The first three parts of this series clarified that the anti-science prejudices of concern to Butts have nothing in common with the views of the communist workers movement. The series has reviewed Marx and Engels's materialist explanation of the relationship between human labor and nature, as well as recent discussions of the communist approach to science and human progress at national and international gatherings of the Socialist Workers Party. Last week's installment assessed the campaign against genetically modified food (GMOs) and pointed to the ways in which the workings of the capitalist system are deepening the debt slavery of working farmers and continuing the proletarianization of layer after layer of these rural producers.
 

The U.S. rulers are not only global capitalism's leading banking and manufacturing power, they also lead the imperialist world in both agricultural output and exports.

Patriotic voices of the U.S. bourgeoisie, from capitalist farmers to major grain monopolies and government agencies, trumpet the "miracle of American farming."

"American farmers grow food that helps feed the world," says the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

"America's farmers and ranchers are equipped to feed the world in the 21st century," says the president of the capitalist-dominated Farm Bureau Federation.

"Our mission is to feed and nourish a growing world population," says the website of the grain giant Archer Daniels Midland. And its top competitor, Cargill, speaks of "helping farmers grow a wide variety of goods to feed a growing world."

The American Soybean Association recently organized a campaign of postcards to the USDA around the slogan, "America's Surplus Soybeans Can Feed a Hungry World."  
 
'America' doesn't feed the world
The first thing to note about these chauvinist claims is that they are simply lies. "America"--that classless fiction behind which a tiny handful of U.S. propertied families shield their domination of the armed forces, cops, courts, and other institutions of the capitalist state based in Washington--does not feed the world.

In 1998, for example, the 25 countries cited by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization as having the world's greatest levels of undernourishment received less than 0.03 percent of U.S. soybean exports, and in 1996 they received none! They were the destination of less than 0.3 percent of U.S. corn exports in 1996, as well.

What does it mean "to feed the world," anyway, when according to United Nations figures nearly 50 percent of children under age five in South Asia are underweight? Nearly one-third in Sub-Saharan Africa? More than 15 percent in the Middle East and East Asia and the Pacific? Nearly 10 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean? What does it mean when right in the United States itself, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, some 10 million people are estimated as being hungry, and another 21 million go for parts of each year without "enough food for an active, healthy life"?

Nor are working farmers faring well under the laws of motion of capital in the United States and worldwide. According to a study released in June 2001, some 33,000 U.S. farms have gone under since the early 1990s. Prices paid to Mexican corn farmers fell by half over that period, driving many more off the land. While farmers in Canada suffered a 20 percent drop in their net incomes between 1989 and 1999.

The giant monopolies that dominate U.S. and world food markets, however, have done much better. Between the mid-1970s and the turn of the new century, for example, food prices paid by consumers in the United States shot up by 250 percent, while the prices received by farmers in real terms over that period have been stagnant at best.

No wonder the latest annual figures show Archer Daniels Midland posting more than $300 million in after-tax profits, while ConAgra raked in $683 million.  
 
Cuba's example
Contrary to the USDA, Farm Bureau, and U.S. agribusiness, it is not American capitalist agriculture that points a way forward for the workers and farmers of the world, or shows how science and technology can be put to use to feed the world and advance broader social needs. To the contrary, the only such example in today's world is the socialist revolution in Cuba, along the lines described in the Militant article by Joel Britton on the 40th anniversary of the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP).

The revolutionary government of the workers and farmers in Cuba expropriated the capitalist landowners, nationalized the land, and thereby guaranteed farmers the right to till it for as long as they wanted without fear of foreclosure and ruin. The socialist government provides cheap credit to farmers, as well as invaluable technical assistance in making a collective go of it on the land.

One accomplishment of which Cuban farmers and workers are justly very proud is the mechanization of sugarcane harvesting. No such machine had ever before been manufactured anywhere, since throughout the capitalist world the wages of agricultural labor gangs to perform this backbreaking work were so desperately low. Plantation owners and other capitalist farmers found it more profitable to press these workers into service at harvest time, leaving them without steady jobs or income during the "dead season," sometimes as long as nine months out of the year.

Cuba's revolutionary government, on the other hand, began organizing production in countryside and city to meet the needs of working people, not maximize the profits of landlords and capitalists. Mechanization of the harvest was among its central goals from the outset, said Cuban president Fidel Castro in his report to the first congress of the Communist Party of Cuba in December 1975.

"In this country, we could no longer tolerate an army of unemployed, that had risen from 600,000 in 1953 to 700,000 in 1958, part of which worked on the harvest four months in the year," Castro said. He continued:

This was a typically capitalist method of sugar production, and it could only exist under the [U.S.-backed Batista] regime's subhuman conditions. But the country had no machine-building industry, and under the existing conditions our mechanized harvesting techniques were absolutely embryonic. Such machines simply had neither been designed nor built by modern industry. Che [Guevara] was one of the leading advocates of this endeavor.

The revolutionary government gave top priority to designing several successively more effective sugarcane harvesting combines and built a factory in Cuba to manufacture them, giving a boost to the country's industrialization. Cuba also licensed a West German company to produce these combines; as of 1989 it had sold hundreds of them to customers in 44 countries. By the early 1980s more than half the sugarcane harvest in Cuba had been mechanized, as had almost all the lifting of the cut cane. Machinery is also used to clear the cane fields of scrap and to perform other tasks.

For the reasons described in Britton's article, Cuban toilers have had to carry out agricultural production in face of reduced resources since the economic crisis that hit them so hard during the opening years of the 1990s. But they have put their ingenuity to work to use whatever they do have at hand--be it a tractor or a team of oxen, be it precious imported fertilizer or a domestic by-product from the refining of sugar--to organize labor in town and country to feed and clothe the population and maintain the revolution's proletarian internationalist political course.  
 
The job is to make a revolution
That underlines the reality that the main thing to be learned in Cuba by farmers or other working people and youth from abroad is not agricultural techniques--organic or otherwise. The most important lesson is what workers and farmers can accomplish anywhere in the world when we organize a successful revolutionary fight for state power and use our conquests to join in the international struggle for socialism.

Communist leader Ernesto Che Guevara once told a gathering of medical students in Cuba that "to be a revolutionary doctor, or to be a revolutionary, there must first be a revolution." That, Guevara said, is the "fundamental thing" he as a young doctor had come to understand half a decade earlier in deciding to join in the revolutionary war to free Cuba from the boot of imperialist oppression and capitalist exploitation. (Che Guevara Talks to Young People, Pathfinder Press, p. 46)

The same holds true, even more so, to be a revolutionary farmer or a revolutionary worker. The "fundamental thing" in either case is to join in the proletarian movement to make a revolution and become a disciplined militant in its ranks.

Frederick Engels made a similar point nearly a century earlier in his article on "The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man." At every step along the advance of society, he wrote, human beings "are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature--but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to know and correctly apply its laws."

Doing so, however, "requires something more than mere knowledge," Engels said. "It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and with it of our whole contemporary social order." (Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Pathfinder Press, p. 236)

It is only along that road that working people will accomplish the goal set forth in the Communist Manifesto of a "combination of agriculture with manufacturing industry" through the "gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country."

It is then, to paraphrase the Manifesto, that humanity will truly discover what immense "productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor."
 
 
Other articles in this series:
Beneath organic farming hype is hostility to science alien to interests of workers, farmers
 
Capitalist agriculture is the art of robbing the soil and the worker
 
Working people need to distinguish science from its uses by capital
 
Other related article:
Working-class fight for peace and a livable environment
 
 
 
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