Criticism of KCP Line on Kansas Farmers¶
The original article may be read here
This article represents a great deal of ideological confusion. I find it important to retort and offer a criticism of, because it is sadly a common misconception in Kansas that “Farmers” represent some kind of revolutionary class. It comes from a fundamentally revisionist, non-revolutionary understanding of Marxism. Ultimately, because this error is common, I want to dissect this article in detail to demonstrate why revisionism is a poisonous error that seeks to strangle the revolutionary edge of Marxism.
Part I: The Farmer is Not a Revolutionary Subject¶
What Marxism Actually Is¶
Let’s go to the very basic core of Marxism. What is Marxism, as a philosophy, all about? Simply put, Marxism is about labor - who creates the value in a society. Marxism teaches us that in society, there are multiple classes determined by their relationship to labor. Are they laborers who produce value, or are they expropriators of value? This, at its essence, is what Marxism is fundamentally about.
Who is the revolutionary subject? This is the fundamental question of all politics: who is our friends and who is our enemies. The article itself understands this, as in the first paragraph Comrade Disco stresses the importance of “... the question of how Communists might recruit the people in rural communities to our great cause.” I am in agreement here that the question posed is indeed perhaps the single most important question we must be asking ourselves!
So let’s take a step back, and ask ourselves an even broader theoretical question. I would like to ask the reader What makes someone become a communist? Why do people abandon the actually existing society and go ‘all-in’ on a revolutionary experiment with no guarantees of success? By answering this question we can begin to construct an answer to the other question posed by Comrade Disco.
The answer is quite simple: people choose to identify with a socialist revolution fundamentally, because they come to see and understand that their probability of survival is higher with the possibility (not guarantee) of a successful revolution, than it is with the guarantee of the perpetuation of the actually existing social order.
Farmers as Landowners¶
With this in mind, let’s think for a moment about the farmers mentioned in the article. Although this article spends a great deal of time talking about the various struggles of the farmers - being underwater on their debt, facing crushing competition from the concentrating and centralising dynamics of capitalist accumulation - it not only never denies but in fact positively affirms that these farmers are land owners. The interests of land owners, in every single case, without a singular exception, is diametrically opposed to that of the oppressed masses. Therefore, when Comrade Disco writes that ”The personal interests of the farmer is the same as those of all the working class, being the basics of home, food, and the leisure [time] that comes from living in a peaceful society” this is flat out incorrect!
It would be too much of a divergence from the focus of the article - a specific criticism of a specific article that parlays into a broader critique of revisionism - to deep dive into a theoretical treatise on the relationship of how land correlates with the production of value. But, as the topic of discussion is landowners, this topic is unavoidable so a brief survey is in order and appropriate. In his book Grundrisse[1] Marx writes:
In history, other systems come before [the development of capitalism] and they form the material basis of a less complete development of value. Just as exchange value here plays only an accompanying role to use value, it is not capital but the relation of landed property which appears as its real basis. Modern landed property, on the other hand, cannot be understood at all, because it cannot exist, without capital as its presupposition, and it indeed appears historically as a transformation of the preceding historic shape of landed property by capital so as to correspond to capital. It is therefore, precisely in the development of landed property that the gradual victory and formation of capital can be studied. … The relation between the industrial capitalist and the proprietor of land appears to be a relation lying outside that of landed property. But, as a relation between the modern farmer and the landowner, it appears posited as an immanent relation of landed property itself; and the [latter], as now existing merely in its relation to capital. The history of landed property, which would demonstrate the gradual transformation of the feudal landlord into the landowner … would indeed be the history of the formation of modern capital.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse, pg 252
This is a dense quote so permit me to offer a layman’s explanation, and illustrate how it relates to the original article being discussed. Marx talks here about a fundamental parallel track of two ideas: the historical development of the money form and the rise of the commodity where its use-value is of a secondary concern to the exchange value, and the historical development of capital itself and its relationship to the land and who owns the land. Marx is saying that the land owners’ antecedent is the feudalistic landlord, and that the modern capitalist and the modern landowners are in practice two varieties of the same phenomenon.
