The Third World Has Been the Favorite Arena for Applied Marxism, for Revolutions, Coups, or Domination by Marxist Intellectuals

The root of the problem is the Third World, where (a) agriculture is overwhelmingly the most important industry, and (b) the people are not affluent enough, in any crisis, to purchase food from abroad. Hence, to Third World people, agriculture is the most precious activity, and it becomes particularly important that it not be hobbled or discouraged in any way. Yet, wherever there is production, there are also parasitic classes living off the producers. The Third World in our century has been the favorite arena for applied Marxism, for revolutions, coups, or domination by Marxist intellectuals. Whenever such new ruling classes have taken over, and have imposed statist or full socialist rule, the class most looted, exploited, and oppressed has been the major productive class: the farmers or peasantry. Literally tens of millions of the most productive farmers were slaughtered by the Russian and Chinese Communist regimes, and the remainder were forced off their private lands and onto cooperative or state farms, where their productivity plummeted, and food production gravely declined.

--Murray N. Rothbard, "The Politics of Famine," in The Free Market Reader: Essays in the Economics of Liberty, ed. Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. (Burlingame, CA: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1988), 224.