Page:Oscar Ameringer - Socialism for the Farmer (1912).djvu/8



This booklet is written for the farmer who, farms the farm. That is, the actual tiller of the soil. The man who works eight hours in the morning and eight in the afternoon that mankind may be fed and clothed. The Socialist movement is not concerned with the farmer who farms the farmer. There are lawyers, doctors, bankers and merchants who own farms. Then there are the retired farmers who moved to town to die and then forgot why they moved to town. All these people are no farmers but exploiters of labor. They live off the farmer who farms the farm. They are parasites as much as our idle rich, only on a smaller scale.

The author has often been asked, "After a man has worked hard all his life and saved his money and bought a farm to have something to live on in his old age, would you Socialists take it away from him?" To this question we answer: "If that farmer had received the full product of his labor during his producing years he could retire to well-earned rest, on the accumulations of his own labor. As it is, he lives on the fruit of some one else's labor." We also may ask in return, "If a man worked hard all his life on a rented farm and paid one-third or one-half of the crop to the landlord, what are you going to do with him after he becomes too old to work?"

We may add further that we don't expect the beneficiaries of the capitalist system to voluntarily relinquish their soft snap. In fact they would be very foolish in doing this, especially so since the victims of the system are still willing to support it with their votes. So we say to the farmer who farms the farmer, "personally we do not blame you for exploiting the renter any more than we blame the chicken for eating worms or the hawk for devouring the chickens. As long as the landless who even now are in the over-whelming majority are willing to pay you for the use of God's earth, you would be a fool not to take all you can. Only we want to serve notice that some day the majority will wake up and then you'll join the one time highly respected Robber Barons and the Feudal Lords."