In this light it becomes quite clear then, that in reality there is nothing that farmers have in common with the oppressed masses of workers and lumpenproletariats in so far as the farmers are land owners. The farmer is opposed to the masses precisely because they own land. Their anxieties and troubles that stem from the phenomenon the article points out cause that psychic anguish and suffering of the farmer because the farmer fears proletarianization.
The Revolutionary Subject is a Class Question¶
The revolutionary subject can be said to be the ‘protagonist’[2] or driving, motive force, of a revolutionary movement. When talking about the revolutionary subject, we speak in terms of classes and not individuals, because individual members of classes can go any which way. Engels, despite being a dyed-in-the-wool bourgeoisie, is undoubtedly a comrade and a friend to revolutionaries everywhere. Similarly, a working-class stiff who joins the police force for career advancement is a class enemy despite the fact that he or she comes from a proletarian background and collects a wage for their paycheck. This may seem pedantic, but it is a common point of confusion I think exemplified by this article and needs to be stated explicitly.
It is clear this article attempts to portray farmers as an untapped wellspring of revolutionary fervor, if only they could be won over to see the foolish error of their ways! But this is a Trotskyist way of thinking - it assumes that people are stupid and don‘t know what’s good for them, that they’re being deceived and hence why they buy into MAGA.
I think that the masses of people broadly speaking, know their own material interests well enough. They know what they need and what’s good for them; nobody needs to tell a farmer or anyone else for that matter that a peaceful society of abundance would be a good thing for them! The farmers know well what they need. Recall from earlier I stated that **the farmers don’t have a natural solidarity with the workers, but rather they revile them on some level because they have great fear and anxiety over becoming one of them. This is the root of why the MAGA movement appeals so much to rural conservative landowners. It’s not that the landowners are deceived by the bourgeoisie, or ensorcelled by some hypnotic class trickery - the farmers are extremely conscientious of their status as landowners and they see that MAGA is their golden ticket to preserving land ownership.
The Peasant Comparison is Historically Illiterate¶
In the article, Comrade Disco explicitly and directly compares American farmers to the peasantry. This is an absolutely ludicrous and ridiculous comparison! But, since the purpose of this criticism is educational, I wish to explain in good faith why this clumsy historical metaphor is wrong. The goal is not to insult or shit-talk your group but rather to educate misguided comrades and get them to correct their mistaken views. I would rather resolve this ideological dispute by building up people’s theoretical rigor, rather than tearing them down with cheap insults and dunks.
Actual history from China and Guinea-Bissau - real countries with real peasant classes - can offer us a greater insight on not only what a peasantry is, but also why they have revolutionary potential[3].
Chinese Peasants¶
Let us first begin with a historical overview of the peasantry in China. Mao Zedong wrote a famous essay Investigations of Peasant Societies in Hunan Province dealing with the matter of the peasantry as a class and their revolutionary potential. The historical context of this essay is one that is surprisingly apt and applicable to our own discourse here. For reference, Comrade Mao wrote this as a criticism of a right-deviationist line led by the faction of Chen Duxiu. Duxiu, much like the Kansas Communist Party, had a muddled and confused idea of the revolutionary subject. In a nutshell, Duxiu and his clique argued that:
1. China only has a fledgling proletariat of 3 million or so in a population of over half a billion at that time. 2. Karl Marx wrote in a book that the proletariat is the revolutionary subject. 3. The correct left-opposition to Duxiu’s line argued that the peasantry, although not the same as the proletariat, had a revolutionary character and could be roped into an alliance[4]. 4. Marx did not state in a book that the peasantry was capable of leading a revolution. The books of Marx state that it must be the proletariat who leads, even though Marx did not write or closely study the Chinese context which was very different from the European context Marx knew all too well. 5. Therefore, because reality went against the mental model of Marx as written in a book, China must allow itself to naturally develop a proletariat. Only then could a revolutionary movement truly begin, because then things would be exactly as they were written about in a book.
