A fascinating look at the rural work of the Communist Party in the mid-1930s during the ‘Dust Bowl’ years of the Great Depression. An in depth chronicle of issues facing the Party as they organize the United Farmers League, cooperatives, migrant labor, and the rural proletariat.

‘Some Problems of Party Work in the Countryside’ by Louise Scott from The Communist. Vol. 14 No. 5. May, 1935.

(The scope of this article does not include problems of the South.)

The possibility of establishing our revolutionary leadership over the toilers of the countryside is greater today than it has ever been before. Economic ruin faces millions of farmers in the United States; hundreds of thousands are driven into the ranks of the semi proletariat (farmers who having lost their means of production through cattle destruction, etc., must work part time for wages); an ever-increasing army of unemployed agricultural and small town workers receive only $4 to $5 monthly relief checks.

The slowly gathering disillusionment of small and middle farmers with New Deal policies (corn-hog referendum in the Middle West), the rising discontent reflected in mass pressure on leaders of old-line organizations, driving them to “Left” maneuvers (Chalmers, vice-president of the Iowa Farmers Union, talking strike at State convention; united front struggle for relief agreed to by Holiday leaders in North Dakota), the growth of numerous independent fighting unions, leagues, and associations of agricultural and smalltown workers (onion workers’ strike in Ohio)—make it imperative that we immediately intensify our work in the countryside.

While we fail to utilize this favorable objective situation, finance capital makes every effort to consolidate a mass base amongst the discontented rural petty bourgeoisie. Through the rich farmers and capitalist elements in the countryside, aided by New Deal demagogic promises, third-party maneuvers and the rejuvenation of old-line farmer organizations (Farmers Union, Farmer-Labor Progressive Alliance), Wall Street hastens to strengthen its hold over the ruined small and middle farmers. An increasingly important role in the pro-capitalist regimentation of the countryside will be played by the County Committees of the County Production Control Associations, of which some four thousand have been organized throughout the country under the direct control and supervision of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Through such hand-picked organizations, dominated by the landlords and bigger farmers who are reaping benefits from crop reduction schemes, the voice of Wall Street speaks. to the countryside more clearly month by month. In various and devious ways capital seeks to direct the confused militancy of the middle section of the rural population against the most destitute farmers (the poor, marginal, and semi-proletarian), against the agricultural laborers and the workers in towns and cities.

In mid-1933 the Extraordinary Party Conference, in its “Resolution on the Farmers’ Movement”, warned the Party:

“Along with the further growth, extension and sharpening of the mass struggle of the farmers, finance capital and its various agents in the form of bourgeois parties will inevitably try to get possession of the farmer masses politically and direct them in a struggle against the working masses. Bourgeois-imperialist counter-revolution which is increasing along with the revolutionary upsurge is compelled to seek for itself a mass social base, putting into operation the weapon of social trickery, all kinds of social demagogy, and playing on the numerous petty-bourgeois prejudices of the farming masses.”

Hand in hand with these preparations goes the openly fascist drive against the proletarian and poorest strata of the farm population, in order to divide and subdue the more militant elements:

1. Settling the dispossessed and “submarginal” farmers, migratory workers and “stranded” industrial families on subsistence farms, where, under strict government control, in “decentralized rural industrial communities” (similar to the Ford scheme), or adjoining big ranches and large plantations (Santa Clara Valley in California, cotton belt in Texas), cheap labor will be provided for the bosses.

2. Cutting off direct relief in rural communities, driving more of the farm youth into C.C.C. camps, and placing the able-bodied men (especially those who have led local struggles for relief) on construction jobs which more and more resemble forced labor camps.

An objective shifting and sharpening of class lines is taking place in the countryside today. This is not yet, however, clearly reflected in the political thinking of any large number of rural toilers, largely because the Party is not playing a decisive role in the leadership of their struggles (with the exception of the Negro sharecroppers in the South, the agricultural workers in California, and the farmers in some counties in the Northwest).

