In part 1 of this 3-part series, I discussed the contemporary political setting of agriculture in the U.S. (www.dailykos.com/…) I emphasized how this relates to the Democratic Party’s collapse of support in rural America beginning with President Carter’s imposition of the grain embargo on the Soviet Union, and, to be worked out in the days ahead, how President Trump’s expressed “policies” (although “sales pitches” may be more apt) on the environment and trade embody enormous contradictions that, if logically pursued, could drastically affect U.S. agriculture. Importantly, there is no time to waste by the left if it wants to awake itself politically in the countryside and begin to tap the cooperative potential of agriculture during the first and hopefully only Trump term in office:
This will all hit the fan before we know it as legislative focus turns to the 2018 Farm Bill. (www.agweb.com/...)
In part 3, I hope to make suggestions for “a better, and progressively socialistic, U.S. policy for agriculture in the U.S.” But, as I acknowledged, “before I”--a socialist, and therefore a presumably sicko “command-and-control” Stalinist forcing my totalitarian self onto the presumably highly productive if not pastoral “free-market” world food garden--“can do that with any credibility, I want to acknowledge what this policy should not be.” Thus, in part 2, I am attempting to “critique past socialist agricultural approaches, acknowledging both successes and failures, because the left must be honest about what it has to offer to the challenges humanity faces and be willing to learn from the past if it's to be useful in the present and future.”
Unfortunately, the story of socialist agricultural history cannot begin to be well-told in a blog piece, for, even if the subject were in better hands than mine, it is obviously too vast a subject. In many ways it is the story of humanity itself. And even if I could write an encyclopedic work on the subject, this would just be my own highly imperfect personal critique of past socialist agricultural approaches. If there is any subject likely to incite an ugly internecine debate among anti-capitalists it is the history of what generations of (some in hindsight deluded) socialist theoreticians have called the agrarian “question” or even more typically the agrarian “problem.”
At the risk of causing a counter-productive struggle among my tender [far more tender to me than any hormone- and antibiotic-infused industrial ag broiler] comrades in the ACM group, I am not going to [Perdue] chicken out and will try to do more than merely frame categories of debate. The U.S. left must now be engaged as a matter of paramount importance on what are really a complex set of agrarian questions, plural, and which also cannot be separated from the urban and transnational questions that ultimately confront us all as human beings on one finite, fragile, and polluted planet. However, my views within the categories of debate will be far more impressionistic than authoritative—and hopefully not at all authoritarian.
Small “d” democratic to the core, to me the most important thing I can do as an isolated, but still living and breathing, socialist in 21st Century rural America is to help in some small way to stimulate a truly open and holistic debate about not only the agricultural past but also about what kind of agricultural system will best serve humanity in the future AND, importantly, what we can do to get there. It is through the exercise of true democracy that we might actually get to a democratically-authentic humane agricultural future. On this of all subjects, for humanity’s sake constructive, and deeply democratic, engagement must never end.
The following are four categories of debate concerning socialist agricultural history and my nutshell overview and opinions about them.
Organic cooperation of human beings
Agriculture’s deepest roots are in cooperation, but sometimes it is hard to realize this. Agricultural "history" is a fascinating subject that rightly includes pre-history. Our understanding of pre-history is highly dependent upon the examination of unwritten clues from the past. Because this is difficult, and for other reasons too, quickly the subject can turn into tales of emerging “civilization” in which the pre-history of the countryside is consumed by its relationship with urban areas. This is in part because the urban areas tended to produce written history but also because these areas tended to be authoritarian in relation to the countryside, leaving alienation (and a metabolic rift that continues to this day as nutrients are taken from the countryside, chewed, swallowed, digested, and eventually dumped into urban sewers) in its path.
The voices of the alienated are rarely heard. This to me is wrong and as a socialist repulsive. I cannot joke about cheap hamburgers without thinking about the silent suffering of the alienated. I certainly do not want socialism itself to produce alienation.
Fortunately, if we only have eyes to see, we can see that humanity’s deepest history often is one of intimate cooperation in the rural struggle for survival with and to some extent against the elements, wild beasts, and, yes, other human beings from outside the group who might also be strangers. Ancient families and tribes often would have involved intense cooperative expressions within the group, with relationships cemented with abundant and deep mutual commitments. This is not to idealize or to deny the likely presence of brutality, slavery, paternalism, racism, and other horrific injustices within many prehistoric societies.
However, often these groups, whether small or large, would have existed in substantial part to make easier, more effective, and if possible more pleasant the process of gathering food of one kind or the other and communally consuming it, often with elaborate rituals and seasonal celebrations. It was to protect this organic internally cooperative process from other groups of desperate humans struggling sometimes for the same resources that much competition and struggle ensued and ensues to this day. But that does not make resource competition fundamental much less good for human existence.