What gave the Chinese peasants their revolutionary character? Mao writes:
All those whom the gentry had despised, those whom they had trodden into the dirt, people with no place in society, people with no right to speak, have now audaciously lifted up their heads. They have not only lifted up their heads but taken power into their hands. They are now running the township peasant associations … which they have turned into something fierce and formidable. They have raised their rough, work-soiled hands and laid them on the gentry. They tether the evil gentry with ropes, crown them with tall paper-hats and parade them through the villages … Not a day passes but they drum some harsh, pitiless words of denunciation into these gentry’s ears. They are issuing orders and are running everything. Those who used to rank lowest now rank above everybody else…
Mao Zedong, Report on an Investigation of Peasant Societies in Hunan Province, The “Movement of the Riff-Raff”
Mao makes it clear here that what gives peasants their revolutionary quality is the fact that in Chinese society, they were the lowest of the low. Although it is true that within the peasantry there was a stratum of upper, middle and lower peasants, the vast majority of peasants could be described as “lower” peasants meaning they owned no land and were worked to the bone. They had a low life expectancy of I believe around 40 years of age. Many were illiterate, lacked formal schooling, and were subjected to the brutal tyrannies of religious officials and spiritual clerics.
Compare this to the situation of the American farmer. Although the article makes it clear that Kansas farmers do face some struggles in life, as discussed above, the struggle of the farmer is the struggle to retain class privileges and thereby avoid proletarianization. Whereas with the Chinese peasantry, for them to be proletarianized would be an improvement in their lot of life and their material conditions. In other words, American farmers stand to lose a lot in a communist revolution (their land) whereas for the peasants, the opportunity to be upgraded into workers was a blessing and an opportunity for improvement.
Peasants of Guinea-Bissau¶
The revolutionary Amilcar Cabral wrote a detailed analysis of the situation of Guinea-Bissau which offers us another look into why the KCP’s comparison of American farmers to peasantry is sloppy, unfactual, and flat out wrong. Firstly, Cabral lays out two social-ethnic groups in Guinea-Bissau: the Fulas and the Dyulas. The Guinea-Bissauan peasantry resides primarily within the Dyulas ethnic group[5][6]. Cabral has some correct but also some incorrect ideas about revolution. Again - how do we know which of his ideas are incorrect? Or how do we know that he even has incorrect ideas to begin with? We know this because Cabral failed at preserving revolution. However, he did successfully help lead a revolution, and therefore his words are worth paying attention to though with a grain of salt.
Cabral has what I believe are some erroneous views and we know that he did have some because the revolution of Guinea-Bissau ultimately failed. But, in his assessment he talks about the peasantry among the ethnic Dyulas. What does Cabral state as giving the peasantry their revolutionary character? He cites their itinerant qualities as lending them a proclivity to revolution. Farmers in Kansas, as landowners, do not have an itinerant nature. The closest thing in American society we have to a Dyulas peasant would again be the migrant farm worker - a revolutionary population that is completely absent in the analysis from your article by some bizarre coincidence.
Among the Balantes - the other ethnic group with a peasantry[7] in Guinea-Bissau, social standing and economic class was in large part determined by how much farm labor a family could contribute. This stands in contrast to the American farmer which, by the KCP‘s own acknowledgment, is defined by their ownership of land and capital. Not labor.
In both the Chinese and Guinea-Bissau examples, another factor present which is absent in the situation of American farmers is the aspect of colonialism. The peasants of China and Guinea-Bissau were subject to a brutal regime of colonisation. In the case of the Chinese peasantry, it was at the hands of the Japanese. In the case of Guinea-Bissau, at the hands of the Portuguese. Contrast this to the situation of the American and Kansas Farmer, in which case the farmer IS the settler and IS the colonizer.
What Farmer Rebellion Actually Looks Like¶
The peasants in China were revolutionary because they demonstrated through their practice a willingness to subvert authority, to fight back against their oppressors, and a militant attitude and spirit. Can we say the same of the American farmer? Actually, yes we can! But it looks a lot different than down-and-out peasants suffering from the oppressions of spiritual clerics and aristocratic landlords.
