I have an old Soviet book in my house (tl;dr book for girls, on how to generally do stuff around the house, cook, clean, grow plants etc.) which has various bits of history/trivia/tips and so forth scattered throughout. This section caught my eye:
This story occured in the USA. There was once a year with an unusually large harvest of potatoes. The poor rejoiced: we'll be full, potatoes will be cheap. But on the command of the leadership a colossal amount of potatoes was shipped into a cave and poured over with toxic blue dye [paint?].
Why was this done? This is why. The capitalists found it unfavourable [unprofitable] that the price of potatoes would go down, and to keep prices high was possible with only one method - to reduce the supply of potatoes.
Truth? Embellishment? Communist propaganda? Book was published in 1974.
Sounds like embellishment of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which was passed in 1933 as part of the first wave of New Deal programs.
The truth is that the government did in fact pay farmers to destroy excess crops in an attempt to raise prices. This wasn't because the harvest was unusually large that year, but rather because the Depression had lowered prices so far that farmers were truly in desperate need of assistance.
Which isn't to say that it was a good idea (there are real grounds to criticize the destruction of food while so many people went hungry), but it was a sincere attempt on the part of the government to help ease the crisis.
/u/Aidinthel has provided the correct answer. I would just like to add some context.
Marxist theory of the business cycle (or trade cycle) states that because capitalism is so productive the would overproduce and that would lead to a crash in prices and a recession. The marxist theory of the cycle has been completely dismissed by the waste majority of economists, and even marxist economist have changed the story a little.
Another thing to understand about the text is that communist generally don't make a distinction between the government and capitalists. For us today, we would not call the president a capitalist, we generally only use that term for business people, or more narrowly, big business leaders. In the communist way of thinking the government and big business are the same and everything done by the government automatically means it is in agreement with big business.
During the early New Deal Roosevelt, guided by false economic theory had the conviction that keeping prices high would be a good idea. Economist universally agree that, that was a terrible idea since it made the deflation worse. Economist also agree that the Agricultural Adjustment Act was a bad idea, the same goes for many of the Cartels he created. They take a more favorable of the infrastructure and social security programs. Most of all they agree of the leaving of the gold standard.
Contrary to the Communist version of the story, government and big business were not at all in agreement, neither was small business and the government. The first wave of the New Deal was in fact defeated in the supreme court by a family of jewish butchers, the case is known as 'Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States' . We also know that many of the big business leaders were strongly opposed to many of the policies and not involved with government all that much. This created uncertainty and some economist believe this helped the depression stay longer in the US compared to other countries. All of this changed during WW2 when many business leaders went into government.
So to sum all this up, the communist book creates the typical communist narrative around something that is actually true.