The content of the bipartisan farm bill signed by U.S. President George Bush this past week points to the need for the labor movement to put forward a program to defend the interests of working farmers who are debt slaves exploited by big monopolies and banks. The new measure, like earlier farm legislation, is an assault on small farmers across the country. It provides massive subsidies to capitalist farmers and corporations who will receive the lion’s share of the $190-billion government largesse. More than two-thirds of the subsidies will go to the largest 10 percent of farms.

The bill highlights how the tiny minority of billionaire families who hold state power use governmental policy to advance their class interests. The enormous subsidies serve to strengthen the capacity of wealthy farmers and agricultural monopolies to trade food and fiber on the world market, enabling them to undercut their competitors.

Washington’s farm policy also has a devastating impact on semicolonial countries. The government of Brazil pointed out that sales of soybeans and cotton at below-market prices by U.S. monopolies has cheated them out of $1.5 billion in exports. And despite imperialist propaganda about "feeding the world," millions of people are starving in the Third World. Nearly half the population on the planet ekes out an existence on less than $2 a day.

The government subsidies are a guaranteed source of income for the capitalist exploiters, who profit from the labor of working people. The subsidies reinforce divisions in the countryside between wealthy and working farmers, and buttress the power of the agricultural monopolies, which squeeze small farmers every which way they can.

Due to some exposure of the unequal impact of government subsidies, the character of these so-called "farm" bills is more widely appreciated today. Nevertheless, the capitalist media continually tries to mask the fact that farmers are class-divided. There are a small number of capitalist farms and ranches run by some of the largest corporations in the United States that exploit wage labor; a larger group of small capitalist farmers who exploit both family and wage labor; and the vast majority of farmers who are exploited independent commodity producers employing little or no wage labor. Many of these working farmers depend on off-farm jobs to make ends meet.

It is not primarily natural conditions such as bad weather and insect plagues that devastate working farmers. Rather, it is the normal functioning of the capitalist system in which working farmers are victims of social conditions beyond their control. They are caught in a vise between low prices received for their commodities and monopoly-rigged prices they have to fork out for machinery, fertilizer, and fuel. Through the capitalist rents and mortgage system, landlords and bankers suck up huge amounts of wealth created by toilers on the land, transferred to them through the medium of rent and interest payments. Moreover, when farmers can no longer keep up payments, these parasitic exploiters simply drive them off the land.

The labor movement needs to extend the hand of solidarity to working farmers, joining with them to demand a halt to all farm foreclosures. Instead of being driven deeper into debt slavery, small farmers should have access to government-funded cheap credit and guaranteed price supports from the federal government large enough to cover their full production costs and provide a decent and secure income for themselves and their families. Today this is especially true for the working farmers who have been devastated by drought conditions in the western plains states from Montana to Texas.

The working class in the United States should also demand that Washington cancel the foreign debt that has been imposed on semicolonial countries and end the enormous subsidy programs that enable U.S. monopolies to block off agricultural commodities produced by toilers in other lands. Through waging battles around these demands vanguard workers and farmers will forge a leadership and a fighting alliance of the toilers that can take on the capitalist exploiters and defeat them. This is the only real solution to the farm crisis: a revolutionary struggle that charts a course to establish a government of workers and farmers.  
 
 
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