What does the rebellious insurrectionary spirit of the American farmer look like? It looks like none other than Ammon Bundy, the famous leader of the 2014 Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation wherein Bundy led a group of American ranchers to take up arms against the federal government and successfully repel the police. What was the source of their complaints? Why did these ranchers and farmers decide to spontaneously rise up? It was because the feds had the gall to enforce environmental protection laws against illegal grazing on protected federal lands. These farmers wanted to effectively destroy endangered species and, in some cases, infringe upon sovereign Indigenous lands for the grazing rights of their cattle. Is this really what the Kansas Communist Party wants to be appealing to? The white chauvinists who ignore Native sovereignty and who violate federal environmental protection regulations? This is what a rowdy uprising of American and Kansas farmers looks like.
The Farmer as Settler¶
One of the most bizarre oversights of the article is that in a discussion revolving around land, there is no mention of Settler Colonialism or Colonization. One need only look at a map of Kansas at the county level to see how important the legacy of settler colonialism is to this state. Notice how neatly the square territory of “Kansas“ so called is subdivided into equally neat square plots of counties. The landowning farmer this article sympathizes so heavily with, exists within the context of the Jeffersonian model/system of parceling out tracts of land, surveyed in a grid-like system whose principal concern is the apportionment and ordering of land-as-property rather than land-as-space. In this regard, we can consider this symptom as pointing to the fact that the farmers are settlers, who benefit from the genocide and appropriation of Indigenous lands.
Beyond that though, this issue of farmers-as-settlers means that the more apt historical comparison is not the farmer-as-peasant but rather the farmer-as-Boer/Israeli. The American farmer has more in common with a Zionazi settler manning a colonial outpost in occupied Palestine, than they do with a downtrodden Chinese suffering under the yoke of Japanese oppression, or a Russian peasant brutally oppressed by the Russian Tsar.
What is the source of this claim? Simply put, the farmer is a net consumer and expropriator of value. Farmers extract from the land and human labor; peasants are the labor extracted from. This is true by the article‘s own admissions! So why in the nine hells would a Communist see it appropriate at all to publish an article sympathizing with the landowners? Simply put: white supremacy.
What is the logical end result of this theoretical oversight? Is it merely a deviation rooted in book worship, or is it something more severe? I would say that, if you do not correct this ignorance and this refusal to confront settlerism that the end result, **regardless of the intentions of your organisation or membership, will be a fascist line plain and simple. J. Sakai details the connection between settler colonialism, whiteness and fascism in his book Settlers: the Mythology of the White Proletariat, but to recap: the settlers’ economic anxieties are rooted in downward mobility. They will do anything, and strike any bargain, to preserve what they have. This is in contrast to the lumpenproletariat and the genuine (non-labor-aristocratic) proletariat for whom authentic proletarianization would represent upward mobility and an improvement in status.
By pandering to the landowning petit-bourgeois settler farming demographic, what your organisation has done in practice - again, regardless of intentions - is to regiment itself ideologically with a fascistic line. The focus of your organizing is not the proletariat, but instead becomes assisting the petit-bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy in preserving what they have. This is, by definition, a counter revolutionary line. I hate to sound rude, but there is no way to sugar coat this issue. Just because the doctor diagnoses you with a terminal illness doesn’t make him an asshole. Consider me a doctor of ideology.
A Note on Book Worship¶
Toward the end of the article, denoted by Footnote 38, the author writes “As we have seen throughout history and in to the current age, dogmatic adherence to Marxist values can often be a detriment to the overall goals of providing for the people.” I would like to ask the author as well as the Kansas Communist Party writ large: in what galaxy is there an excess of adherence to Marxist “values”? What values specifically are you speaking of?
There is a theoretical error known as Book Worship, which is the mechanical application of texts without regard for concrete conditions. But Book Worship cuts both ways. The error is not in adhering too closely to Marx - it is in adhering to a frozen, decontextualized reading of Marx that ignores the method in favor of the conclusions. Chen Duxiu’s clique committed Book Worship by insisting China wait for a proletariat to develop because that‘s what the European model described. Mao corrected this not by abandoning Marxism but by applying its method - materialist analysis of concrete conditions - to the Chinese context.