In fact, unless immediate steps on our part are taken, we may find ourselves isolated from the countryside. Especially must we intensify our work in those rural areas where bourgeois third-party movements are most rapidly gaining headway (Minnesota, Wisconsin, the Dakotas), and in those districts where our influence among the proletariat is strongest (Michigan, Ohio, Chicago, Pennsylvania, New York, California).

“The Communist Parties must direct their chief attention in the villages to those districts which, owing to their nearness to big proletarian centers, to their large proportion of farm workers, the national composition of the population, their significance from the point of view of supplying the city proletariat with food or for any other reason, will play an important role in mass political strikes, in the course of the struggle against war and in the decisive fights for the proletarian dictatorship.” (Organizational Tasks of the Communist Parties in the Farm Communities,” E.C.C.1., 1933.)

Our leading comrades, including those in the concentration Districts, can no longer ignore their task of building the Party and giving leadership to the Party members carrying on activity among agricultural workers and toiling farmers. This task is not in contradiction to the main concentration of every Party organization on the leadership of the workers’ struggles in the basic industries. But it is the dialectics of Leninism that the stronger the movement of the proletariat, the more urgent becomes the question of winning influence over the masses of non-proletarian toilers, of whom the largest section is the poor, small, and middle farmers. Thus, strengthening of agrarian work becomes a task of the concentration Districts as well as of the Districts in areas distant from the industrial centers.

Special problems arise in connection with the carrying on of Party work in rural areas. It is intended here to outline some of the immediate difficulties and weaknesses of Party activity in the countryside outside the South, and to suggest a few general methods which will improve our work. The hope is that this article will stimulate the comrades in the field to discuss much more concretely their own experiences and problems through the Party press, in the Section and District Committees. It is especially necessary that comrades active in mass work among farm workers and rural proletariat (California and South Jersey), should pass on their experiences to the Party as a whole through articles and other material in the press.

HOW IS THE PARTY CARRYING OUT ITS TASK OF LEADERSHIP?

The guiding force for carrying out our Party work is the unit or nucleus. The Party unit in an agrarian community should represent the leadership of the proletariat in the fight of the masses against their exploiters, its task to win the majority of toilers in the neighborhood to the revolutionary struggle for a workers’ and farmers’ government, rallying them around a clear class struggle program of immediate demands.

Yet this is far from the situation of our units in the rural areas, In a number of Districts (Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, Nebraska), where up to half the Party membership is from the farms and villages, and where third-party movements are actively maneuvering for a base, special guidance on how to carry on the ideological struggle against reformism, how to win to our program the ruined farm population and petty bourgeoisie of the small towns seeking a way out of the crisis, is not given. At the same time, little or no work is carried on inside the reformist organizations (cooperatives, Grange, clubs, churches) in order tc reach the vast number of poor farmers and rural workers under their influence. In addition, comrades leading the work of the Left-Wing farm organizations are left to carry on without check-up or guidance from the Section and District centers, with the result that these organizations become either narrow duplicates of the Party, or develop sporadically and spontaneously along petty-bourgeois reformist or opportunist lines.

In other Districts where mass struggles of farmers and farm workers have taken place in the recent past under reactionary and reformist leadership, where such mass movements are again developing spontaneously (Wisc., N.Y., Pa., Ohio, Ill., etc.) the Party leadership has shown itself unaware of such movements until very late, and is not preparing the Party to lead the coming struggles.

The District leadership of the Party as a whole gives no serious attention to the agrarian units. Problems of work in the countryside are not regularly taken up in the District Bureaus, and when a discussion is held it is usually the last point on the agenda. District Bureau comrades from the trade unions do not participate, and the guidance of work of fractions in mass organizations is neglected. It is not unusual to find leading Party comrades completely ignoring the class lines in the countryside by lumping the entire rural population into the category of “the farmers”. Making the excuse that they are not acquainted with our program for farmers, or with the political and economic problems of farmers and agricultural workers in the territory, the Section and District leaderships seldom call in comrades leading the mass work, together with members from the agrarian units, to discuss Party work in the countryside. Too often when these comrades are summoned to the center, it is not to help them solve their problems of rural work, but to issue mechanical instructions that the “farmers must be mobilized” for support of this or that industrial struggle. Mass campaigns are instituted without consideration or discussion of how these connect with local problems.