When desperate "Israelites” walked into Egypt because they were starving, just as when they walked out and decided to take a land of milk and honey from “Canaanites,” conflicts ensued that are continuing to this day but which are not the whole story. The story of bitter human group resource struggles against other human groups does not eliminate the cooperation within the struggling groups themselves, nor the potential for peaceful cooperation between and outside the groups, even with former rivals and enemies.
Blessed are the peace and justice makers. When the desperate landless Levellers began to plant on the commons, they did so in an organically cooperative manner that provides a source of inspiration to this day.
Gathering food, whether by first killing, milking, or picking it, was found to be more efficiently done by domestication. We call domestication of plants agriculture. Gathering through domestication, like gathering from the natural terrain before it, is best done in cooperation. Where competition ensues, this should be viewed an unnatural failure of humanity’s better impulses to overcome those which are worse.
The fact that urban areas need an agricultural surplus to exist also does not manifestly destine the rural population for authoritarianism and alienation. Admittedly, in most cases, societies have not implemented good social relations between rural and urban workers. At its best, socialism can provide a humane and truly democratic framework for such relations.
Conscious engagement or disengagement of self-identified socialists with or from peasant struggles
In the 19th Century, self-identified socialists began to see peasant struggles as having bearing on "the socialist struggle.” Not all viewed these peasant struggles as being part of the broader socialist struggle in an affirming way, however. Of those that did, I have a special place in my heart for the sometimes bungling Russian socialists known as the Narodniks. (www.britannica.com/...) Lovingly novelized by Ivan Turgenev in Virgin Soil (www.gutenberg.org/...), the character of Nejdanov made a fool of himself naively urging rural peasants to revolt against the Czar. Falling victim to a multi-faceted despondency, also arising in part from his love of the arts (an aspect of urban culture which he felt obliged to deem to be counter-revolutionary), in the end he commits suicide (BTW, breaking my heart when I read the book so much so that when I adopted a “socialist” online pen name, I chose Nejdanov for my middle name).
Section Three of Rosa Luxemburg’s 1913 master work, The Accumulation of Capital (www.marxists.org/...) details “The Historical Conditions of Accumulation.” Luxemburg describes capitalist exploitation of humanity in clear terms sure to raise your blood pressure. She makes particular effort to describe “primitive communist agrarian communit[ies],” which capitalism generally has sought to devastate in order to provide conditions for capital accumulation.
But, sadly, not all of the socialist attention to “the agrarian question” has been so seemingly supportive:
Among Marxists, a central issue in early debates about capitalist development was the "Agrarian question". The nub of the matter here wasn’t really economic. What really preoccupied the classical Marxist thinkers was a political question: would the peasants act as allies in the struggle to achieve socialism, or were they ultimately a reactionary, counter-revolutionary element? Perhaps some segments of the peasantry would ally with the industrial proletariat, even if others wouldn’t... and so on. The most important point to grasp here is that Marx and his followers saw capitalism as an historically progressive force in the objective sense. Capitalism, per se, was an exploitative and inhuman system. But, it also created the possibility of a type of society which was materially more prosperous and infinitely more humane than its predecessors. Capitalism produced an historically unprecedented development of the material forces of production, a quantum leap in Humankind’s mastery over nature. It also created the proletariat, what Marx, in his more Hegelian moments, called the first universal class, the class which was capable of abolishing class society itself, with it, human exploitation. In other words, this was an optimistic, modernist perspective on history.
The problem posed by the peasantry, as far as Marx was concerned, was that they seemed in danger of standing in opposition to the full development of capitalism, and might therefore stand in opposition to the achievement of the socialist millenium. As far as Marx was concerned, the development of the capitalist mode of production was dependent on the dispossession and proletarianization of the peasantry. Peasants who succeeded in resisting that process, and clung on to their land by means of armed resistance, for example, might, in fact, be delaying the possibility of socialism being achieved, however worthy their struggle might be in its own terms. As both Marx and Lenin suggested, peasant producers might also sustain the continued dominance of archaic, merchant capitalist, forms of rural exploitation, or the dominance of landlord classes. The latter might manipulate the peasantry for reactionary political ends, and, by definition, archaic forms of capitalism had to be replaced by industrial capitalism if history was to progress. Ultimately, any process which checked the growth of the proletariat was putting off the day when all humanity could be liberated finally and completely from exploitation.
Naturally, this way of putting it doesn’t really reflect the language the classical Marxists used, because they had to show some sympathy with the plight of the rural poor. But it is what lurked away underneath their thinking on the Agrarian question.
(jg.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/...)
