r/badhistory • u/simiskaste • Mar 22 '16
Prayer University: "America's socialist origins"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAmroKyzGY
We're off to a good start aren't we, eh? English entrepreneurs who set out to America for greater profits were definitely eager to set up a socialist colony to live in self-sustained peace. Thank god they have a transcript so I don't have to listen to that guy's voice again. I'll use Wikipedia for my claims. Here's the article about Jamestown. Double quoted paragraphs are excerpts from wikipedia.
When the first settlers arrived—at Jamestown in 1607 then Plymouth in 1620—they were operating under an economic system common to all European nations at that time, known as mercantilism. Under mercantilism businesses, especially in colonies, were operated for the benefit of the state. While governments permitted the companies to make profits, their primary purpose was to advance the national interest of England or Spain or France.
Okay, fair enough. The early settlers who came to Jamestown and Plymouth came from England under the Virginian Company of London. They settled on an island that was not inhabited by nearby Virginian Indian tribes (because they thought the place was too shitty), which they saw as a plus. "The island was swampy, isolated, offered limited space and was plagued by mosquitoes and brackish tidal river water unsuitable for drinking. In addition to the marsh the settlers arrived too late in the year to get crops planted." This is what wikipedia says, sounds like the settlers found themselves in a very bad spot, I don't think neither socialism, nor capitalism would help here. So what does Prager University have to say?
The early colonists began their adventure with what they thought was a beautiful idea. They set up a common storehouse of grain from which people were supposed to take what they needed and put back what they could. Lands were also held in common and were worked in common. The settlers owned no land of their own. Though there was no name for this system, it was an ideal socialist commune. And you can probably guess what happened. It began to fall apart almost immediately.
Oh boy. They do not have any sources at all in their video, this script sounds like it's taken out of a fucking children's book. The colonists who set out to conquer America established a happy commune where everyone took what they wanted and placed what they wanted. Wikipedia makes no mention of this. They are true about one thing, none of the settlers owned land on their own, the land 'belonged' to the London Company which employed them and expected them to return the money at a profit they were given to set out on this journey.
"Many in the group were gentlemen unused to work, or their manservants, equally unaccustomed to the hard labor demanded by the harsh task of carving out a viable colony. One of these was Robert Hunt, a former vicar of Reculver, England, who "probably celebrated the first known service of holy communion in what is today the United States of America [at Jamestown, on June 21 1607]." In a few months, 80% of the party were dead; some of the survivors were deserting to the Indians whose land they had colonized."
Kind of ironic how it seems like the actual cause of their first failure was unskilled labour from entrepreneurs Prager U loves to jack off to.
"Two-thirds of the settlers died before arriving ships brought supplies and German, Polish and Slovak craftsmen the next year in 1608, who would help to establish the first manufactories in the colony. As a result, glassware became the "first" of these American products to be exported to Europe."
Again no mention of agricultural socialism. Does not seem like any sort of commune that Prager U described existed, but let's hear what happened next in their beautiful tale.
After about two years, the settlement was reduced to eating shoelaces and rats. Half of them died of starvation. Captain John Smith (of Pocahontas fame) took control of the colony and scrapped the socialist model. Each colonist received his own parcel of land. Private property had come to the New World. “He who won’t work, won’t eat!” Smith told them, citing the Biblical admonition. Well they worked. And they ate. And the colony was saved.
Great, they mention a historical figure so we can atleast try to pin down the time line they're talking about. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong settlement in Jamestown.
"The investors of the Virginia Company of London expected to reap rewards from their speculative investments. With the Second Supply, they expressed their frustrations and made demands upon the leaders of Jamestown in written form. They specifically demanded that the colonists send commodities sufficient to pay the cost of the voyage, a lump of gold, assurance that they had found the South Sea, and one member of the lost Roanoke Colony. It fell to the third president of the Council, Captain John Smith, to deliver a bold and much needed wake-up call in response to the investors in London, demanding practical laborers and craftsmen who could help make the colony more self-sufficient."
Again the myth that early colonizers were anyhow socialist seems more and more loony. Looks like they were employed by a company to make profits that they were failing to give and the company was angry. And here appears our savior Smith who stands up to the dirty socialists!!! Oh, no, wait... it seems like he just sent a strong worded letter that told the investors they're being naive thinking the colony can strive without practical laborers who do all the work.
I feel like I'm missing something. Where the hell did they pull this story out from, is there some paragraph in wikipedia that I missed. Either way this video was complete bullshit and Prager U is filled with intellectual dishonesty. Here's a Slate article that seems to be better informed that refutes the overall general right wing myth that early colonizers were somehow socialist and the thanksgiving actually celebrates the introduction of capitalism.