What the KCP article does is not the opposite of Book Worship. It is a different species of the same error. By invoking “dogmatic adherence to Marxist values” as a thing to be avoided, the article grants itself license to abandon class analysis altogether. This is not flexibility - it is opportunism dressed in the language of pragmatism. The article waves away the question of who produces value and who expropriates it, precisely because answering that question honestly would reveal that farmers are not the revolutionary subject the article wishes them to be.
True adherence to Marxist method would require asking: what are the material conditions of agricultural production in Kansas? Who performs the labor? Who owns the land and the machines? Who captures the surplus value? These questions have answers, and the answers do not favor the thesis of farmer-as-revolutionary. The article‘s hedge against “dogmatic adherence“ is therefore not a correction of Book Worship but an evasion of the analysis that Marxism demands.
Part II: The Migrant Laborer is the Revolutionary Subject¶
The Absent Protagonist¶
Oddly enough, one would think that for an article about farm labor there might be some mention of the struggles of undocumented migrant workers, as well as even migrant workers who perhaps have legal papers but are still subject to the regime of capital and its brutal agents. Kansas is not a border state, but it is no stranger to the nefarious schemes and brutal raids of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. When I still lived in Manhattan, I remember within a week of Trump taking office that the gestapo stormtroopers raided the community and hauled off dozens of people whose only crime was not having their bureaucratic documents in order. While I don‘t know exactly what these Manhattan residents did for a living, I do know that in the US, many farm workers - including in Kansas - are undocumented. These are the individuals who grow our food and actually work the land.
Numerous times in your article it is stated that “Farmers are the ones who grow our food” in various permutations of vocabulary and words. But, as I have demonstrated above, this is false: farmers own land and provide machines to the laborers who are the ones actually doing the harvesting. Oddly enough, there seems to be a recognition of this in your article explicitly so on some level, Comrade Disco and the Kansas Communist Party seem to understand this. Yet migrant laborers - the actual producers of value in agricultural production - are completely absent from the analysis. This is not an oversight. It is a symptom of the theoretical confusion that runs through the entire article.
Material Conditions of Migrant Labor¶
Let us apply the survival-probability framework I established earlier. Why do people become revolutionaries? Because they come to understand that their probability of survival is higher with the possibility of revolution than with the guarantee of the existing order‘s perpetuation.
Consider the material conditions of the undocumented migrant farm worker. They own nothing - no land, no capital, no machines. They sell their labor under conditions of extreme precarity. They have no legal protections; indeed, the law is deployed as a weapon against them. The state, through ICE and Border Patrol, can at any moment snatch them from their homes, their workplaces, their communities, and deport them to countries they may not have seen since childhood - or ever, in the case of those brought as children. Their wages are depressed precisely because their undocumented status makes them vulnerable to superexploitation. They cannot organize openly. They cannot appeal to the courts. They cannot vote. They are, in the fullest sense, a population for whom the existing social order offers nothing but continued brutalization.
For the migrant laborer, proletarianization is not a fear - it is already their condition, and a degraded form of it at that. They are sub-proletarian, denied even the minimal legal recognitions afforded to citizen workers. Revolution does not threaten them with loss of status; it offers the possibility of human dignity. The survival-probability calculus is unambiguous: they have nothing to lose.
Contrast this with the farmer. The farmer fears losing land. The farmer fears becoming a worker. The farmer’s anxiety is the anxiety of downward mobility. The farmer’s relationship to the existing order is one of desperate clinging - the hope that MAGA or some other reactionary formation will preserve their position against the concentrating dynamics of capital. The farmer is not a revolutionary subject because the farmer still has something to lose.
The True Producers of Value¶
Return to the basic Marxist question: who produces value? In agricultural production, it is not the landowner who produces value. It is the laborer who works the land. The farmer may own the land, may own the machines, may own the seeds (or more accurately, may be in debt to the corporations that own the patents on those seeds). But ownership is not production. The farmer is an expropriator of the value produced by the laborers who actually plant, tend, and harvest the crops.
