The Fight for a Workers and Farmers Government in the United States

by Doug Jenness and Jack Barnes

* The Fight for a Workers and Farmers Government in the United States by Jack Barnes* The Crisis Facing Working Farmers by Doug Jenness* Land Reform and Farm Cooperatives in Cuba, two speeches by... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0873486390
• ISBN13: 9780873486392
• Release Date: December 1985
• Publisher: New International
• Length: 376 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

TheWayOutOfCapitalism'sCrisisForUs,TheWorkingPeople

It is family farmers, not Big agri-Business, that produces most of the food and fiber grown and raised in this country.The superrich that own the banks, fertlizer and seed corporations, etc. that exploit small farmers also own the Democrat and Republican politicians that don't even claim to care a fig about small farmers til election time.Their hog superfarms, for just one example, are monuments to capitalist greed, stupidity, and pollution of everything they touch.This book explains that working people in city and country, in our unions and in fighting farmers organizations-like today's National Black Farmers and Agriculturalists' Association-have got to unite and fight our common enemy and take government power out of the capitalists' hands.The authors also explain we must identify and unite with our friends around the world, like Malcolm X taught--other workers and farmers just like us-- against our enemy in the world: imperialism,in the first place the Yanqui-U.S. Empire.As we enter the new Great Depression and face the continual string of U.S, wars against OUR people, the working people, around the world that go along with, this book's use of the lessons of Cuba's land reform, with speeches by Fidel Castro, could not be more timely.As timely is the 1985 document adopted by the Socialist Workers Party, which explains how the experience of being industrial workers, unionists, and fighters for our class as a whole , after a long absence from those unions, led to that party's call for a workers and farmers government as its most important campaigning slogan and goal.The resolution also explains why the middle-class groups calling themselves "The Left" in this country were/are only pushing for band-aids to cover the abcesses of the system.Must reading for today's and tommorow's fighters for fundamental social change.

For a Workers' and Farmers' Government

"The Fight for a Workers' and Farmers' Government in the U.S." is a key article in this collection. It is based on the fact that farmers who hire no labor but work their own land have common interests with workers. Both are exploited by giant agribusinesses and are in debt slavery to the capitalist banks. In this article, Jack Barnes presents a convincing argument for the correctness of the strategy of the Socialist Workers Party to "educate and organize the working class to establish a workers' and farmers' government that will abolish capitalism in the United States and join in the world-wide struggle for socialism."

Alliance with farmers decisive for workers in the USA

The big battles between farmers and banks, farmers and agribusiness that opened in the late 1970s and early 1980s helped the Socialists Workers Party reconsider the decisive role of farmers and their struggle to the struggle for Socialism in America, and indeed the world. Two articles in this issue of the New International from 1985 record this new understanding. "Forging a Fighting Worker-Farmer Alliance" by Doug Jenness analyzes how farmers are exploited by big business, how they have begun to fight back, and how workers need to join and support their struggle. "The Workers' and Farmers' Government in the United States" by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes, is a speech changing the SWP's constitution to call for a workers and farmers government in this country. Barnes' speech in particular integrates the experiences of the Cuban, Nicaraguan and Grenadian revolutions on the common fight of workers and exploited farmers with the battles workers and farmers face in the USA. Added to these two speeches are two speeches on the alliance between workers and farmers in Cuba by Fidel Castro and a resolution on "The Agrarian Question and Relations to the Peasantry," a resolution adopted by the Cuba Communist Party in 1975. Along with these articles on the alliance between workers and farmers, this issue contains "Revolutionary Per4spective and Leninist Continuity in the United States," the central political resolution adopted at the SWP's august 1984 convention surveying world and US politics in the early Reagan years.