Re-Activating Rural Radicalism

Coming from a small Kansas town none of you will likely ever have heard of, I often think how I would approach introducing my old neighbors to a Communist world in a way that they would accept. I have imagined a rowdy town hall filled with guns held threateningly high as I tried explaining how their lives were about to get better. However, I don’t actually think it would be that bad, as long as we don’t continue to ignore the rural communities.

As is attested by the very symbols on our flag, the history of the world Communist movement is a history of collaboration between the rural farming populations and the urban industrial centers. While the old labels of “peasantry” and “proletariat” don’t exactly seem to fit these modern groups, they have the same basic distinctions (which I will address in detail later).

The Democrats Have Abandoned Them, We Should Not

Much like the Democratic Party, we have abandoned the rural communities to be taken over by the right-wing groups that comprise the GOP, to our detriment. I have personally heard CPUSA members from the bigger city clubs balk at the idea of reaching out to people they consider backwards and reactionary, which only demonstrates a willing ignorance of those communities. My own in Northwest Kansas hometown has for over a decade had a program that allows any local high school graduate to attend our community college two years on the towns dime[1], and has seen its local intelligentsia stand up to the proposition that we’re all reactionary bastards[2]. Statewide, we have a Democrat governor (although a strongly conservative one), and our politics are remarkably progressive (Bernie Sanders “handily” carried Kansas in the 2016 primary[3]).

Since the 60’s, the GOP has implemented an ambitious 50-state plan to gain support in rural communities by a focus on cultural issues such as abortion[4] and gun rights, while the democrats focused more on the cities and cultural issues they knew they could win on (sometimes). The GOP strategists knew, as we should learn, that workers could be moved to vote against their best interests if the right lever were found to move their opinions. The GOP also knew that they could take the country if they took the rural areas (who have more voting power anyway, due to the corrupt nature of American “Democracy”[5]). We have all probably read about the so-called “Southern Strategy[6]” and other ways that the GOP used to gain support in the South. Despite ongoing debate on the validity of the claims to its actual existence, the results cannot be debated. The GOP has taken control of the American rural communities using a number of methods.

Throughout history, politics is always about a smaller group exerting influence on a larger population. There are far fewer people actually active in our political parties than people who actually vote to give them power, and even fewer people who actually control those parties. The same is true for any Communist organizations, but we don’t have the benefit of a population divided between the different current manifestations of those organizations. You could put every dues paying member of every Leftist group in the nation in to New York City and you might, with a great effort, get a City Council seat or put someone on the School Board. If you were to spread that same number of people across key areas of Nebraska or Montana, you could take the state[7].

A microcosm of this was demonstrated when I once worked on a campaign supporting a Democrat named Paul Davis[8] during his run against Republican Sam Brownback[9]. While our efforts were focused on the denser population centers in an effort to make the most bang for our buck, Brownback campaigned by personally visiting many of the scattered farms across the Kansas prairie, often completely ignoring the cities. Despite widespread condemnation of Brownback from both sides of the aisle, the trust he built with scattered communities saw him win nearly every county in Kansas, including the larger cities[10]. This reveals to us that often times it is simply enough to hear people out, rather than seek to lecture them as we too often do.

It’s important to speak to people as fellow workers, despite what personal distaste you might have for their views on some issues (organizing is a duty, and should not be personal). After law school I worked as a union organizer (shout-out to the SEIU Local 513[11]). As a union, our focus was strictly on worker power, with little formal efforts given to those things that could be considered cultural, such as LGBTQ rights, abortion, or the 2^nd Amendment, but as all Communists understand, such issues are interconnected. The SEIU represented units from across the political spectrum, such as the traditionally more liberal school staff (nutrition services, Paras, administration, custodial, etc.) to more conservative or politically neutral city workers and school security. All these groups could agree that workers were getting screwed, they just had different ideas as to the specifics of it.

While as a union organizer I had to set aside my personal politics and beliefs, I did in my efforts develop close relationships with many of those I helped organize, and in so doing many found out my political leanings. One such person was a big 6’3” ex-marine that we will call “Mike”, a member of one of the city worker groups we served (a group it should be mentioned had more than a few LGBTQ members). Mike was one of the best union members I ever met. He was the one you could count on to get properly mad about getting screwed over, and was not shy about loudly voicing that anger at the first opportunity. He came to every meeting, event, or picket line. Personally, Mike and I also got along very well because he was a genuinely good man who would fight tooth and nail for any of his worker comrades. Mike was also a raging Trump conservative who knew that I was a Communist.

