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U. S. AGRICULTURE AND TASKS OF THE PARTY   365

the surplus production. We have many examples of just how "organized" capitalism is: Domestic sugar demands higher tariff, but this meets conflict with equally powerful sugar capital invested in Cuba, Hawaii and the Philippines. It is this class of two powerful sugar interests that carried the sugar "lobby scandal" to the doors of the White House. Finance capital has a certain measure of control over commercial butter production, and there is a demand for tariff protection against substitutes, but this collides with imperialist capital interest in Philippine cocoanut oil. Finance capital has its grip on the apple growers' associations of the Northwest, but when the latter demands a tariff on bananas the United Fruit Company seriously objects, since (contrary to a popular song) it has too may bananas, it demands more banana eaters and has closed down its Costa Rican plantations to limit production. Under Farm Board auspices, the National Farmers' Grain Corporation was formed with $20,000,000 capital late last October (others in cotton, tobacco, vegetables, etc., are in prospect) to assure Hoover's "orderly marketing." But it faces disorderly production on a world scale which it cannot overcome. Virginia tobacco growers are dismayed at the drop of around 50 per cent in tobacco prices, caused, it is said, by the British revenging Hoover's thrust against British rubber, by growing tobacco in Canada and China. The world wheat crop of 1929 was only a little below 1928; Europe's crop is above 1928, with a reducing inner market rather than an expanding one; the American corn crop was 11 per cent and wheat 12 per cent less than in 1928, but the farm income, counting in all the farm-raised food consumed on the farms, as well as the usual padding, could show no more than $16,000,000 more than in 1928 in the total of all farm income--or about 50 cents per head of farm population. Moreover, outside of all control of American and world capitalism is the overshadowing fact of socialized agriculture in the Soviet Union, producing ever greater volume while distinctly bettering the working conditions and living standards of its agrarian population, an example to inspire the poor farming masses of the whole world to raise themselves from the swamp of capitalist misery and fight, in alliance with the proletariat, to overthrow capitalism.

[[centered]] SECTION VI
FARMERS IN THE POLITICAL STRUGGLE [[/centered]]

1. The ups and downs of agrarian political discontent in the last several decades show, in themselves, the dependent and vacillating role of the petty bourgeoisie in the political struggle, agrarian dis-