Workers World, Vol. 23, No. 16
April 12, 1981: When the new secretary of agriculture named by Reagan, James R. Block, was confirmed, he reiterated what he had said earlier: that food should be used by the U.S. as a weapon against its enemies.
This astonished much of the world and intimidated others. This unrestrained belligerence by Secretary Block is wholly in accord not only with Reagan’s foreign policy but with the policy of the Carter and prior administrations as well.
What is new is the brutal frankness of the Reagan administration, especially in such a sensitive area as food.
Yet one must take into account that the agricultural background against which Secretary Block spoke was carefully screened from pubic view and is only gradually being publicized in rather oblique commentaries in small and inconspicuous news items in the capitalist press.
When Block spoke there were already tens of millions of navel oranges rotting in the sun. They were left there by giant agribusiness owners in order to jack up the price of many different kinds of fruits, vegetables, and grains that the market cannot absorb.
It is the same old story, the same utterly intractable and incurable disease of capitalist production, in this case affecting agriculture.
To many of the older generation this scene of the rotting millions upon millions of oranges and other fruits cannot but bring back memories of the catastrophic Great Depression.
Whereas 50 years ago, wheat was burned and vegetables were buried underground or left to rot while millions starved, today it only seems that the change has been one of substance. [Transcriber’s note: In context, I believe it should say “form.” – G.B.] In reality what half a century of capitalist legislation in the field of agriculture has done is to drive the disease of capitalist overproduction deeper into the body politic of capitalist society.
There are many, many laws now governing the production, distribution, marketing, and pricing of agricultural products. But if capitalist overproduction and the havoc it causes have been hidden from sight and submerged, they will only reemerge in threatening catastrophes.
Today we are told by the Reagan administration that there is too much government, that government should get out of the business of agriculture, and that the growers and planters should work out voluntary agreements, etc., etc.
This could only produce a real laugh from those who are in the know about the particulars of capitalist farming today and about the role of the capitalist state. For nothing is truer than that most marketing decisions regarding agriculture are made by so-called producers’ committees drawn form the biggest agribusiness interests who set the prices, rig the market, and set shipping quotas for the individual farmers. It’s all “voluntary,” all right. And the government rubber stamps it with speed and alacrity.
If some small producer objects, he is fined by the producers’ group. An item in the New York Times of April 11, 1981, tells how one grower sent 150 tons of good oranges to one of the consumer cooperatives for sale to the poor at cost. He is now subject to one of those big fines that come from the producers’ committees, which are supposed to be governed by democratic procedures where majority rules. But it takes only one producer, like the giant Sunkist, to overrule all the others, kit and caboodle.
A whole literature has grown up around the growth and development of agribusiness, which is one of the powerful levers of imperialist politics in this country. Yet those in the progressive and working-class movement who view it with dismay and despondency are not sufficiently aware of the overall significance of the dynamic changes deep in the anatomy of the capitalist agricultural economy.
Many are blinded by its superficial aspects and do not see the broader sociological significance in the light of the class struggle. Much of the very progressive literature on the subject, the purpose of which is to expose the avaricious character of agribusiness, has a mournful and pessimistic tone, similar to some of the early semi-feudal exposures of capitalist industry when it was first emerging from the womb of feudal society.
The days when the vast majority of people worked and lives in rural America have gone forever. Even as late as 1930, 40 percent of the U.S. population lived and worked on farms. Today, it is only 3 percent.
One can say without fear of contradiction that American capitalism – the free enterprise system par excellence – has done a most splendid job in collectivizing agriculture, as has been done nowhere in the rest of the world. That is, it has concentrated what once were millions upon millions of small farmholdings into vast concentrations of land and resources in the hands of a small group of finance capitalists organized into mighty conglomerates that own the food supply of this vast country.
But what has not been fully brought to view is that this is done nowadays by virtue of the existence of more than 32,000 food manufacturing companies in the country. Along with these 32,000 food factory complexes are thousands of smaller units in the food manufacturing industry, which can be characterized as satellites of the bigger ones. Notwithstanding the large number of units, it is estimated that 75 percent of all profits are reaped by 50 of the top companies.
Nowadays there are not only fish factories, pork factories, and chicken factories, but it can fairly well be generalized that the food industry is reaching the stage where it is developing mass production in these animal factories.
This may be viewed with gloom by those who expose merely the avariciousness, insensitivity, and utter disregard of health and safety hazards by the exploiting conglomerates. One the other hand, it has given rise to a phenomenal growth in the number of agricultural factory workers, who along with the regular agricultural workers in the fields and in the vast food distribution industry count in the millions.
This tremendous growth in the workforce is in a sociological sense a growth of the working class, who while they may be scattered, as yet poorly organized, and virtually driven underground – as are the undocumented workers, in agriculture as well as in industry generally – are nevertheless a social factor of tremendous objective significance in the light of a developing class struggle.
This is obscured by a lot of glib and ignorant talk about the growth of the middle class, which, by the way, keeps forever sinking into the working class. Little is said about the growth of the working class – as though the millions who have been forced from rural areas into small factory towns and to big cities and the new millions in the service industries are not workers and have supposedly become middle class.
But no matter how capitalist propaganda distorts all this, the U.S. Department of Labor cannot but say that of the hundred million who are considered in the workforce today, counting millionaires, supervisors, bosses, bankers, you name it, there are 80 million solid members of the working-class community. They are oppressed and exploited. They are robbed by inflation, cheated by their government, and persecuted by it when they fight back with vigor and determination but without mass organization.
It is true that the industrial working class has declined relative to the rest of the working class. But that does not negate the fact that all are exploited and oppressed. For no matter how capitalist industry and agriculture progress they can only garner profits from the sweat and blood of those who work.
The relations between capitalist industry and agriculture so far as the working class is concerned become narrower. The wide gulf that separates industrial and other workers narrows. And the common bond of exploitation remains.
Just as the barons of auto, steel, and other industry have eroded their industrial base because of their insatiable drive for profits, so has agribusiness been destroying in an even more dramatic manner the very basis of life and agriculture.
It is estimated that between six to eight million acres of agricultural land is being annually lost, eroded, destroyed. How? By the avarice of huge conglomerates, of so-called land developers who ravage the land spur erosion, and employ reckless agricultural practices which can only lead to the irretrievable loss of land.
Nonetheless, just as capitalism on a world scale brings havoc, chaos, and destruction, it also erects a foundation in the form of millions of agricultural and food workers who will be the grave diggers of the new forms of monopoly capitalism.
Food, said the secretary of agriculture, should be used by the U.S. as a weapon against its enemies. In the eyes of the millions of new workers born out of what are virtually new industries, their enemy is agribusiness and no amount of bellicose talk of diverting capitalist overproduction in agriculture to serve the purposes of the U.S. war machine can change that.
From the sunny fields of California where the migrant workers by the hundreds of thousands are organizing, to the animal factories of Arkansas, New England, and the Midwest, to the groceries, the supermarkets, and the hundreds of thousands of small little satellites around these supermarkets, are a new, growing, and restless army to add to the strength of the working class as a whole. All their interests as well as their historic destiny show that they will be in the battle against capitalism and imperialist war.
The new resurgence in the anti-war movement should not overlook this. It should not merely look to the old and established trade union movement, which of course is vital and indispensable. But it should direct its attention as well to the new divisions of the great army of the working class in the struggle against the capitalist class for the socialist transformation of society and to free it from exploitation and oppression.
Last updated: 11 May 2026