Pre-American Colonial Economies

[Tarun616]

Comrades,

I am not a right-winger and merely wish for the rest of you to weigh in on the following claim I read from a conservative website.

"After the Pilgrims landed in 1620, they decided that they would plant a community garden and share the fruits and vegetables equally at the end of the season. The idea was that all would work together and share equally at the end of the season. However, no one wanted to work in the gardens. Most were reluctant to do the planting and weed a garden that was not theirs. That first year, the gardens were not well kept and they had poor crops, which led to hunger the next winter. Under this system, by 1623 the colony was facing starvation. It was decided that a new system be used the following year. Each family was given a plot of land to garden in proportion to its size. They would be allowed to keep the fruits and vegetables for them selves.

Governor William Bradford's account. . .

This had very good success, for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.

The lesson here seems to be, when you own it you take care of it. If it belongs to someone else, you won't take interest in it or care for it. But if it is yours to own, you take interest in it and take care of it. The Pilgrims started out with socialism for the first two years but abandoned it in favor for capitalism after two years, which worked much better."

I'd post the link to the article but I don't have the authority just yet. It's on a site called culture-warrior dot info.

Here's what I think:
1. That isn't the best example of Socialism. I can draw parallels to "Primitive Communism" because it is agriculture related which is a different beast altogether compared to industry. For example, the allocation of land in the example above (which allegedly lead to greater returns) would be akin to splitting up the means of production in an advanced capitalist modern economy and dividing them up democratically amongst the people who actually operate them! So, in other words this would add to the argument as to why the means of production should be owned in common. (Rightwingers, please feel free to challenge this).

2. Also, in terms of why the farms didn't return a good yield, the article ignores the diseases that plagued some of the people who were supposed to farm (half of the Mayflower's passengers died during the first winter). That is, there was scurvy aboard the Mayflower and small pox on land; not farming whilst unhealthy does not equal not farming due to laziness!

3. And in terms of the bountiful harvest that resulted after the land was allocated, what if it was simply better farming practices that lead to it given that the pilgrims might not have been the best farmers to start with!

4. Finally, who's to say that the land was traded fairly with the native Americans and not taken by coercion or by means of a shrewd business deal that left them worse off without them realising it at first.

[liberlict]

The lesson here seems to be, when you own it you take care of it.

True enough to me. Ever notice how when you use a public toilet there's piss all over the seats, broken locks and graffiti on the walls? Imagine if all of society was like that.

[#FF0000]

True enough to me. Ever notice how when you use a public toilet there's piss all over the seats, broken locks and graffiti on the walls? Imagine if all of society was like that.

It depends. Public places (bathrooms, parks, et al) are gonna be better maintained if people feel like they're partly responsible for it and for their community.

Anyway, there's a lot wrong with the right-wing account of this -- mainly that it didn't resembles "socialism" at all. The pilgrims who worked the land were basically sharecroppers and the arrangement was a temporary measure, with the idea being that they'd produce more in a short amount of time this way, in order to turn a quicker profit for their financial backers. The problem with the arrangement wasn't that it was inherently unstable -- it was that the settlers that farmed the land came from different parts of their home country. They spoke very different dialects and had different ways of agriculture altogether. So of course there was confusion.

There was never any famine, though. Whereas everything else is half-truth, that is an outright lie -- the first "thanksgiving" was in 1621.

[argeiphontes]

There aren't enough details, it's just a cute story. But this doesn't really hold true empirically in worker-owned and managed firms. These references are from Schweickart's After Capitalism:

* Katrina Berman, "A Cooperative Model for Worker Management" in "The Performance of Labour-Managed Firms." Frank Stephens, ed. St. Martin's Press, 1982. She states: "The major basis for co-operative success, and the survival of capitalistically unprofitable plants, has been superior labor productivity. ...higher physical volume of output per hour... higher quality of product and also economy of material use." (About the plywood cooperatives in the PacNW.)

* Hendrick Thomas, "The Performance of the Mondragon Cooperatives in Spain" in "Participatory and Self-Managed Firms." Jones and Svejnar, ed. 1982. Concludes: "Productivity and profitability are higher for cooperatives than for capitalist firms. It makes little difference whether the Mondragon group is compared with the largest 500 companies, or with small- or medium-scale industries; in both comparisons the Mondragon group is more productive and profitable."

[bcbm]

The Pilgrims knew about the early disasters at Jamestown, but the more adventurous among them were willing to hazard the Atlantic anyway. First, however, they sent two emissaries, John Carver and Robert Cushman, from Leyden to London to seek permission to found a plantation. This was granted, but finding investors was a problem. Eventually Carver and Cushman found an investment syndicate headed by a London ironmonger named Thomas Weston. Weston and his fifty-odd investors were taking a big risk in putting up the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in today’s money. The big losses in Jamestown had scared off most “venture capital” in London.

Those waiting for news in Leyden were concerned that their agents in London would, in their eagerness to find investors, agree to unfavorable terms. Carver and Cushman were admonished “not to exceed the bounds of your commission.” They were particularly enjoined not to “entangle yourselves and us in any such unreasonable [conditions as that] the merchants should have the half of men’s houses and lands at the dividend.”

Eventually, however, Carver and Cushman did accept terms stipulating that at the end of seven years everything would be divided equally between investors and colonists. Some historians claim that those who came over on the Mayflower were exploited by capitalists. In a sense, they were. But of course they came voluntarily.

