#class question

By some reasoning, small farmers could be viewed as proletarians who just happened to have some capital – as the primary labourers on their farms (along with their family members), they were essentially selling their labour to the buyers of their crops. Yet many of these farmers employed wage labourers, leading some on the left to an analysis of farmers as a petite bourgeoisie. 

The Communist Party of Canada had an ambiguous answer to the question, attempting to varying degrees to organize both small farmers and agricultural wage labourers, sometimes in alliances. Certainly, the Party made a much greater effort with farmers, through the Farmers’ Unity League (FUL), which operated primarily in western Canada. Their efforts with farm labour came in the form of a two-year foray into the world of sugar beet workers, where the Workers’ Unity League (WUL) helped found the Beet Workers’ Industrial Union, which led strikes in Alberta and (of a lesser magnitude) in Ontario in 1935 and 1936. 

The Communists turned out to have the wrong answer to the class question in both efforts. With the FUL, part of the reason for its failure to compete with the CCF and Social Credit for members was farmers’ discomfort with the Communists’ language of class warfare – presumably, some of the farmers very keenly felt their “in-between” status as both primary producers and employers. In the WUL’s efforts with Alberta beet workers, the class question turned much more dramatically against the Party. The Beet Workers’ Industrial Union attempted to bring small farmers into an alliance with workers, arguing that Rogers Sugar was exploiting both farmers and workers. While the beet workers won some initial gains in their strikes, they were eventually defeated resoundingly by the sugar company, with the assistance of the growers. 

...an alliance with workers was a seriously risky proposition for small growers, while aligning more closely with Rogers Sugar was a safer bet, and this latter route was the one they eventually chose. As Thompson and Seager nicely sum it up: “Ironically, the agitation by the beet workers, designed ostensibly to unite grower and worker, drew the company and the growers closer together.”  The WUL also organized beet workers in Ontario and attempted to ally with small growers, but the effort was smaller, and there was no such dramatic choosing of sides as there was in Alberta. In fact, the workers’ strikes did appear to attract limited support from some growers.

In Ontario tobacco, as in the province’s sugar beet fields, the agrarian class question was not nearly as explosive as it was in the West. In fact, there was less of a class question, and more of a class objective: tobacco workers fighting for better conditions consistently preached a message of collaboration between workers and small growers, and made frequent attempts to unite the two groups in their struggles against the tobacco companies and large plantations. Unlike in the sugar beet campaigns, the efforts in tobacco were not marked by the involvement of the WUL or the FUL, nor were they much shaped by strategic directives from the Communist Party. 

The shift from the sectarianism of the Third Period to the collaborative anti-fascism of the Popular Front in 1935 did not alter the character of Tobacco Belt organizing in any profound way. Communist organizers in Canadian agriculture had sought to construct grower-worker alliances before the advent of the Popular Front, and the Norfolk region’s Hungarian Communists welcomed non-Communists to their events even during the Third Period. Instead of being driven by the Party line, efforts at worker-grower cooperation in the Tobacco Belt were primarily motivated by grassroots political analysis, on the part of activists both Communist and not.

Despite their efforts, tobacco workers were unsuccessful in forming a strong, united producers’ bloc. Small tobacco growers displayed a tepid interest in allying with workers, but the latter put a far greater effort into building the relationship than the former, with the result that workers were much more involved in struggles that primarily benefited small growers than the growers were in inverse situations. So while the story of grower-worker relations was not as dramatic as in Alberta sugar beets (and indeed neither were the instances of worker protest), the end result was essentially the same: growers did not risk their necks to support the struggles of workers. When push came to shove, they protected their own interests, choosing not to broaden the struggle and risk losing the position they did have.”