Facing a decline in their average rate of profit, each imperialist class in Europe, North America, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia, is fighting to expand its domination of a bigger piece of the diminishing world market. This leads to increasing attacks by the capitalists against the living standards and working conditions of wage workers and working farmers in the name of "increasing our competitiveness."

Jenness describes how the cost-price squeeze by the capitalists has devastating effects on working farmers in the United States and other countries. Farmers become debt slaves of the capitalist banks and face the continuous threat of losing their land. Working farmers in Greece face the same devastating conditions that farmers face around the world. They are victims of social conditions that emanate from the normal workings of capitalism. While the prices farmers in Greece receive for their produce from the capitalist food processors and merchants has either dropped or been frozen over the past decade, prices for seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, spare parts, and fuel have continued to rise. This year, cotton, tobacco, olive, rice, and citrus fruit producers have seen cuts of up to 50 percent in the price of their products, while large amounts have remained unsold. As a result working farmers' real income has been sharply declining.

Farmers in Greece who borrowed heavily in the 1970s and '80s to purchase land, tractors, and other modern equipment needed to produce ever more products have seen the average price of their land - and thus their collateral - drop since 1975. At the same time, high interest rates and the practice of compounding interest on overdue loans by the capitalist Agricultural Bank of Greece (ATE) have turned farmers into debt slaves. Increasing numbers are being ruined.

In the past decade hundreds of thousands of farmers in Greece have been forced off their land and the country's agricultural labor force has declined from 27.7 percent to 20.3 percent of the population. Successive governments representing Greece's ruling capitalist families have implemented policies that have accelerated the ruination of farmers "in order for our national products to become competitive in the world market," as Stefanos Tzoumakas, Minister of Agriculture, asserts.

Farmers in Greece have continued to resist these sharp attacks. At the beginning of this year, thousands of farmers took to the streets in tractorcades, rallies, and demonstrations to press the government to provide relief. They have faced the cops, the courts, and a vicious campaign in the big-business media portraying them as greedy, privileged troublemakers in order to undermine solidarity with their struggle by workers in the cities. This effort aims to prevent struggles such as the public workers strike taking place at that time from converging with the farmers' fight....

As trade conflicts sharpen, each of the rival imperialist powers has increased its efforts to pull working people on their side using the big lie that "we" all - wage workers, working farmers and capitalist industrialists, merchants and bankers - have "common national interests." They have intensified their efforts to draw us into an alliance with them in their nationalist chauvinist trade policies and practices. For example, capitalists of Germany, France, and other countries of the European Union have used the fear of the "mad cow disease" to ban imports of beef from Britain and thus deal a blow especially to working farmers in the United Kingdom. Farmers in the UK have organized protests against imports of beef from Ireland, France, and other countries. Farmers in France have organized protests in which trucks bringing tomatoes from Spain were set on fire, and farmers in Italy have attacked trucks bringing watermelons from Greece.

Similarly, government officials and political forces within the farmers movement in Greece defending the interests of capitalist farmers have argued that the cost- price squeeze faced by working farmers in Greece is caused by U.S. imports, by farmers in Italy and Spain who are too "efficient" and have "flooded Europe" with their olive oil or farmers in Turkey who have "glutted Europe" with cheap cotton, tobacco, and hazel nuts.

The economic nationalism of the rival imperialist classes of Europe, the United States, and Japan feed ideologically incipient fascist currents such as Patrick Buchanan in the United States, Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, and Chrisi Avgi and the National Front in Greece....

Sharpening conflicts between the imperialist powers and by them against the oppressed peoples of the Third World and the workers states of central and eastern Europe, combined with the rapid rise of fascist currents have once again posed the possibility of capitalism dragging humanity into a third bloody world war. Wage workers and working farmers must oppose all imperialist military alliances, such as NATO and the Western European Union, in which Greece currently holds the presidency. As Jenness explains in these pages, we must also oppose all the ways the capitalist rulers try to organize their trade in order to impose their domination of exploitation of workers and farmers and colonial and semi colonial countries. Their aim is the same whether they prefer "free trade" pacts such as the European Union, NAFTA, and APEC or "protectionist" measures that are often backed by political forces within the workers and farmers movements. The pretext these political forces use is the defense of "our national products" and the jobs of the native workers against "immigrants."

In the following articles Jenness provides us with unshakable evidence that workers and working farmers around the world face common problems and a common enemy: the capitalist industrialists, merchants, and bankers with whom we have no common interests.

This pamphlet contains a program for political action around which workers and working farmers can unite in a common struggle internationally against the catastrophic consequences of capitalism's depression conditions.

Working class fighters and revolutionary minded youth in the course of resisting imperialism's march toward fascism and war must build mass revolutionary workers parties around the world and emulate Cuba's revolutionary workers and farmers and their communist leadership. Revolutionary parties, as Jenness explains, are needed that can lead the working class to cement an alliance with the working farmers in a struggle to take political power out of the hands of the capitalists and establish a workers and farmers government. Such a government will be used by toilers to organize the production and distribution of the goods they produce in order to meet the needs of humanity's toiling majority and not the thirst for profits of a handful of exploiters, and build a new world based on human solidarity, peace, and the development of culture - a socialist world.

Bobbis Misailides

February 1998  
 
 
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