The Pilgrims Tried Communism. It Didn’t Work Out.

0:01 You know, we call this channel Dad Saves America, and it's because I I think that fundamentally America has a lot of good things going for it, especially in its founding principles. But one of the most interesting things about American history is that the quintessential American holiday, Thanksgiving, is actually a celebration of early Americans triumphs over socialism. Let me quickly recap the origins of Thanksgiving from an article Jerry Bower wrote over a decade ago because it sums it up perfectly. It's wrong to say that America was founded by capitalists. In fact, America was founded by socialists who had the humility to learn from their initial mistakes and embrace freedom.

0:41 One of the earliest and arguably most historically significant North American colonies was Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620 in what is now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. The original colony had written into its charter a system of communal property and labor. Early communism, as William Bradford recorded in his of Plymouth Plantation, a people who had formerly been known for their virtue and hard work became lazy and unproductive. Resources were squandered, vegetables were allowed to rot on the ground, and mass starvation was the result. And where there is starvation, there is plague. After 2 and a half years, the leaders of the colony decided to abandon their socialist mandate and create a system which honored private property. The colony survived and thrived. And the abundance which resulted was what was celebrated at that iconic Thanksgiving feast. No, Thanksgiving wasn't principally about making peace with the natives. It was about celebrating a bumper crop after the basics of human nature and material reality were once again embraced. The free enterprise system, private property, and treating adults like adults. The reason I'm bringing this up is in some ways kind of obvious. We have an epidemic of Marxist sympathies going on in this country. In fact, if you look at recent polling, Gen Z say they have a favorable view of Marxism. Back in 2019, I actually co-wrote and produced a rap video called Mises versus Marks, the March of History of the World. Assemble.

2:22 It's time for the ruling classes to [music] treble. I'm the people's hero, the MVP, Mr. X. Yeah, you know me. During that time, I actually spent a lot of time reading not just Mises, who had already read quite a bit, the free market economist, but the writings of Karl Marx, both the Communist Manifesto and his more academic work, Dos Capital. While I wouldn't put myself forward as a in-depth scholar of Marx, I certainly understand his ideas, I think, more than the average protester if you ask them on the streets of Portland. There was a recent interview that Jordan Peterson did with an author named Paul Kangor and his book is called The Devil and Karl Marx. Kangor brings the receipts from this book in an incredible way and I want to share it with you now and then talk a little bit more productively about why Carl's ideas themselves aren't even good in theory.

3:15 >> And the one word, well, two words that jump out of the Communist Manifesto, all of Markx and Engel's writings to criticism. And Markx wrote to Arnold Rouge in 1843 called for the ruthless criticism of everything that exists. Right. Right. >> And the other word that they that they use all the time is abolition abolish. They want to abolish everything. >> I think this is what makes this moment right now so tenuous, so scary. When you see brokenness in the world, it is very tempting to want to burn it all to the ground. You see this impulse on the left and on the right. You see it in every human heart. A desire to reboot the computer-, which would be maybe the best way you could think of it. Oh, if we just reboot, it can all it can grow again. This burn it all to the ground abolitionism that embodies Marx and that was clearly embedded in his psychology in deep and fundamental ways is a siren call. And it's one that we have to work really hard to keep our kids from being sucked into because it is a vortex of despair because his fundamental premise even theoretically is that the most important thing we should abolish is ownership, private property. You could define communism as the abolition of private property. That that is actually what communism fundamentally is. And if you go out into the streets and talk to people who are calling themselves Marxist, you will arrive at the abolition of private property.

4:49 >> Whether you call it the abolition of private property or you call it, you know, just a statewide housing guarantee, it is preferable to what is going on right now. >> Then it gets a little more complicated sounding like workers should own the means of production. >> There are also other issues that we firmly believe in. The the end goal of of ceizing the means of production >> right there. You're like, well, what do you mean they own it? Because if you're abolishing private property, how does anyone own anything? And very quickly, what you realize when you spend time with Markx as I have is that the incoherencies just mount on top of each other. At the center of his thinking that survives even in those who haven't read him directly, is two basic concepts. Private property should be abolished and thus everything should be owned by everyone. and that the world is best understood as a class struggle between oppressors, victimizers, and the exploited, the oppressed, the bourgeoisi and the proletariat, the capitalist and the worker. This has been transposed in modern times to race and gender and social order and the basic victimizer dynamic is sort of at play everywhere.