Rank-and-file Party members in the countryside, as well as the agrarian organizers, receiving neither guidance in fraction work or guidance of policy from the leadership of the district, have tended to turn to a center other than the usual Party center for leadership. The dangerous habit has developed of carrying on rural work separately from the District and Section leaderships of the Party, under a sort of “special dispensation” from the national fraction of the United Farmers’ League or the Farmers’ National Committee for Action. Instead of the Districts taking responsible leadership of Party work in the countryside, certain Party members have been assigned to the agrarian field to act as leaders of the farm organizational work independently of the Party in the District. Since the leading comrades in the national agrarian work are also leaders of the national Left-Wing farmers’ fractions, the orientation of the work they directed has been practically entirely toward farmers. The results of these bad practices have been of two kinds: Either functioning units are not built, Party members acting only as members of a fraction in these places; or where Party units are set up, they lead a narrow mechanical inner life, disconnected from the activities and life of the neighborhood. In both cases, our work tends to become centered around the conditions and problems of farmers, not of the other sections of toilers in the community.

UNIT LIFE IN THE COUNTRYSIDE

Since the rural units may be 100 miles from Section headquarters and two or three hundred miles from the District office, no Party functionary may visit some of the units for months or even a year! Even contact or check-up by mail is sporadic and formal. This, together with the weaknesses noted above, tends to make for disheartening the Party forces in the countryside and for a generally low level of unit life.

Agrarian units are chiefly composed of poor and small farmers, with a few militant middle farmers. It is safe to say that a large number of these are foreign-born, especially in the Northwest. Few agricultural workers or farm hands have been drawn in; town workers are not recruited into these units, even though the unit may meet within a mile or two of a small semi-industrial town. As a result, there are cases in which the Party, strongly organized in the countryside, holds meetings and demonstrations in the county seat without being able to rally any considerable section of the town proletariat to its support. Emboldened by the hostility or indifference of the town workers, the authorities are able to carry on wholesale terrorization of the militant farmers and farm workers (Nebr., Wisc., etc.).”

A survey of unit members would probably show 35 to 45 years as the average age. There are few women. Units range in size from 6 to 20, meeting irregularly (from twice a month to once in three months) with an average attendance of half to two-thirds of the registered membership. Meetings are held evenings at farmhouses to which unit members must drive or walk from 2 to 30 miles.

Unit meetings are in general unprepared, since distances make it difficult for a unit bureau to get together. The unit organizer reads the District Organizer Bulletin, reviews correspondence; assigns tasks, passes out tickets to be sold; or gives collection lists, signature blanks, leaflets, for distribution. With little or no discussion of the purpose of the unit task and how it can best be carried out in the community, collective responsibility is seldom established. Work usually falls on the shoulders of the same few members of the unit who “know how to do it”. So mechanical has this procedure become in some units that enthusiastic new members drop out because their initiative, their suggestions, are smothered by routine. In other cases, the less active, less class-conscious, members of the unit may continue for months attending meetings without once being given, or accepting, even a small task. Such members come to believe that Party membership carries no responsibility except to “be on the right side of the barricades when the revolution comes”. On the other hand, the few active Party members, working without collective leadership and Party control, finding themselves overburdened with work and isolated from the mass of poor farmers and farm workers in their community, tend to become discouraged and pessimistic.