Vera Zalusich framed the situation cogently and powerfully in her 1881 letter to Marx:
Either the rural commune, freed of exorbitant tax demands, payment to the nobility and arbitrary administration, is capable of developing in a socialist direction, that is, gradually organising its production and distribution on a collectivist basis. In that case, the revolutionary socialist must devote all his strength to the liberation and development of the commune.
If, however, the commune is destined to perish, all that remains for the socialist, as such, is more or less ill-founded calculations as to how many decades it will take for the Russian peasant’s land to pass into the hands of the bourgeoisie, and how many centuries it will take for capitalism in Russia to reach something like the level of development already attained in Western Europe. Their task will then be to conduct propaganda solely among the urban workers, while these workers will be continually drowned in the peasant mass which, following the dissolution of the commune, will be thrown on to the streets of the large towns in search of a wage.
(www.marxists.org/...)
Rather than attempt to summarize the subsequent exchange, and generations of engagement and disengagement that followed, I will take from it at least the fact that “the agragrian question” was viewed as being of central importance for a century. In contrast, often times these days rural America is an afterthought to the U.S. left. I think this state of overall neglect needs to change and fast.
Actually-occurring state-directed “socialist” agriculture
But change to what in the U.S.? Plainly not to alienating Stalinist state capitalist agriculture policy, and needless to say not to the totalitarian mass undernourishment of present day “socialist” North Korea. Nor even in my mind to the paternal authoritarian and relatively holistic Cuban agricultural policy, of which I am in some respects a fan (gardenvarietydemocraticsocialist.com/...).
But before I can in part 3 present some thoughts on a democratic version of a humane and holistic socialist agriculture policy for the U.S., we must acknowledge the elephant in the room. In trying to produce a greater agricultural surplus to support rapidly industrializing the Soviet Union, Stalin imposed alienating state capitalist agricultural policy on the peasantry, not to mention inhumanely and unwisely from a production standpoint casting off the land and into exile in Siberia countless vaguely defined “kulaks,” contributing to mass starvation during the early 1930s.
On the positive side, by and large there was a much more equitable distribution of the agricultural production than under market capitalism. Also on the positive side, implementation of modern large-scale farming techniques did allow greater production per acre in many instances from what had been experienced in the past on the same land:
During the Russian Civil War, Joseph Stalin's experience as political chief of various regions, carrying out the dictates of war communism, involved extracting grain from peasants, including extraction at gunpoint from those who were not supportive of the Bolshevik (Red) side of the war (such as Whites and Greens). Thus Soviet agriculture was off to a stressful internecine start even after that war was pushed to a bloody conclusion. After a grain crisis during 1928, Stalin established the USSR's system of state and collective farms when he moved to replace the New Economic Policy (NEP) with collective farming, which grouped peasants into collective farms (kolkhozy) and state farms (sovkhozy). These collective farms allowed for faster mechanization, and indeed, this period saw widespread use of farming machinery for the first time in many parts of the USSR, and a rapid recovery of agricultural outputs, which had been damaged by the Russian civil war. Both grain production, and the number of farm animals rose above pre-civil war levels by early 1931, before major famine undermined these initially good results.
(en.wikipedia.org/...)
Some of the criticism of Soviet agricultural productivity was and is undoubtedly politically-motivated:
Hedrick Smith wrote in The Russians (1976) that, according to Soviet statistics, one fourth of the value of agricultural production in 1973 was produced on the private plots peasants were allowed (2% of the whole arable land).[18] In the 1980s, 3% of the land was in private plots which produced more than a quarter of the total agricultural output.[19] i.e. private plots produced somewhere around 1600% and 1100% as much as common ownership plots in 1973 and 1980. Soviet figures claimed that the Soviets produced 20–25% as much as the U.S. per farmer in the 1980s.[20]
This was despite the fact that the Soviet Union had invested enormously to agriculture.[20] Production costs were very high, the Soviet Union had to import food, and it had widespread food shortages even though the country had a large share of the best agricultural soil in the world and a high land/population ratio.[20]
The claims of inefficiency have, however, been criticized by Economist Joseph E. Medley of the University of Southern Maine, US.[21] Statistics based on value rather than volume of production may give one view of reality, as public-sector food was heavily subsidized and sold at much lower prices than private-sector produce. In addition, the 2–3% of arable land allotted as private plots does not include the large area allocated to the peasants as pasturage for their private livestock; combined with land used to produce grain for fodder, the pasturage and the private plots total almost 20% of all Soviet farmland.[21] Private farming may also be relatively inefficient, taking roughly 40% of all agricultural labor to produce only 26% of all output by value. Another problem is these criticisms tend to discuss only a small number of consumer products and do not take into account the fact that the kolkhozy and sovkhozy produced mainly grain, cotton, flax, forage, seed, and other non-consumer goods with a relatively low value per unit area. This economist admits to some inefficiency in Soviet agriculture, but claims that the failure reported by most Western experts was a myth.[21] He believes the above criticisms to be ideological in nature and emphasizes "[t]he possibility that socialized agriculture may be able to make valuable contributions to improving human welfare".