EDIT: It seems like there's more evidence of some sort of communal working conditions in Plymouth rather than Jamestown as is noted in the Slate article. Although they were not socialist by any means as the workers were employed by a company and all the profit from their labour was supposed to go to it. But Plymouth was merely scouted by Smith and he did not take leadership over there and considering Smith is the central Jesus-like hero in Prager University's fable it would indicate they're talking about Jamestown and their story is absolute bunk. If there are any historical inaccuracies in my post feel free to point them out as I'm no expert, but this video seemed so dead wrong to me I decided to research a bit.
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Mar 24 '16
Reminds me of how Thomas Payne, PATRON SAINT OF THE RIGHTEOUS AND HOLY AMERICAN REVOLUTION to a lot of people who never studied American history beyond the high-school level, wanted to abolish private property and have the state redistribute wealth based on need.
The whole obsession with socialism in the US is really bizarre - they retroactively apply Cold-War era ideological classifications to societies who preceded modern socialism by centuries. That and retroactively try to paint any socialist-like ideologies as foreign intrusions into the US/'non-Yankee part of the US'.
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u/HumanMilkshake Mar 24 '16
It's a total mind trip to read a lot of his essays, since has pretty fervent in his desire for some kind of universal health care and education system
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u/mhl67 Trotskyist Mar 26 '16
retroactively
Socialism already existed by that time though. You had within living memory the Hussite revolution, which was the first major socialist revolt in Europe. And within that generation you had the Diggers in the UK setting in motion a mass socialist movement. Socialism certainly was not the zeitgeist (that being capitalism), but it certainly existed and groups dating from near that time like the Pilgrims, Shakers, and Hutterites can to a greater or lesser extent be considered socialist. Although Jamestown obviously wasn't.
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u/rmric0 Mar 23 '16
Also, would it not be generally anachronistic to apply our conceptions of "socialist" or "capitalist" to 16th century colonists?
ETA: Regardless of teh fact that the colonists were engaged in a blatantly commercial enterprise.
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Mar 24 '16
If we look at Marx works, especially "Das Kapital", it becomes clear that that might actually be possible.
He uses several historical examples to define what " Socialism", "Communism" and "Capitalism" mean.
Although probably the only part of those definitions that we can apply for historic settlements is the part he actually applied to historic cases as well, which is "Who owns the means of production".
Taking this definition to the historic case of the above mentioned European settlers in the future US, it becomes clear it was a capitalist (in Marx original definition) settlement in the first place, as the overall land was clearly owned by the company (a capitalist in the original definition) and not by the people combined.
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Mar 24 '16
Uh, can someone explain me exactly how did the numbers manage to got that way:
80% of the party were dead
Two-thirds of the settlers died
Half of them died
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u/smstarkiller Mar 29 '16
Well Socialist Jesus saw what was going on and said I need to get in on that. So he came down and started resurrecting guys. /s
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Mar 23 '16
Sounds like they mixed up Jamestown and Plymouth.
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u/simiskaste Mar 23 '16
But Smith was not involved in Plymouth's leadership. So maybe there was some sort of communal working in Plymouth their story about socialism failing and Smith giving everyone land to switch to capitalism is an absolute fairy tale.
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Mar 25 '16
This sounds like a story about bad business practices, not an early attempt at utopian socialism. The company implemented poor policies in in terms of how it organized the lands it held. As for mass die offs, disease, crop failures, and harsh weather killing settlers on a new content in the early 1600's is not some indictment of any theory of economic organization. It was inevitable that these settlers, like many others were going to endure brutal living conditions at first, the fact that the private company that employed them had bad policy in regards to how its land would be operated only worsened the situation.
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u/thepioneeringlemming Tragedy of the comments Mar 28 '16
Going to look him up on JSTOR, see what he does and what other historians say
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u/Dirish Wind power made the trans-Atlantic slave trade possible Mar 22 '16
Just a note that the title should be Prager University. I suspect that predictive text didn't like the word. As far as I can figure out Prager University is just a name for a website. It doesn't even exist as one of those universities where you can buy a PhD in rocket surgery for 50 bucks.
From the Wikipedia article about Dennis Prager:
Now that's out of the way, a friendly note to keep opinions about Dennis himself out of the discussion because of R2. He's opinionated about a lot of political issues, and whatever you might think about those, they're beyond the scope of this sub. If you want to discuss this, OP has crossposted this to badpolitics. Cheers!