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U. S. AGRICULTURE AND TASKS OF THE PARTY   369

"labors" of the conference with Hoover brought forth the promise that there was nothing much wrong with agriculture, and the conclusion from this, that all that is necessary to improve the "splendid conditions" prevailing in all except "crop shortage areas," is "better roads to market" (to a market that does not exist!) and "lower interest rates." These rates would be welcomed and even celebrated by great masses of poor farmers who can get no credit at any rate, but the fact is that not one of those who may be so "favored" will ever know how it was determined that interest would be "lower," nor solve the mystery of how lower rates were to be "reflected back" to agriculture from the Stock Exchange, where "money used in speculation" has disappeared with equal mystery. The simple magic of entering inflated price quotations of stock in books is thus matched by Hoover's suggestion that all will be well once this "money" (which never existed in the realm of substance) is "made available for agriculture" by the book price of stocks being marked down. Yet in spite of or bacause of such transparent swindles Hoover obtained the support of the "farmers' organizations" to his Farm Board plan of pushing the majority of poor farmers into deeper poverty to establish the rule of finance capital.

7. The "Farmer-Labor" movement, which flared up and then expired, was essentially a petty bourgeois movement, for all its bravely worded programs, and could no nothing else than seek exit from prospects of struggle through the enticement of a "more practical" phraseology offered by La Follette. Nevertheless, a new period of history was begun. The Bolshevik revolution had awakened the agrarian world from its torpidity. Elemental forces of incurable crises, of wars and revolutions, were at work,and the Farmer-Labor movement could not subside without leaving traces of the rising agrarian movement that looks to the revolutionary overthrowal of capitalism as the only solution and to the Communist Party as the leading force. A growing section of the poorest agrarian petty bourgeoisie is historically turning to the left and seeking revolutionary forms of expression.

8. This revolutionary residue of the past wave of petty bourgeois discontent has crystallized around the United Farmers' Educational League, the weakness and limitation of which has been the fault of our Party in its own opportunist failure to analyze the agrarian question in a Bolshevik way and to give these revolutionary elements a revolutionary program. In place of such, piecemeal (opportunist) policies were given our comrades working in the League, which tended at best to make it an unrecognized left wing