This is what the article fundamentally misunderstands. When Comrade Disco writes about farmers facing crushing debt and corporate consolidation, these are real phenomena - but they are phenomena occurring within the capitalist class, not between capitalists and workers. The farmer being squeezed by Cargill or Monsanto is a small capitalist being squeezed by larger capitalists. This is the normal operation of capital’s tendency toward concentration and centralization. It is not a revolutionary situation; it is simply capitalism doing what capitalism does.
The revolutionary situation exists in the relationship between the farmer (as employer, as landowner, as expropriator) and the migrant laborer (as worker, as propertyless, as producer of value). That relationship is one of exploitation. And the migrant laborer, not the farmer, is the exploited party.
Revolutionary Potential in Practice¶
What would revolutionary consciousness look like among migrant farm laborers? Unlike the Bundy rebellion - which was a reactionary defense of the right to exploit public lands and destroy ecosystems - revolutionary action by migrant workers would be directed at their actual class enemies: the farmers who exploit their labor, the corporations that depress their wages, the state that terrorizes their communities.
We have historical examples. The United Farm Workers under Cesar Chavez, whatever its limitations and later degeneration, demonstrated that migrant and seasonal farm workers are capable of militant organization. The recent strikes and work stoppages by agricultural workers during the pandemic - when they were deemed “essential” enough to risk their lives but not essential enough to receive protection or fair wages - show that this capacity persists. The networks of mutual aid and sanctuary that emerge in migrant communities in response to ICE raids demonstrate organic forms of solidarity and resistance.
These are the seeds of revolutionary organization. They emerge from the material conditions of migrant labor - precarity, exploitation, state violence - and they point toward a politics that challenges the existing order rather than defending a position within it.
Part III: On the Question of Tactical Engagement with Farmers¶
A Contradiction Worth Noting¶
Having established that farmers are not a revolutionary subject, and that migrant laborers are, I want to address what I suspect is the underlying impulse behind the KCP article: the desire to find some basis for engaging with rural populations. This desire is not in itself wrong. The question is how such engagement is structured and on what terms it occurs.
There is a real contradiction in the situation of the landowning farmer that is worth noting. The farmer relies on migrant labor to work their land and harvest their crops. The state, through ICE and Border Patrol, periodically raids these communities and removes this labor force. This disrupts the farmer’s operations and cuts into their profit margins. The farmer therefore has, at least on this narrow issue, an interest that conflicts with the enforcement arm of the state.
This is analogous to the situation of the national bourgeoisie in anti-colonial contexts, which Mao analyzed in his work on the New Democratic revolution. The national bourgeoisie, while still a capitalist class, had contradictions with imperialism that made them potential - if unreliable - allies in the anti-colonial struggle. They could be incorporated into a united front, but only under proletarian leadership and only on terms that did not compromise the fundamental class character of the movement.
The Limits of the Analogy¶
However, we must be clear about the limits of this analogy. The national bourgeoisie in anti-colonial contexts faced an existential threat from imperialism. Their contradiction with the imperialist powers was deep and structural. The American farmer’s contradiction with ICE is economic, not existential. The farmer can survive deportation raids - they simply face reduced profits and operational disruptions. They can hire new workers, or mechanize further, or sell their land to larger operations. Their survival as a class is not threatened by immigration enforcement; only their margins are.
This means any alliance with farmers is even shakier than the already tenuous alliance with the national bourgeoisie that characterized New Democratic formations. The farmer’s commitment to opposing immigration enforcement extends exactly as far as their profit motive, and not one inch further. The moment it becomes more convenient to side with the state - the moment some other arrangement preserves their land and their position - they will do so without hesitation.
Necessary Conditions for Any Engagement¶
If the Kansas Communist Party or any other formation insists on attempting engagement with landowning farmers, the following conditions are not negotiable. They are the minimum requirements for such engagement to avoid degenerating into tailism and class collaboration:
First, the farmers‘ contradiction with ICE is real but shallow. Any engagement must proceed from clear-eyed recognition of this fact. Farmers are not potential revolutionaries discovering their true interests; they are a class fraction with a narrow, temporary, self-interested reason to oppose one specific state apparatus. This must be stated openly, not obscured by rhetoric about shared struggle or common cause.