After a unit meeting is over it is not unusual to hear a lively discussion on local grievances with relief distribution, road work, the county agent, schools, grievances against the local cooperative, taxes, price of feed, etc. Asking the comrades why these questions were not raised in the unit meeting and plans laid to mobilize the workers and poor farmers of the community in active resistance, you will get answers such as: “It wasn’t on the order of business”, “We have too many other things to do”; ““What’s the business of the U.F.L.?”; “We Party members can’t talk to neighbors about these things because they’re scared of us ‘reds’”; “The other farmers won’t fight—have to let them starve some more”; or, even more commonly, “I did tell the relief director [or county agent or banker] when I was in the other day what I think about such and such a case”. This latter kind of individual action is often considered very effective by our comrades because it may temporarily scare the small local officials, but it doesn’t win mass support for our comrades nor educate the local workers and farmers in the class struggle. Rather, it tends to make our neighbors regard our militant comrade as a kind of “Mr. Fix-it”, eventually making easier a fascist attack on these isolated comrades when the authorities find they have no mass base.

Questions of political education; literature; the Party and Left Wing press; recruiting; fraction work for raising the political level of the: militant mass organizations (U.F.L., etc.); work in local reformist organizations (Grange, Community Club, cooperatives, etc.); the united front; systematic exposure of local Farmer-Labor, Progressive, Socialist politicians; the fight against local fascist developments—these vital problems are not regularly taken up in the agrarian units. Neither do we find these units drawn into the wider life of the District, developing a Communist analysis of the political situation in the state and the New Deal as it effects the local workers and farmers, although these are the questions raised by non-Party farmers which our comrades must answer every day. Nor are discussions organized dealing with conditions and struggles of workers and unemployed in nearby towns and cities, or nationwide problems of the class struggle, strikes, national conferences, etc.

PARTY GUIDANCE OF MASS WORK IN THE COUNTRYSIDE ⁽¹⁾

This low level of political life in our agrarian units holds back the development of a mass movement around our program. Without a correct understanding of fraction work, our Left-Wing farmer locals in the majority of places are small, disconnected from the masses, and are not developing in size or influence in the community. In many units comrades regard the local of the Left-Wing mass organization as a sort of Communist Party under another name, into which they introduce the Party campaigns just as they come from the District, unadapted and divorced from the local problems. In fact some comrades quite seriously raise the question, “Why is the Party trying to hide behind the U.F.L.?” When the local begins to dwindle away, comrades decide that the farmers “aren’t revolutionary enough” for our organizations. Sometimes they try to meet this situation by abandoning the attempt to carry on mass work or build a mass organization and by turning the remnants of the local into a Party unit!

The insufficient clarification of our comrades in the agrarian units on questions of building the united front in the countryside leads to a narrowing of their approach to only those militant farmers who are ready to accept the class struggle program of the U.F.L. The general orientation of work has been to build and strengthen the U.F.L. (or Michigan Farmers’ League, etc.)—local, county and State—before beginning building the united front. For instance, a number of leading comrades in a certain State debated for several weeks whether to call a State convention of the U.F.L. or a united front conference, and decided on the former “because we’re not strong enough yet for the united front”.

Reflecting the insufficient political understanding of Communist mass work and the Left-sectarian character of most of our organizational efforts to date, as well as the many real objective difficulties we face in the countryside today, some comrades active in the farm work have raised the question: Can we, in the present period, hope to build the U.F.L. into a mass organization? To place this question by itself is like’ asking whether the toiling and exploited farmers in the United States can be won to the support of a program to save them from ruin; the answer of every Communist would of course be in the affirmative. It would serve to clarify our problems better if we put the question this way: Is the U.F.L. (or the Michigan Farmers’ League, United Farmers’ Protective Ass’n., etc.) our only method of leading the masses in the countryside along class struggle lines? If we examine our work from this point of view, we find that most of our comrades in the farm work have been suffering from “organizational inflexibility”. By arbitrarily demanding that the militant farmers in the countryside be organized in our Leftwing locals, we have isolated them from their more backward neighbors and lost contact with the masses of farmers still affiliated to the reformist and capitalist controlled groups. Party comrades in agrarian work have not yet learned how to go among farmers in Rightwing organizations and carry on revolutionary work, how to adapt our tactics to win the rot yet class-conscious farmers.

