A South Dakotan Communist sheep rancher with an early popular exposition of the Party’s land policy to small farmers through its intervention in the Farmer-Labor Party movement.

‘Land for its Users!’ by Tom Ayres from Farmer-Labor Voice. Vol. 13 No. 10. February 15, 1924.

Land for its users. The phrase should be easily understood, for it means, without any qualification, that the people who plow the land, seed the ground, harvest the crops and make their homes where they do plow, seed and harvest–shall have the first right, and the only right, to the land. This necessarily excludes the big landlord, the mortgage-shark and every other parasite. “Land for Its Users.” That idea has started almost every emigration, and has been at the bottom of almost every revolution of consequence in history. The French peasants wanted land. The nobility and the church had the land. The peasants did not start the revolution. That was done by the middle class. The peasants got much of the land as a consequence of the revolution, but not all. Had the revolution fulfilled its mission in this regard, none of the land would have been sold and none of it would have passed into the hands of speculators and been regained by the idle classes. The Russian revolution of our present day has done a much more thorough job Lenin’s famous Land Act, proclaimed on the first day of the revolution, distributed to the working peasants all the land of the big land-owners. The Russian revolution was started–not like the French revolution, by the middle class but by the working class. The Russian workers understood that they would create the surest basis for their revolution if they expropriated the big parasites–took from them their land, and gave the land to the millions of its users.

The Land Hunger.

The Madero-Carranza-Obregon revolution in Mexico was a revolt of the land slaves against the plunderers who had feloniously taken possession of the soil, in tracts as large as the State of South Dakota. The Terrzus family “owned” a State, twice the size of South Dakota. The present Mexican government has been parceling out these stolen estates to the USERS OF THE LAND, who had been dispossessed by force and trickery. The counter revolution now taking place is being financed by the dispossessed plunderers of the farmers, who seek to re-establish Mexican landlordism.

It was the cry of “land for its users” that sent the poor people of landlord-ridden England, Ireland and Germany to America for new homes. When they got here some of them in irons as slaves and bearing the brands of their masters–they found that the finest land in America had been parceled out to the “down-and-out” favorites of the King. The land along the coast in the southeastern states and New York was thus doled out. Pennsylvania was largely handled in the same way. British Landlordism promptly transplanted itself to America with the other institutions of the ruling classes of England: The estates of the Astors and other rich families were founded on such practices. America thus made a bad start in furnishing “land for its users.” However, there was much land left a whole continent–which might have been now covered with beautiful homes and without a mortgage! Our own farm mortgage debt of $400,000,000, might have been avoided. The interest on this gigantic debt, at 6 per cent, would build forty-eight thousand homes worth $5,000 each–enough to house a city of 250,000 people each year–if our land ownership system had been wisely and honestly devised and administered. If the “fathers” of our country had been real statesmen–instead of bankers, lawyers, speculators, landlords and grafters, who hid behind closed doors when they made “our” constitution–they would have provided that none of this vast, rich public domain should ever be sold or otherwise disposed of to private corporations or persons; that it should be held as the everlasting heritage of the people, to be leased to the users of the soil at a tax so small that it would have made a permanent home possible for all who desired to live on the land. And, at the same time, this would have yielded a prodigious revenue. But these “fathers of our country” were not made of such material. They came of families of English landlords, bankers, speculators and grafters, and they had the social philosophy of these English ruling classes.

The Land Grabbers.

The farmers–and by that, I mean those who actually live on the land and work it–have been the under dogs, since history began. History proceeded only to repeat itself here. No sooner had our continent been opened, until the crafty habit of acquiring land for speculation and exploitation won the day in our legislative halls, our courts and civil administration halls. It is going on today–as witness the theft of our oil lands by the Sinclair interests, through the corruption of our late Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Fall. The gentlemen who formed our political institutions were not farmers, nor industrial workers. They had a contempt for and a fear of the workers. They were the ruling classes then, as they are now. They made the rules of the game for themselves. Crying “democracy” they at once established a dictatorship of bankers, slave-holders, lawyers, speculators and grafters, which has been maintained to this day with little variation. They not only fixed the laws in favor of the big land owners, usurers and speculators, but organized the markets and the credits to control the price of the farmers labor.

The Mortgage.