Second, any engagement must be premised on farmers providing concrete material support to migrant workers. This means: sanctuary (using their property to shelter migrants from ICE raids), financial support (contributing to legal defense funds, bail funds, mutual aid networks), non-cooperation with state enforcement (refusing to provide information to ICE, refusing to allow ICE on their property without warrants), and public advocacy (using their social position to defend migrants in contexts where migrants cannot safely speak for themselves). This is the price of admission. Farmers must come to the movement offering material aid, not communists going to farmers offering ideological concessions.
Third, farmers cannot set the agenda, determine priorities, or hold leadership positions in any formation that emerges from such engagement. The alliance is tactical and issue-specific; it is about exploiting a contradiction, not building unity. The migrant workers and their organizations must lead. The farmers’ role is supporting, subordinate, and contingent on continued material contribution.
Fourth, the alliance must be understood as temporary and conditional. The moment farmers begin to waver, to make excuses, to prioritize their property over the safety of migrant workers, the engagement ends. There can be no sentimentality about this. The farmers will betray the alliance when it becomes convenient to do so; this must be anticipated and planned for, not hoped away.
Fifth, none of this requires communists to soften their analysis of farmers as a class. The farmer remains a landowner, a settler, an expropriator of value. Tactical engagement on a specific issue does not transform the farmer into a comrade or an ally in any deeper sense. The theoretical clarity established in Part I of this essay must be maintained even while practical coordination occurs on narrow issues.
A Word of Caution¶
I offer this framework not as an endorsement of the KCP’s approach but as a correction of it. If you are going to engage with farmers, this is the only version of that engagement that does not constitute tailism. But I remain skeptical that even this framework can produce meaningful results. The farmers’ contradiction with ICE is simply too shallow, their commitment to their class position too deep, their historical role as settlers too determinative.
What I would suggest instead is that the Kansas Communist Party pivot its investigative series entirely. Rather than studying the plight of landowners, study the struggles of the actually revolutionary population: the undocumented immigrants and migrant laborers who produce the value that farmers expropriate. Investigate their conditions, their networks, their forms of resistance. Build relationships with their existing organizations. Offer concrete solidarity - not outreach, not recruitment, but material support for struggles they are already waging.
This is where revolutionary potential actually exists. This is who the revolutionary subject actually is. The farmers are, at best, a class fraction with a narrow self-interested reason to occasionally not obstruct. They are not the protagonist of any revolutionary movement. They should not be treated as such.
Conclusion¶
The Kansas Communist Party’s article on farmers represents a fundamental confusion about the nature of revolutionary politics. By misidentifying the revolutionary subject - by treating landowners as if they were peasants, settlers as if they were the colonized, expropriators as if they were producers - the article veers into revisionism of the most dangerous sort. It is the kind of error that, if uncorrected, leads inexorably toward tailism, class collaboration, and ultimately the evacuation of any revolutionary content from communist politics.
I have attempted in this essay to correct this error by returning to basic Marxist principles. Who produces value? Who expropriates it? Whose survival probability is improved by revolution, and whose is threatened? These questions have clear answers in the context of Kansas agriculture. The migrant laborers produce; the farmers expropriate. The migrants have nothing to lose; the farmers have land to protect. The migrants are the revolutionary subject; the farmers are not.
This does not mean farmers are forever beyond any engagement. But it means the terms of that engagement must be set by the revolutionary class, not by the petit-bourgeois landowners. Farmers who wish to contribute must come offering material support for migrant workers, not demands that communists moderate their analysis to make farmers comfortable. And even then, such alliances remain tactical, temporary, and subordinate to the leadership of those who actually have revolutionary potential.
The Kansas Communist Party should immediately issue a self-criticism acknowledging the erroneous line of the original article. It should explain the theoretical confusion that led to this error. And it should pivot its organizing efforts toward the truly revolutionary population: the undocumented immigrants and migrant laborers who face the full wrath of the Amerikan state, and who have every reason to fight for a different world.