Our comrades’ failure to organize in the field, to concretize and localize the Party program through unit discussions and collective work in properly directed fractions has contributed to the falling off of mass farm struggles during the recent period. At two national united front conferences, held under the leadership of the Party, delegates representing thousands of farmers, unorganized and organized in various reformist as well as militant organizations, accepted as just and necessary our program of class struggle demands. Nevertheless, this program has remained largely formal and on paper, because the Party members who should lead the development of these struggles were not clear either how to reach the masses of farmers not yet acquainted with our program or as to what forms of immediate action to propose to the masses for the realization of all or some of these demands.

For example, the Chicago program with its revolutionary call for cancellation of poor farmers’ debts, met with enthusiastic response from the farmers, both at the conference and in field meetings. But neither the leading Party fraction at this conference nor the Party comrades responsible for carrying this program into action discussed sufficiently the concrete forms which this action could assume (for instance, Committees of Action to send delegations and resolutions to county, State, and national authorities, bankers, insurance companies, etc., demanding cancellation of farmer So-and-So’s indebtedness; demonstrations at insurance offices and banks; mobilization of mass sentiment for cancellation of back taxes, etc.). Nor were steps taken for more than a year after the Conference to penetrate the locals of old-line farm organizations with this program, although contacts and forces were available even within the ranks of the Party. The result was that this demand never became a reality in the minds of the poor farmers, and the Communists, by putting forward as an immediate issue a demand which remained unreal to the masses, lost an excellent opportunity to develop the class struggle in the countryside.

Our slowness in developing a mass campaign around the Farmers’ Emergency Relief Bill is largely due to this same failure to bring the Bill to the countryside as a burning reality linked up with local grievances. Many of our own comrades still regard the Bill as a “gesture” of the Communist Party which we cannot consider seriously or expect to have passed by Congress. The same attitude appeared in the ranks of the Party toward the Unemployment Insurance Bill several years ago, and was overcome only through training every member of the Party to understand and present the Bill to the workers in the simplest form and in the most intimate terms.

The correction of these mistakes in the Party work among the farmers depends upon correct political and organizational guidance of the rural units and fractions by the Districts and Sections. The most vital questions facing comrades in the mass work today are: How to translate our national farm programs (U.F.L., Chicago Conference, the Sioux Falls Conference program) into local action (not agitation alone) around concrete local demands which can draw into motion the exploited but as yet politically backward elements; how to mobilize the masses for the next step in the struggle; how to develop new cadres of leadership; and how to broaden out the Party influence from the radicalized farmers to reach all sections of toilers in the countryside, organized and unorganized.

HOW CAN WE IMPROVE PARTY WORK IN THE COUNTRYSIDE?

1. Improvement of Party life and work in rural areas will not result only from the correction of weaknesses in agrarian units. We must educate the entire membership of the Party in our agrarian policy and the situation in the countryside today. This requires a continuous education of the entire Party membership around the question of building the “united revolutionary front” between the industrial proletariat and the exploited toilers of the countryside, Where personal contact between the two groups is possible, as in some of the concentration Districts, we should bring in delegations of farmers to strike headquarters, onto the picket lines, and carry on joint actions with the Unemployment Councils; workers from the cities and towns can be led to aid farmers in county protest actions, relief, eviction and foreclosure fights. In other parts of the country this solidarity must be built by popularizing such joint activities, collecting relief, sending resolutions, joint relief struggles, etc.; by acquainting the town workers with conditions in the countryside, and by bringing always before farmers the revolutionary significance of the joint fight against the exploiters under the leadership of the proletariat.