When the new lands of Ohio and Indiana were invaded by the venturesome farmers of New York and New England, it was because these farmers were disgusted with their jobs. Still they found the same system confronting them; those from whom they bought fixed the price. Those to whom they sold, fixed the price. THE MORTGAGE FOLLOWED. Then they emigrated to newer fields. The same rule prevailed wherever they stopped. Their oppressors were not then organized as they now are, but they were fully conscious of their class advantage, whereas the farmers were not conscious of their unorganized power. The mortgage always followed the covered wagon, and invariably for the same reason. It was always the rebels who went west. They had courage. The weaklings remained in their slavery, and were absorbed in the growing factory industry, changing the form of their slavery, but not materially bettering their conditions of life. The farm rebels kept on going west. They invaded Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Washington; there they stopped and turned back. There is now no new land. It has all been taken up, and MORTGAGED. The mortgage represents, now as always, the wages that the farmer and his family earned but did not get. The game of paying what the other fellow asks and taking what the other fellow offers, is still going on. All the earnings of the farms, above a bare living, have been absorbed by the system and loaned back to the farmers whom the system has robbed. As the land rose in speculative value, the mortgage rose with it. There has never been a time when the farmer could beat the game, because he has always been the victim of the crooked device which made him take what he was offered and give what was demanded of him. There is no escape from this. It is the system working out its logical ends. We must therefore settle down and agree to serfdom, or CHANGE THE SYSTEM.

The Tax Problem.

The farming industry of this country is mortgaged for more than it is worth. It would take fifteen billion dollars to pay the farm mortgage debts, and if all the possessions of the farmers were to be sold they could not, then pay what they owe. Two million farmers left the land in 1922, and a million more in 1923. The Secretary of Agriculture declares that 25 per cent of the farmers are bankrupt. I believe that 75 per cent would be nearer the truth. Ten per cent of the farms in North Dakota have been foreclosed in the last eleven months. South Dakota is in about the same boat. At that rate there will be no owning class in any of the Northwestern states in the next ten years. The farmer who, for the last twenty years, has counted his profits in the increased speculative value of his land, has been disillusioned. This paper profit has been burned up. It will not return–FOR HIM–he will be a renter before another visitation of land speculators. Future rise in prices will be used by the insurance companies and land mortgage companies to exact higher rents from the man who uses the land. A way will be found by these gentlemen to reduce taxes on land and saddle it on consumption, when they have driven the farmers from the land. Until that time the farm “owner” will [words missing] a rapidly rising land taxes. The day of a “private ownership of land” as we have understood it, has gone. It will not return. Small holdings will vanish. Big holdings will increase. The mortgage system and the control of the markets by the interests which legislation calculated to assist the farmer own the mortgages will attend to that. Any will be employed to the advantage of the people who live on the land. big land owners, not for the benefit of the Farm Tenantry.

Before the last deflation (Wilson) from which we are now suffering, more than half of the farmers were tenants. Before this tragedy has buried the hopes of its dead and wounded, not more than twenty per cent of those who live on land will own it. The man with a clear farm, who has worked all his life to give his children a landed inheritance, cannot assure them of land. When his estate is settled, his heirs will divide the land. They must improve it. If they mortgage, they are lost, when they sign the first note. If they have money with which to improve, the marketing system, organized in the interest of the money loaner, will get them. THERE IS NO WAY TO BEAT THE SYSTEM UNDER THE SYSTEM. Six per cent interest doubles the debt every eleven years and eight months. There is no escape–THE SYSTEM IS RELENTLESS.

The money loaners own the government. They maintain a dictatorship. They will dispense with Congress and make that dictatorship open and scandalous any time their interests appear to require it. The industries are organized. They will continue to fix their toil as they have been doing. The farmer who lives on the land is unorganized. He must continue to be the victim. He will build houses and pay for diamonds and furs, but he will build on Broadway, not on a farm of his own; some plutocrat will occupy the house the farmer has paid for and his wife will wear the diamonds and furs. The picture of the future is clear to me. It is a question of but a few short years till we witness the finish. What then is to be done? A new land system must be adopted. Those who use the land must be the only ones entitled to have land. That is the only means of insuring the food supply. It is the only method of saving civilization from the ravages of the crazy system which is undermining it.

The Land for Its Workers.

The Farmer-Labor Party stands for “land for its users.” As between the life insurance companies and money sharks who are rapidly getting the land through the mortgage system, and the folks who live on and work the land, WE STAND FOR THOSE WHO WORK THE LAND. The mortgage system must be abolished. The politicians who have brought us to this pass must be put out of power, and a farmers and workers government established. Only through a farmers and workers government can the task be accomplished. That is our job. Let us not flinch, nor compromise, nor wait. The time is NOW.

The Voice of Labor was a regional paper published in Chicago by the Workers (Communist) Party as the “The American Labor Educational Society” (with false printing and volume information to get around censorship laws of the time) and was focused on building the nascent Farmer-Labor Party while fighting for leadership with the Chicago Federation of Labor. It was produced mostly as a weekly in 1923-1924 and contains enormous detail on the activity of the Party in the city of those years.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/vol/v13-n10-feb-15-1924-Farmer-Labor-Voice.pdf