Every damn Thanksgiving idiots try to parrot the same meme, that the English colonists were communists that came over here, that they pooled all their resources together, and only until the implemented free market policies did they escape destruction.
The Plymouth colony was founded by Puritan separatists. They were granted a land patent by the Plymouth company--a private company. They obtained financing through the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London, a corporation. They came to America up to their eyeballs in debt.
The agreement was simple. The Company of Merchant Adventurers would supply the colonists with what they needed to survive and establish a colony and the colonists would work to harvest resources from the land to pay back their debts and provide the company with profits. Instead of their failure being a condemnation of communism, which has already been pointed out, was not even a government concept of the time, it was a failure of the "free market". I mean which side do you believed failed to keep up their end of the agreement?
For the entire first year of Plymouth the settlers refused to sign the contract with the Merchant Adventurers, proclaiming it was one sided in favor of the corporation, sound familiar? The following year, Robert Cushman, an agent of Merchant Adventurers, sailed to Plymouth on the Fortune. He delivered no supplies, no food, and instead made empty promises that were never fulfilled, albeit getting the settlers to sign a contract and dutifully filling the Fortune with lumber and other materials they had labored to recover and produce. Due to complete incompetence, again, sound familiar, the Fortune made a navigational error during her return trip and was captured by the French, LOL.
The end of the story is clear. When the colonists told the Merchant Adventurers to pound sand, throwing off the yoke of their servitude, and instead of gathering resources for "the company", working for "the man", and watching those resources get pissed away due to incompetence, they kept them for themselves and built a new nation. That is the lesson of Plymouth, no wonder the powers that be try so hard to revise it.