One of the most important methods of improving our Party work has scarcely been utilized—the press. To date the Daily Worker has only occasionally published material on the agrarian question, and the Farm Correspondence page on Thursday is extremely weak. One of the reasons for this is that few rural Party members subscribe to the Daily Worker, and bundle orders, when they are taken, are for the Saturday edition. If material on agrarian problems would appear on Saturday, with the Party Life column discussing problems of rural work in this edition, combined with a special drive to build the circulation of the Saturday edition in the countryside, closer contact between the Party and non-Party workers in industrial areas, between the farmers and farm workers, could be established. The language press and the publications of the mass organizations should also undertake to give guidance on how to work in the countryside. With improvement in the political contents of the Farmers National Weekly, strengthening its united front appeal and giving more attention to problems of the rural proletariat and city workers in their relation to the farmers’ movement, its circulation can become a powerful method of broadening the movement.

The initiation of a thorough discussion of Party work in the rural areas in the press, in all District and Section Committees, and in all village, town, and county units, is necessary if we are to carry through successfully our task of building a mass Labor Party and winning the rural population for the fight against fascism and war.

2. Through the correct application of Party structural principles, responsibility for developing agrarian work can be made an integral part of the task of each District. We must liquidate once and for all any tendencies toward “parallel” leadership of agrarian work in the Party, but not by liquidating our agrarian work! Rather, the leadership of each District must become informed on the problems of the various strata of farm population, the alignment of class forces and the strategic points for concentration in the District. A check-up by each District Bureau of the composition, functioning and activities of Party units in the small towns ard in the countryside is necessary. Reports on the situation in the countryside and proposals for development of the rural work should be discussed regularly by the District Bureau, and a control established over the carrying out of all decisions. The organization and leadership of correct fraction work must be seriously undertaken.

THE ORGANIZATION OF RURAL UNITS

3. The strengthening of the Party in the countryside depends upon drawing in more proletarian elements (village workers, farm hands, poorest farmers) in order to provide a healthier base for our work. Experience in the East has shown that the unit should concentrate its life around the local town or village. Where this can be done in the Western farming areas, it will help to break down the isolation of the rural workers and farmers from the small town proletariat and semi-proletariat. A special struggle must be carried on to recruit the scattered farm workers and poor farmers working part-time for wages—who are to be found in every rural community —into the Party, and as rapidly as possible, develop them for leadership. Sympathetic women, young farmers, young workers, and more American elements, should at once be drawn in and activized.

The first task of every unit is to become acquainted with the various groups of workers in its township or community; to be able to analyze their problems, explain to them in simple language on the basis of everyday experience how to struggle against the local exploiters; to initiate, support and lead organized action in their interests; to learn how to present the Party program to each of these groups. Each agrarian unit should select a point of concentration, such as a local saw mill, cannery, lumber camp, fishery, mine, factory, Indian reservation, construction project (C.W.A., P.W.A., etc.), condensary, creamery, flour mill, large farm, or any enterprise employing wage workers even though on a part-time basis.

Each member of the unit must be assigned responsibility for work among a given group or section of the local toilers, reporting regularly to the unit on the progress of the work. This includes work among members of the cooperative, Grange, Farmers’ Union, Holiday, community club, language, fraternal, and benefit societies and lodges, A. F. of L. locals, relief projects, in the American Legion Post, at the annual township or school district meeting, wherever workers and toiling farmers are to be found. As rapidly as possible, fractions or groups of farmers and workers sympathetic to our program should be formed within each of these organizations to work under the guidance of the Party unit.

As a number of workers from a single local industry are recruited into the Party, it is best to transfer them to a town unit or shop nucleus. In some instances—and, of course, this is raised only as a proposal for discussion—it might be desirable, if a number of farm laborers are recruited from within a workable radius, to form them into a separate unit. But we must guard against the danger of falling back into the present narrow unit life which takes up only problems of one group (or craft) to the exclusion of the broader tasks of the Party. Some of the specific tasks of these units would be to defend the economic interests of the wage-workers, help them to build their own class organizations, and lead the strike struggles of the proletariat. ‘These tasks are no less the responsibility of the revolutionary farmers organized in the Party, and the work of the farm, village and town units and nuclei must be intimately linked up through joint bureau meetings and representation on the Section and District committees. This strengthening of the proletarian base of the Party in the agrarian communities is one of the best guarantees that our work among farmers will be correctly guided. Here in day-to-day activity will be worked out the concrete methods of farmer support for proletarian struggles, and aid and leadership by town workers for mass struggles of the exploited farmers. And here we can begin to form on a local scale detachments of “that broad political army in which the proletariat is the leading class”.

