Exclusive: Jack Cashill explains William Bradford's failed Marxist experiment
How the Pilgrims saved us from socialism
11-24-12
Karl Marx had little use for America. From what he knew it was “pre-eminently the country of religiosity,” and yet it seemed to be the one nation that had been most thoroughly corrupted by ambition. Two strikes against America right there.
The “free inhabitant” of New England, Marx wrote in “On The Jewish Question,” is convinced “that he has no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbor.” When he travels, he worries “only of interest and profit.” The world for the New England Yankee is “no more than a Stock Exchange.” As to idols, he has but one, and that is, of course, mammon.
Marx wrote this in 1843, when J.P. Morgan was a first grader in Hartford, Conn., and Marcus Goldman was peddling goods from a horse-drawn cart in Philadelphia. One sees in his rant a precocious anti-Americanism that would deform the thinking of the international left for the next 165 years and find full flower, most recently, in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
What Marx almost assuredly did not know is that 200 years earlier, the very first New Englanders had taken a serious stab at the social scheme he was in the process of formulating.
Plymouth Plantation Gov. William Bradford describes here the outcome of the colony’s ambitious “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” experiment:
-go to link-The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.
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