Socialism Was Tried in the USA - Predictably, it Failed.
The Pilgrims Tried Socialism. By 1623, They'd almost died and had enough.
More than 200 years before Karl Marx, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony conducted an experiment in collective labor and shared production. It nearly ended with catastrophe. And the governor who abandoned the arrangement left us a remarkable firsthand account of why.
In December 1620, the Mayflower settlers arrived in a wilderness with limited provisions, inadequate shelter, and a brutal New England winter ahead. By spring, nearly half were dead.
The colony's original financial agreement with its English investors required a communal arrangement: labor and its proceeds were pooled, with provisions distributed from common stores. Everyone was expected to contribute. Everyone depended on the common supply.
But Governor William Bradford discovered a problem. Those capable of producing more resented receiving no greater share. Younger men objected to supporting other households without additional compensation. The arrangement generated dissatisfaction, weakened incentives, and discouraged productive labor.
Bradford recorded that the communal system produced: “much confusion and discontent”
He also observed that the strongest workers received no greater allotment of provisions than those physically unable to contribute as much. The colonists themselves considered this unjust.
Then came 1623.
With food supplies dangerously low and no certainty of relief from England, Bradford and the colony's leadership changed their approach. Instead of continuing communal agricultural production, they assigned individual families parcels of land to cultivate for their own benefit.
These were initially rights of use, not outright private ownership or inheritable property. Other communal arrangements remained. But the crucial economic relationship had changed. The people doing the work now had a direct stake in what they produced.
Bradford reported the result: “This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious.”
More corn was planted than the governor believed he could have obtained through the previous arrangement. Women who had resisted compulsory fieldwork now willingly participated, sometimes bringing their young children into the fields.
And Bradford drew a conclusion extending well beyond agricultural management. He challenged the ancient proposition, associated with Plato, that eliminating private property and holding things in common would necessarily produce a happier, more prosperous society. His judgment was based on what he had witnessed.
Even among deeply religious people committed to a common purpose, shared production had generated resentment rather than harmony. The lesson wasn't that cooperation was bad. It was that collective responsibility could not substitute for individual incentives.
The Pilgrims did not establish modern socialism. Their communal system arose from a seventeenth-century commercial agreement, not Marxist political theory.
But the economic problem Bradford identified remains recognizable four centuries later: What happens when individual effort and individual reward are separated? Who continues producing when the benefits of additional work disappear? And what happens to an entire community when production falls short of what everyone needs?
Plymouth's experience does not settle every debate about economics. But it does provide a documented warning about the consequences of poorly designed collective production. A community can share its harvest. It cannot share a harvest that was never grown. And no political theory can repeal that reality.
Historical source: William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, account of the 1623 division of land.
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