IMPROVEMENT IN THE FUNCTIONING OF UNITS

4. Without improving the inner life of our Party in the countryside, we cannot hope to revolutionize our work there. Long, dull unit meetings concerned only with questions of dues, collections, resolutions, and correspondence, will not hold the younger farmers, workers, and women. Exclusive discussion of farmers’ problems and U. F. L. work will not draw the farm and town workers into the Party. Activity of only one or two comrades in the unit will not build a mass base for Party or develop responsibility of other Party members.

Technical business of unit meetings can be kept to a minimum, so that there is time at each meeting for a carefully prepared political discussion or study circle. District directives to these units have to be especially simplified and adapted to local conditions, so that new units are not burdened with every Party task indiscriminately, but learn step by step how to link up each campaign with the mass work in the community.

Each member of the unit should be drawn into Party work, given tasks that are within his or her capacity to perform, and helped by older comrades to carry them out. Check-up or control over each task must be made by the unit. Excessive burdens of Party work on a few comrades must be lightened.

Agrarian units usually function better if they are large (12 to 15, rather than 6 to 8 members), provided the location of meetings is shifted about so that comrades in outlying townships do not always have to do all the traveling, and provided every member is activized. The organizational orientation of the rural units, however, is more important than size. Members must live sufficiently close together so that work can be carried on among all strata of toilers in a certain territory or township. Better a small unit that is representative of the village proletariat, farm workers, and poor farmers in one township, than a large unit composed only of farmers from half the county. Use of the term “farm unit” may often be misleading, implying only farmer composition; in places where there is no small town nearby, units might well be called by the name of the township.

Organizational approach to agrarian units must be flexible. For instance, too many inner organizational meetings cannot be demanded. Where unit bureaus do not function because of scattered membership, a joint bureau of three or four units in the same territory or county can be formed to meet every month or six weeks, with a leading comrade from the Section present to help in preparing unit business for the next two or three meetings. In large Sections which are chiefly agrarian, it may be necessary to elect on the Section Committee, or even Bureau if possible, double representation from each group of units or from each joint unit bureau in a particular territory, in order that at least one representative will be able to attend each meeting. Thus the same comrade will not have all the burden of travel. Such meetings should be used to lead the farmer members to an understanding of the class base of the Party, to draw them into revolutionary activity among the rural proletariat, and not to discuss only “farmer” problems. Special meetings of the Section Bureau with the actives from village and country units can be held to discuss methods of improving unit life or to examine the work of the fractions.

IMPROVING OUR MASS WORK

By assigning every possible Party member to active work within some old-line organization which includes in its membership a basis of poor, small, or ruined middle farmers, we can begin to engage these local organizations in a mass movement under our leadership, Party members must become agitators for class issues and demands within the local and county organizations of the National Holiday, Farmers’ Union, Grange, cooperatives, etc., drawing the small and middle farmers into activity over the heads of or against the opposition of the rich farmers and political agents of capital who today play a leading role in many of the county organizations and in the State apparatus of these organizations.

Without ceasing our work of building Left-wing mass organizations of poor farmers and of carrying resolutely into life their revolutionary program of work, we should at the same time recognize the following: that one clear class demand put forward within the ranks of an old-line organization, around which we can mobilize a group of poor and middle farmers im action, may be more powerful in breaking the capitalist hold on the countryside, in attacking the exploiters, in drawing class lines and winning masses under revolutionary leadership, than a complete set of revolutionary demands endorsed by a small local of the U.F.L. composed mainly of radicalized farmers and Party sympathizers.