(Id.)
Cooperative efforts under capitalist conditions
But in my view, achieving the positives through state capitalism was unnecessary and, to some extent the result of an ironically implicitly utopian (and in some cases dystopian), as opposed to truly scientific and humane, socialism. Alienation of much of the rural population, as occurs both under state and market capitalism, is not the price of true “progress” and “productivity,” as exemplified currently by many modern and highly productive cooperative farming operations the world over, which manage to survive and in some cases even thrive under capitalist conditions:
Notable examples of collective farming include the kolkhozy that dominated Soviet agriculture between 1930 and 1991 and the Israeli kibbutzim.[2] Both are collective farms based on common ownership of resources and on pooling of labour and income in accordance with the theoretical principles of cooperative organizations. They differ radically, however, in the application of the cooperative principles relative to freedom of choice and democratic rule. The establishment of kolkhozy in the Soviet Union during the country-wide collectivization campaign of 1928–1933 exemplifies forced collectivization, whereas the kibbutzim in Israel traditionally form through voluntary collectivization and govern themselves as democratic entities.[citation needed] The element of forced or state-sponsored collectivization that operated in many countries during the 20th century led to the impression that collective farms always operate under the supervision of the state,[3] but this is not universally true; the common theme was that the administration would be collective, although not necessarily run by government agency staff.
(en.wikipedia.org/...)
Importantly, even if one narrowly defines “socialist” approaches to farming to exclude small family farming—a point which in part 3 I will vigorously dispute, with, among other things, references to current small parcel Cuban farming and agrarian socialism in early 20th century Oklahoma—voluntary, deeply democratic collective farming can work just fine, even for a time under certain less inhospitable capitalist conditions.
To really do the job, however, system change to true democracy is needed, and we must not forget that. Seeking a loving balance between urban and rural needs is the product of the overarching need for a consciously humane social contract for all, one that logically takes into account Maslow’s heirarchy and every person’s inalienable rights (www.dailykos.com/....).
There is no scientific or humane basis for the assumption that feeding the masses well necessitates depopulating much of the countryside and crowding more and more desperate workers into the alienated and ever-growing urbanized mass army of the unemployed. What such an assumption really does is throw up intellectual flak to serve the greedy facts on the ground: the accumulating needs of the land-grabbing, alienating capitalist corporations and the desires of exploitative faux “gentleman farmers” and profit-grubbing mercenaries running defense companies and private prisons to house the disenfranchised, meth-cooking, opiate-dependent great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of former small U.S. farmers.
Those who previously would come home from foreign warring to peacefully pitch fodder to cows now grow up with the divide-and-rule distraction of drug warring raging in their own unstable homes and neighborhoods. While many struggle on and do their best to compete in the bread wars, most have no value to Wall Street and Easy Street other than as consumers, cannon fodder, inmate population numbers, and, for the lucky few, petit mercenary positions carrying weapons to “keep our streets safe” from dark-skinned people often working, if they are able to, as grossly abused wage slaves on plantations and in industrial agriculture sweat shops—and dark-skinned terrorists of course.
If a society wants to support profits for the rich over meeting the legitimate needs of desperate working people the world over, many driven into refugee status and patterns of migration they'd rather avoid, it will do what the U.S. does in it's urban-rural relations and in its agriculture and foreign policies. It is past time for the rural and urban workers of the U.S. to unite with each other—and with the rest of the workers of the world.
True democracy would leave plenty of room for such peaceful solidarity to occur. Divide-and-rule smashes it wherever it manages to take root with the bountiful tools of faux democracy or whatever other authoritarian form the ruling class organizes itself through in a given venue. If we could go back in time we could just ask the Levellers or the tenant farmers of early 20th Century Oklahoma. All that pumped up, culturally-inculcated professed love of country and kin is, in the hands of the ruling class, when push comes to shove, exposed as the fascist rhetoric de jour.
While cooperative agricultural enterprises under capitalist conditions are to be applauded and nurtured, ultimately the system must change to one which is deeply democratic, i.e., one that does not wall off the economy from democratic control, allowing society to actually fulfill the promise of liberty and justice for all.
"To turn over virgin soil it is necessary to use a deep plough going well into the earth, not a surface plough gliding lightly over the top."—From a Farmer's Notebook.
(The first lines of Turgenev’s Virgin Soil.)