But it would have been astonishing if a small farmers' movement had advocated the destruction of small farmers. Agrarian movements in the world generally did not demand that farms be collectivized and that farmers be turned into wage workers on collective farms. The demand to collectivize mainly came from the state in a socialist country that needed agricultural surplus to industrialize.
Where social democracy succeeded, as in Sweden, success generally came from workers' and farmers' alliance: "With the advent of universal suffrage, the social democratic parties were able to increase their parliamentary representation substantially, and in some cases had formed short-lived minority governments before 1930. But the real breakthrough came in the 1930s, when all five Scandinavian social democratic parties were able to negotiate compromise agreements with agrarian parties, and thus secure the parliamentary support necessary to allow them to form majority governments, and introduce welfare reforms and some degree of counter-cyclical economic policy" (The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Scandinavian Culture, <http://www.routledge-ny.com/enc/scandinavian/social.html>).
Populist farmers in the USA did organize cooperatives and offered solidarity to wage workers, so social democratic potential existed. In the Omaha Platform (at <http://www.historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5361/>), they
5. RESOLVED, That we cordially sympathize with the efforts of organized workingmen to shorten the hours of labor, and demand a rigid enforcement of the existing eight-hour law on Government work, and ask that a penalty clause be added to the said law.
6. RESOLVED, That we regard the maintenance of a large standing army of mercenaries, known as the Pinkerton system, as a menace to our liberties, and we demand its abolition. . . .
10. RESOLVED, That this convention sympathizes with the Knights of Labor and their righteous contest with the tyrannical combine of clothing manufacturers of Rochester, and declare it to be a duty of all who hate tyranny and oppression to refuse to purchase the goods made by the said manufacturers, or to patronize any merchants who sell such goods.
The real problem for that social democratic potential was this:
The platform included opposition to immigration: "4. RESOLVED, That we condemn the fallacy of protecting American labor under the present system, which opens our ports to the pauper and criminal classes of the world and crowds out our wage-earners; and we denounce the present ineffective laws against contract labor, and demand the further restriction of undesirable emigration."
That was not a sentiment peculiar to small farmers, as it was widely shared by wage workers, but in a nation of immigrants whose industrial workers would tend to be immigrants, it constituted a problem that neither farmers nor workers handled well till very recently. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>