We must take care not to jump from isolation into liquidation of the U.F.L. Parallel to the work carried on by comrades within the old-line organizations, the U.F.L. local should approach the oldline locals for joint action on a united front basis. In some cases this activity will result in increasing the membership of the U.F.L. from among the unorganized farmers who are usually the poorer and semi-proletarian farmers, and in strengthening the influence of the U.F.L. in the community and among the farmers in other organizations. In other cases, where the U.F.L. local is small and hopelessly isolated from the mass of farmers, and where locals of old-line organizations are predominant, it may mean the dissolution of the U.F.L. and the concentration of all militant farmers on work within the reformist organizations. In cases where the U.F.L. has not yet been formed, the comrades should examine carefully the requirements and possibilities for work in existing local organizations, the level of class consciousness of local farmers which will determine the mass base a U.F.L. may hope to establish there, before taking permanent organizational steps. “The Committee of Action form of organization for loose, flexible and temporary mobilization and education of masses of farmers in struggles, should be used more effectively.

In general, our comrades working in the countryside should cease to regard themselves solely as U.F.L. organizers, but begin o understand and experiment boldly with various informal methods of rallying broad masses of farmers around a program or a single local demand which calls for class action. Such a development demands clarification of the political perspectives and immediate tactics of our work in the countryside, the strengthening of Party responsibility for agrarian work, the rapid recruitment of class-conscious farmers and rural proletariat into the Party, and the creation of correctly functioning fractions to guide the work in the mass organizations (reformist and Left-wing). At the same time there should be regular political reports established between the comrades active in the field and the Agrarian Commission which is responsible to the Party leadership, in order to determine the correct tactics in the light of a thorough political analysis of varying local conditions.

CONCLUSION

Only on the basis of a correctly executed united front tactic can we today win the masses of rural toilers to the struggle against capitalism. We must broaden our perspective in the rural areas, to include work in reformist mass organizations. The number of farmers and farm workers who follow our program in action will be the measure of our influence in the countryside, and not only the number of membership books issued by the U.F.L. or even the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union. In every village, in every township throughout the country, in the locals of the Holiday, the Farmers’ Union, among the Farmer-Labor, Progressive, Democratic, Republican, and Socialist voters, even among members of the fascist-led groups in the country, among the millions of rural dwellers, are to be found the poor farmers and workers who belong under our leadership. “To win these elements requires patient, day-to-day activity of our Party members and revolutionary farmers along correct political lines, in order to overcome their reformist and bourgeois-democratic ideology, and to build up a broad mass base for the Party among the toilers of the countryside.

NOTE

1. In order to give more concrete and detailed experiences of mass work among the agricultural and rural proletariat (in California, Colorado and South Jersey, the only places where the Party has carried on such mass work), this question deserves to be taken up in a separate article.

There are a number of journals with this name in the history of the movement. This ‘Communist’ was the main theoretical journal of the Communist Party from 1927 until 1944. Its origins lie with the folding of The Liberator, Soviet Russia Pictorial, and Labor Herald together into Workers Monthly as the new unified Communist Party’s official cultural and discussion magazine in November, 1924. Workers Monthly became The Communist in March ,1927 and was also published monthly. The Communist contains the most thorough archive of the Communist Party’s positions and thinking during its run. The New Masses became the main cultural vehicle for the CP and the Communist, though it began with with more vibrancy and discussion, became increasingly an organ of Comintern and CP program. Over its run the tagline went from “A Theoretical Magazine for the Discussion of Revolutionary Problems” to “A Magazine of the Theory and Practice of Marxism-Leninism” to “A Marxist Magazine Devoted to Advancement of Democratic Thought and Action.” The aesthetic of the journal also changed dramatically over its years. Editors included Earl Browder, Alex Bittelman, Max Bedacht, and Bertram D. Wolfe.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/communist/v14n05-may-1935-communist.pdf