I’m not writing this to refute whether or not the Pilgrims were communist, and/or whether or not their communism (if they were in fact communist) forced them to starve off and die. But for those adherents of free market capitalism who like to point to the failure of Pilgrim communism, as an affirmation of their deeply held free market beliefs; I ask what about the robust livelihood that was attained by the Socialist Native Americans of that time (who lived quite capably in North America for centuries long before the Anglo Europeans invaded, indeed nearly all the indigenous peoples of the world prior to the advent of capitalism lived under something akin to socialism)?
The Native Americans were not only prosperous in their own right, but they apparently had the surplus of knowledge and resources to help their Pilgrim neighbors get through some trying and difficult times. The Native Americans may not have been socialist by Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin’s standards, but they could also not be considered capitalist in nearly any sense of the word. The indigenous people of North America, did not even believe that land could be owned (as a possession) by human beings! As I understand it, they believed that the Earth belonged to their God, the Great Spirit, and that they were only given the right to reside and carry out there lives on this planet, and make use of its land and natural resources, by their Great Spirit (who they gave thanks to very often, not just one time every calendar year). How can you have capitalism, without a belief in the right to ownership of private property? The answer is, you can’t have it, and the Native Americans did not.
Not only this but what was hunted, gathered, and/or farmed by Native American nations was not the exclusive domain of any one individual, group or family to hoard for sale for profit or even just to keep safe. The entire tribe benefited from the spoils of each individual’s labor, and they didn’t starve at the time that the Pilgrims did, nor did they starve at any other time prior to that. It was only when the Europeans interfered with their successful way of being, that these industrious people, encountered problems, and many of these great nations sadly became extinct and became a memory, mostly remembered in recorded human history. We should really remember these individuals as the socialist precursors of human civilization on the continent of North America (not to say they were not civilized, they just had a different kind of civilization). We shouldn’t remember them as ridiculous caricatures of who they were (such as savages), ignorant unrefined people, or those who needed to be removed off the land, pacified, and dominated.
