaucrats and make Congress define wetlands according to the rule of common sense.
"5. Rewrite the Endangered Species Act so that Congress is forced to vote on every species that is listed as endangered."
There is great pressure by trade monopolies to put more land back in production because of the current export boom in farm products. This is at the heart of the "Freedom to Farm Act" just passed by the U.S. Senate. U.S. agricultural exports reached a record high of $54 billion in the year ending September 30, and are expected to increase by another $4 billion in the year ahead. Beef, pork, corn, and wheat exports have seen big percentage increases in overseas sales this year.
Proponents of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), the land set-aside program established in 1985, claim that the program conserves soil and protects the environment and certain endangered species. But the capitalist ruling families and their hirelings in Congress could not care less about the environment or endangered species.
The CRP was set up primarily to limit agricultural production in order to keep U.S. grain prices high for the profit-hungry international monopoly traders. Couched as a conservation measure to win broader support, the CRP has idled 40 million acres in the past decade. It is slated to expire in the year 2000.
Buchanan is trying to exploit the fact that the administration of these programs is what one Iowa farmer called "a bureaucratic system that's gone haywire."
But Buchanan's fundamental opposition to set-aside programs at this time, like that of many other capitalist politicians, stems not from opposing unwarranted government intrusion into farmers' planting decisions, but from the fact they serve now as a curb on production.
Regulation and compensation
The third part of Buchanan's farm program concerns
federal regulations and property rights:
"6. Permanently exempt family farms from OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration], and begin a Regulatory Revolution to restore sanity to federal regulation. There will be a moratorium on new regulation, a sunset provision of 5 years on all regulations, and defined annual cutback in paperwork for family farms.
"7. Defund the Legal Services Corporation and end the legal assault on American family farms and business with tort reform at both the state and local level. Punitive and compensatory damages should be related to actual harm done - and the loser should be made to pay the legal fees of the winner.
"8. The restoration of property rights under the 5th Amendment. Just as we believe in no taxation without representation, we believe in no regulatory deprivation of property rights without just compensation."
Farming is the one of the most dangerous occupations, yet laws pertaining to minimum wage, child labor, and safety standards are not applied to the industry. This benefits large capitalist concerns first and foremost. If anything, safety regulations in agriculture need to be maintained, strengthened, and enforced.
Family farms employing wage labor should not be exempt from these laws. And all applicable legislation should be used to protect agricultural workers, including the growing number in hog confinement facilities, more than half of whom, according to the American Lung Association, experience one or more symptoms of respiratory illness or irritation.
Agricultural workers
Likewise, Buchanan's concerns over the "legal assault on
American family farms" is primarily an attack on farm
workers. The Legal Services Corporation (LSC) referred to by
Buchanan is a private, non-profit organization that
distributes federal money to programs funding legal aid to
those not able to pay. The LCS has been strongly criticized
by the American Farm Bureau Federation, which objects to
cases brought against its better-off farmer members by
migrant workers.
The scapegoating of immigrant laborers - many of whom were farmers forced off the land in Mexico and other countries - by both Buchanan and the Farm Bureau should be rejected by working farmers and trade unionists. This is a life-or-death question. Defense of the rights of immigrants, who are a large and growing proportion of workers in Midwest packinghouses today, is necessary to forge a worker-farmer alliance that can fight effectively against our common exploiters.
A bill passed by the Iowa state legislature last year makes it harder for small farmers and other rural residents to sue the megafarms over environmental issues. Because of this new law regulating "nuisance lawsuits," plaintiffs must now prove " clear and convincing" negligence on the part of these capitalist farms or be held personally liable if the claim is found to be "frivolous". This is designed to intimidate opponents of the hog confinement system and further enshroud the machinations of these corporations in secrecy.
These proposals are related to the so-called "private property rights" movement that originated when wealthy Western ranchers balked at even minimal government concerns about public land use. Since then the Farm Bureau, National Cattlemen's Association, and National Pork Producers Council have become proponents of this cause. In several states legislation is pending that would compensate big landowners who claim government regulations have reduced or destroyed the value of their farmland.
This is part of Buchanan's "radical" demagogy, through which he tries to bring working farmers in tow behind a program of capitalist agribusiness.
The fight to nationalize all land and make it available to those willing to work it is at the heart of a revolutionary alliance between workers and farmers. Under a workers and farmers government, the land of the large landowners and the big factory farms would be expropriated, while the right of working farmers to work their land would be zealously safeguarded.
International market
The final two points of Buchanan's "Farm Bill of Rights"
get to the heart of the class distinctions in the
countryside:
"9. Aggressive action to secure significant market share for U.S. agricultural products in the emerging markets of Asia and the developing world.
"10. A level playing field for American farmers with their European competitors. European farmers enjoy a 16-to-1 advantage in government export subsidies over their American counterparts. This should be erased so that American and European farmers can compete equally in the global marketplace."
This program accepts and defends the framework of capitalism, which exists to maximize profits for Cargill, Con Agra, IBP, Archer Daniels Midland, and other corporations - Buchanan's railing against "big multinationals" to the contrary. And this is counterposed to meeting the social needs of toilers in the countryside. Working farmers don't trade internationally or compete with Asian or European farmers. In fact, they lose control of their product at the packing plant, feed lot, or grain elevator.
U.S. agribusiness is pushing aggressively for bigger pieces of the world market against their capitalist competitors. Their government in Washington, D.C., is ready to carry out trade and military wars to protect this drive, and to use food as a weapon against anyone who stands in their way.
Democratic and Republican politicians talk "free trade" while supporting protectionist measures slapped on thousands of products. Buchanan raises high the protectionist banner as part of taking an even more aggressive stance toward big- business rivals in the Pacific and Europe, a position that in the end will benefit a handful of wealthy agricultural merchants at the expense of workers and farmers here and around the world.
Farmers and workers
Counterposed to Buchanan's fake anticapitalism,
socialists demand a moratorium on all farm foreclosures,
cheap credit, and a guaranteed market for crops, livestock,
and dairy products above the costs of a farmer's production
and sufficient to make a decent living.
As long as farmers want to work the land and produce goods for society, the government should guarantee them use of the land.
Moreover, socialists fight to forge a workers and farmers alliance that can take power out of the hands of the capitalist bloodsuckers. In a socialist society, the world's resources could be rationally used, and a real division of labor created. Workers in Midwest agricultural implement plants, for example, could produce machinery that farmers around the world can use to help feed the world. Within the framework of sound conservation measures, restrictions on farmers' production should be lifted so they can help increase the world's food supply.
Forming an alliance of workers and farmers across national borders is a necessary first step in that direction.
Under capitalism, workers and farmers alike face ruination. Buchanan's "America First" proposals are aimed at duping small farmers to follow a course against their potential allies in the trade unions and the entire working class, and down the road toward fascism and war.
Bill Kalman is a member of United Transportation Union
Local 867 in Des Moines.