5:57 anti-racism is just another manifestation of this fundamentally Marxist construction of human relations. Those are the two mechanisms. Now, I want to break those apart for you so you can understand philosophically and and operationally why these don't actually work, why they aren't true even in theory. So, let's start with private property. First problem is if I don't own it, I'm not going to take care of it. This is why people don't wash rental cars. [laughter] Economists actually have a term for this. It's called the tragedy of the commons. And we've all seen this to be true. You walk down the street and it's a mess. Why is it a mess? Because somebody just threw trash on the ground. Why did they do that instead of putting it in the trash can that's at the end of the street? First of all, it is kind of a moral failing.

6:44 Like you're just being a jerk. But fundamentally, they don't own the street. It's owned by all of us. So, it's somebody else's problem to clean the streets. Aren't I paying taxes? This is the tragedy of the commons. When there is a shared resource, people will tend to exploit it in a way that's unsustainable. In the absence of the incentives to care about the future that come with ownership, you don't take care of yourself or your things or the future. You leave it to someone else.

7:15 You free ride. Now, what about this power dynamic? What about this relationship problem? The more nuanced Marxists and socialists, people like Richard Wolf and others will claim that what they're really advocating for fundamentally is a kind of commune, workerowned firms. What's wrong with that? Who doesn't want workers to own the firm? Well, you can create a worker-owned firm in a free enterprise system. There's nothing in America that prevents you from starting a cooperative. But here's where it really becomes essential to understand the difference and what at the academic level the Marxists are advocating for.

7:55 Let's say you're going to start a uh a lawn care business and you need to buy some equipment. You've got your 10 guys. You're going to go out there and mow lawns and build a a great enterprise taking care of people's property. So, you go to your grandmother and say, "I want you to invest in our firm. We're going to be doing the work. We think it can be worth X. you give us $100,000 out of your retirement account to help us make this happen. Does your grandmother give you the $100,000 if she gets nothing in return? Because that's what communism says should happen. You shouldn't be able to invest in someone else's enterprise and get a return because that would be exploitation because the workers are doing the work.

8:37 I guess capital is just there to be grabbed from and and put to use. It's already there. That's the thing that's so weird about communism and Marxism. There is a kind of assumption that there's this capital that's just waiting to be taken. Does my grandmother's savings is that money that's in the wrong hands that I should just take and say, "Buzz off, grandma. You're going to die soon anyway." No. She deserves a return. And why should she get a return?

9:06 Okay. $100,000 of her savings from her life's work. She could spend that money now. and enjoy it for herself. By investing it in you, she's foregoing that joy and that consumption. She has to be compensated for that, shouldn't she? You're having to wait. So, one of the components of a return on investment is a return on time. I am investing in this firm so that in the future, I won't just get the money back, I need to get more because I waited. But that's not all. The other thing is I'm putting my money at risk. So there's a good chance you're going to go out of business, son.

9:44 Most businesses fail. So if you're going to put your life savings at risk in an investment, you need to get compensated for the risk. So that's the other piece of the profit that has to be accounted for. I'm putting my money at risk. It's not exploitation of surplus value. It's a return on risks that have been taken. And what communism and Marx want to do is say, "No, that's immoral. you can't do it. And the relationship between the capitalist and the worker is a lot more complex than delusional old Karl Marx thinks. It isn't just, "Hey, Engles, cut me another check. Sorry about your dead girlfriend." Profit is not necessarily exploitation at all. It is a return on a very vital service, which is investing and taking risks. When you try to abolish property and investment in others, you end up with murder factories. There's a saying from the Soviet Union, the Soviets pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. And that's what happens even in the face of brutal murder. That's what happens. The Soviet Union, Mauis, China, Cambodia, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, all of these regimes were as close to marks as we could get. They tried to abolish God, burned down churches, imprisoned nuns and priests. They were being pretty Marxist. And I know from firsthand experience that the first thing that happens when you talk about Marxism and communism is all the Marxists come out of the woodwork to say that's not the real Marx. Real communism's never been tried. Call it whatever you like, but on the spectrum between some perfect free enterprise society and perfect communist hell hole, we got as close as you want to get in the 20th century to the latter. And the results speak for themselves. So, what's the lesson in all this? Well, first of all, I hope I've given you some ways of talking about this ideology with your kids because they are going to encounter it. Markx is a kind of demonic mystical religion and for those enraptured by darkness it has an appeal. It is an appeal to the worst angels of our nature. That is who Marx was. It's how he lived his life and it is what he baked into the cake of his philosophy. And our kids need to understand this. And the only place they're going to get it is with us. It's up to us. So, I hope this helps you as you help your kids navigate these ideas so that when you do send them off to college and they get some sociology professor that's talking about a Marxist lens on history, they will know to roll their eyes and realize this person's kind of lost and needs to get with the program on the facts.

12:39 If you like this clip, you should check out the full video and all the other great content we've got at Dad Saves America. So, be sure to hit the like button, subscribe, and ring that bell so you won't miss our new stuff as it drops each week.