BY JACK BARNES
As emphasized at the beginning of this report, our governmental perspective is based on the alliance between the working class and working farmers. This class alliance of exploited producers against the capitalist exploiters is at the heart of our entire strategy. In this section of the report, I want to focus on a section of the draft political resolution that explains an important aspect of the worker-farmer alliance more clearly than our party has done in the past.

This section of the resolution opens with an explanation of how the U.S. capitalist class is forcing exploited farmers to shoulder the burden of capitalist stagnation and competition. It explains:

Income from farming remains too low to enable family farms to meet the rising costs of land, equipment, seeds, fuel, fertilizer, and loans. The squeeze on these debt slaves is being tightened by the banks; the land speculators and real estate sharks; and the seed, fertilizer, food processing, farm equipment, and energy monopolies. Washington's policies are designed to benefit the capitalist farmers and big food processors and merchants. They do little or nothing to free exploited working farmers from the scourge of foreclosures, land dispossession, and repossession of tools, livestock, and machinery.

Having laid out the crisis confronting family farmers, the resolution continues:

The working class has a direct stake in the resistance of exploited farmers against this ruinous proletarianization. The larger the number of working farmers who succeed in this struggle, the stronger will be the worker-farmer alliance, which is essential to the advance toward a socialist revolution in this country. The more solid this alliance, the easier it will be to feed and clothe the population in a socialist United States. And the firmer will be the foundation on which to increase farm output to meet the needs of working people worldwide.

At first glance, it might seem strange for a workers' party to oppose the proletarianization of farmers. After all, the creation of our class is largely the result of the proletarianization of small farmers--or of freed slaves who aspired to become small farmers--over the past few hundred years. Won't an acceleration of that process today strengthen the ranks of the working class for the coming battles with the capitalists? We say no.  
 
What future does capitalism hold?
What future does capitalism offer working farmers? Basically it holds out two roads.

One is to try to become a capitalist farmer. To get bigger and bigger, to amass some capital, to start hiring wage labor, and to become rich. That is the American dream, the great promise. But the problem is that it doesn't happen to many farmers.

(This dream is actually held out to workers too--the prospect of somehow scrimping and saving enough out of their wages to start a small business of their own someday, "to be my own boss." A smaller percentage of workers are prone to believe in this dream, however, since their conditions of life and work don't lead them to think of themselves as small businessmen. They neither possess any productive property nor have anything to sell on the market except their capacity to work.)

The alternative future that capitalism holds out to working farmers is proletarianization. This is not a dream. It is a nightmare that is happening to growing numbers of farmers. Dispossession of the land they work. Dispossession of their tools, machinery, and livestock. Being ruined and thrown down into the reserve army of labor, into the ranks of the jobless and the homeless.

It is not the demoralization and ruin of the producers that can furnish added power to the workers' fight for a better world. Involuntary proletarianization does not make exploited farmers as a class more progressive, more anticapitalist. Working farmers will not be won to the struggle for socialism by having their land and tools wrested from them, their confidence sapped, getting bloodied and battered. That is not the way forward for working farmers--or for the working class.

Of course, deepening social crisis will force many who are today working farmers to travel such a path. But that will be the product of objective conditions created by capitalism--whose effects on working people we seek to combat--not an outcome that we advocate.

Defeats do not advance the revolutionary struggle to establish a workers and farmers government, nor will the ruin of working farmers facilitate agricultural production and the transition to socialism following a successful revolution.

This is not a new position. Engels explained this in 1894 in an article addressed to socialist parties in France and Germany. "The greater the number of peasants whom we can save from being actually hurled down into the proletariat," Engels wrote, "the more quickly and easily the social transformation will be accomplished."1

The idea that the ruin of working farmers in any way strengthens the revolutionary labor movement has nothing to do with Marxism and the working class. It is a prejudice, with its origins not in our class but in the bourgeoisie and well-off middle classes.

The draft political resolution connects our approach to the worker-farmer alliance with the lessons that the workers' movement has learned since the Russian revolution about the tasks of workers and farmers governments in the countryside.

"The goal of communists," the SWP resolution explains, "is not the transformation of exploited independent commodity producers into proletarians, either before or after the revolutionary conquest of power and expropriation of the bourgeoisie. Our goal is the voluntary collaboration of all producers in discovering and developing the most labor-efficient and environmentally sound methods of cooperative and collective agricultural production, as part of constructing a socialized economy."  
 
 
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