The way he found out I was a Communist is a conversation we had after one particularly contentious meeting in which Mike stood up and accused the union workers present as being “nothing but a bunch of goddamn Democrats” (it would be appropriate to read that in all caps with perhaps a page or so worth of exclamation points following). Speaking after, I politely asked him not to lump me in with any liberal groups, admitting to his surprise that I was a card-carrying Communist. After overcoming the initial shock that I disliked the Democratic Party and its supporters as much (or more) than he did, we spoke for a bit about “Communism” and worker power, concluding with him promising to at least not confuse us with the Liberals. I was able to do this because I had developed relationships with people like Mike, and because we both spoke the language of the working class, because Mike didn’t vote Trump because he hated the Trans coworker he worked with every day, or because he wanted to exclude immigrants, he voted the way he did because he didn’t feel represented by the traditional parties. Now, Mike may never be a Party member, but he also won’t be an enemy to our cause.

There are a lot of Mikes in the Midwest. People who have been ignored or forgotten by the capitalist parties (the [usually] GOP incumbents typically run unopposed, and the Dems, if they offer a candidate at all, will often leave them to fund and organize themselves). Interestingly, the Libertarian Party[12] often does very well in Kansas, even having a libertarian mayor in the largest city[13] (even if she is heavily funded by conservative groups[14]). Considering that both Bernie and Libertarianism is popular in Kansas, it is clear that the people are sick of the choices presented by the traditional parties. This is a situation that an active communist movement can exploit by implementing our own 50-state plan in opposition to both the traditional parties.

This won’t be done by passing out copies of a newspaper focused on activism in the big city (or “activism” in general), or by videos about Communism on YouTube. Folks in my part of the country respect action, and all the videos and rhetoric amount to nothing but talk. What it takes is people coming in to those communities and “doing”, even if that doing is a small thing.

Rural People are Not Petty-Bourgeoisie

While the average rural farmer is often a member of the petty-bourgeoisie, and thus an unreliable ally in the revolution, historically speaking this isn’t always the case. Radicalism runs deep in rural communities, from the term “red-neck[15]” to the great John Brown[16], we have led the way and put revolutionary talk into revolutionary action. We have also had more than our share of Communist and Socialist thinkers, such as those coming out of the town of Girard[17], Kansas, a town of around 2,000 people. Girard was the home of the Socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason[18] and for a time hosted Eugene Debs. Kansas also birthed Earl Browder, who for better or worst led the CPUSA through some of its most difficult times but saw membership expand to its highest levels ever.

Even if one considers “ownership” to include those properties being leased by a bank or other group, many farmers today don’t actually own the land they work, even when they live on it (most will own their house, but not the actual farmland). Many times the land that the farmer is working on will be owned by someone else, a trend that is only growing[19]. My first experience with this came from an indescribably difficult summer job I had setting up the big center pivot crop irrigation systems[20]. During one such job, the farmer introduced us the man who owned the fields we were working in, who had flown in on his private jet from Phoenix to film us building his new half-million dollar system. Speaking with the farmer, I learned that his family had been working that land for three generations, but had lost it to the bank some years before. This arrangement is not unusual, as shown by the 2022 census, around 40% of farmland is rented to those working it, in a modern form of sharecropping[21].

If the Kansas farmer is anything to go by, it exemplifies the argument made by Engels that the petty-bourgeoisie were in a transitionary state between workers and the nobility they sought to emulate, and that they would see themselves become the proletariat as fascism rose[22]. As the pattern of purchase by the rich and their corporations continues[23], more and more farmers are going to realize that they were working class all along (note: I haven’t met a one that doesn’t already proudly proclaim themselves as such).

We also shouldn’t ignore the fact that the greater bulk of rural people are not, despite the common perception, working in a profession in any way related to farming. While the communities may exist in order to facilitate the transforming of seed or stock into food, the communities themselves exist as a cross-section of people and jobs you’d find anywhere else (with some important exceptions[24]). Within these communities you will also be likely to a regular cross-section of views as those found in city dwellers, if you were willing to find out.

So What Would I Tell Them?

Someday, I hope I can stand up in my home towns newly built city hall and explain to the gathered crowd that they no longer have to pay their landlord for their farm or the house that has housed their family for generations, and that the loans they took against their coming crop yield and family farm (which was the only way to get through the year until harvest) would be forgiven. Hopefully I will explain that the value of their work is no longer bound to the inconsistent capitalist markets. I hope to tell them that this was all because the communists won their liberation, and I hope that we do enough as Communists to both prepare the way to that victory and to ensure that friendly faces stare back at me from that crowd.