The colonists hoped that the houses they built would be exempt from the division of wealth at the end of seven years; in addition, they sought two days a week in which to work on their own “particular” plots (much as collective farmers later had their own private plots in the Soviet Union). The Pilgrims would thereby avoid servitude. But the investors refused to allow these loopholes, undoubtedly worried that if the Pilgrims—three thousand miles away and beyond the reach of supervision—owned their own houses and plots, the investors would find it difficult to collect their due. How could they be sure that the faraway colonists would spend their days working for the company if they were allowed to become private owners? With such an arrangement, rational colonists would work little on “company time,” reserving their best efforts for their own gardens and houses. Such private wealth would be exempt when the shareholders were paid off. Only by insisting that all accumulated wealth was to be “common wealth,” or placed in a common pool, could the investors feel reassured that the colonists would be working to benefit everyone, including themselves.

. . .

Common ownership would also “foster communion” among the Pilgrims, he thought (wrongly). Having held discussions with the investors, who seem to have been unyielding, Cushman wanted to close the deal. So he tried to persuade his brethren not to worry about the property arrangements. Those still in Leyden remained unconvinced and unreconciled to the terms, but there was little they could do. Many had already sold their property in Holland and so had no bargaining power.

It is worth emphasizing all this because it is sometimes said that the Pilgrims in Massachusetts established a colony with common property in emulation of the early Christians. Not so. It is true that their agent Cushman used arguments that were calculated to appeal to Christians—in particular warning them against the perils of prosperity—in order to justify his acceptance of unpopular terms. No doubt he felt that a bad deal was better than none. But the investors themselves unquestionably had profit in mind when they insisted on common property. The Pilgrims went along because they had little choice.



http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/6580

[Jimmie Higgins]

Yeah this is an ahistorical example and not an argument against communism as much as maybe an argument against colonizing somewhere when you don't know how to survive there.

Considering that the speculative profit-driven colonization of Jamestown repeatedly failed and led to:


″...driven through insufferable hunger to eat those things which nature most abhorred, the flesh and excrements of man as well of our own nation as of an Indian, digged by some out of his grave after he had laid buried there days and wholly devoured him; others, envying the better state of body of any whom hunger has not yet so much wasted as their own, lay wait and threatened to kill and eat them; one among them slew his wife as she slept in his bosom, cut her in pieces, salted her and fed upon her till he had clean devoured all parts saving her head...″

...I don't think it's in the interests of pro-capitalists to try and make these a-historical analogies into generalizations about "communism" or capitalism.

In fact it makes even less sense when you consider that native people who lived in vastly more egalitarian ways with near common ownership (they weren't communist/primitive communist either, they just didn't have stark class differences compared to Europe of that time and definitely compared to capitalist countries today) did pretty well until disease and displacement from the colonial forces. In fact, the starving profiteers often abandoned Jamestown settlements to join them.

[Five Year Plan]

Funny that anybody would try to bring up the early colonial settlement of North America as an argument in favor of capitalist private property, considering that the household economies of the North, as well as the slave economies of the South were decidedly not forms of capitalist production. I suppose some people are so desperate to slander socialism, that they would sooner side with slaveholders. I guess they know which side of the class line they stand, even if so many revolutionary socialists don't have the same perspicacity.

If the argument is that these examples prove the flawed nature of trying to socialize the means of production required to produce people's necessities, it's an ahistorical example, because the whole point revolutionary socialists would make is that the advances in technology over the past 300 years have made possible an economic commons precisely because people no longer need to operate as efficiently as possible to make social ends meet.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

*facepalm*

Yo, this is just a (slightly) reworded "Tragedy of the Commons".
I call bullshit on this as historical fact.

[Red Commissar]

This is an apocryphal account that is passed around, I think it gained steam after Rush Limbaugh mentioned it back in the 2008 election cycle too.

The initial struggles of the Pilgrim colony wasn't so much due to their more agrarian-communal lifestyle (which was common among religious groups then) but rather crop issues owing to the fact that they kept trying to cultivate crops they were comfortable with from the UK rather than those better suited to the new terrain they were living in. Apparently the initial manifests for the Pilgrims' colony also didn't list agricultural-oriented laborers so that probably didn't help either, as such they were woefully unprepared to be able to adapt to the new land. This includes the weather, which was much more brutal than winters back in England.

The other issue here is that the Pilgrims really didn't "own" their colony collectively. They had a writ granted from the crown which held the proceeds of the colony as a joint-stock company of sorts that got a share of the produce. So they were working not so much for their community but also committing to the crown. In fact, early on many Pilgrims did buy shares from the company to "own" their land individually for themselves to free themselves of this obligation, but this didn't improve their standing at all as the article seems to assert at the end.

What turned the tables on the pilgrims' colony wasn't really how they were organized economically, but that overtime they learned the hard way what crops and trades (such as logging and fur trapping) were actually viable in their part of New England, and in time establishing trade off the good growth from tobacco and cotton operations further south. Once that was established more immigration from the isles started coming into the colonies, and that's what helped to overcome the mortality rates early on and cement trade ties with the UK and the rest of Europe.

What matters at the end of the day really is it really doesn't matter if you owned your land individually or if it was a communal plot, if the land wasn't producing anything to begin with and you didn't know how to cultivate anything else, failure is expected.