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360   THE COMMUNIST

ment a majority cannot afford. When such is offered "free," it is because finance capital thus baits its trap. In the country districts "co-operatives" are under leadership of local small business men and rich farmers, the servile tools of banking capital whose interests are advanced at the cost of the vast majority of farmers. Demagogy appealing to their petty bourgeois desire for "a reasonable profit over the cost of production" does not benefit the majority, the poor farmers, however, when they respond to this bait. Finance capital with its local and petty tools not only takes the "reasonable" profit, but actually impoverishes the poor farmers and binds them more closely to finance capital with debts while pretending to "help" them with loans. Much is made by "left" reformists of what co-operatives "could" be "if" they struggle against finance capital. But this is merely an abstraction. They are not struggling against finance capital, but for finance capital and against both the majority of farmers and the whole proletariat. Supposed to be "neutral" in politics, they, in fact, are centers of control by capitalist politics. As giving some indication of how the "co-operatives" are held by a minority of rich monopolist farmers, we cite the following figures for 1925:

   | No. Farms in U.S.A. | No. Farms Selling Through Co-operatives | Sales in Dollars
Owners | 3,868,332 | 602,364 | 582,622,977
Managers | 40,700 | 5,023 | 22,347,268
Tenants | 2,462,608 | 276,820 | 253,314,142
Total | 6,371,640 | 884,207 | $858,284,387

By this we see that the proportion of all farmers who are actually in co-operatives is only a small minority, that most of them are owners and that the percentage of tenants who participate in relation to the number of tenant farmers is very low. We also see that the total sum of sales, in relation to the total value of crops produced in 1924, which was $7,472,534,858, is low, though this is said to have grown to $3,200,000,000 in 1927, and that the problem of finance capital, although even  by this proportion of aggregate control it can, in degrees varying by industry, attain a measure of monopoly, is to press further for "more co-operation" by the farmers but for finance capital.
Only when capitalism is overthrown will farmers' co-operatives pay a progressive role in the interests of the farming population and all society.