The first people to set up a society on the basis of community of goods in America, indeed in the whole world, were the so-called Shakers.
Karl Marx
What the member of the rump remnant at Eschaton said, minus what was said about me, was " the American Christian religion and the corrupt capitalist patriarchy it was constructed to serve would lead to amoral depravity."
Considering how much atheists and "secularists" love to claim that the Founding Fathers who set up the Constitution were anything but Christians - something I actually wouldn't necessarily disagree with, if by Christian you mean fidelity to the Gospel, the Epistles of Paul, the Acts of the Apostles - it's rather funny that they, when convenient, pretend they didn't say that.
Considering that Karl Marx said the Shakers were pretty much the first actual socialistic society, something which the old time Shakers would probably have agreed with, a Christian community which was based on the testimonies and prophesy of Ann Lee, which, from the very beginning had women leaders as well as male leaders, the comment is particularly stupid.
I am not sure where "Gummo" could have gotten such an ahistorical and stupid idea, though I suspect its genesis is probably from some European like Max Weber or some American idiot who read what he said and didn't bother to fact check, or the same third or fourth hand. This paper about the history of Christian Socialism in America by John Spargo notes that when European socialists reported back home on the phenomenon of Christian socialism here, European socialists were amazed because it was at variance with their theories and experience of European socialism.
I have noted before that the most successful socialist in the history of North America was the Baptist minister Tommy Douglas and that probably what might count as an even earlier experiment with something like socialism in the Western Hemisphere, and the longest lasting, to date might be the Jesuit Reduction in Paraguay.
Maybe I'll go into this more sometime but it's my experience that English speaking college educated snobs are influenced by old fashioned, polemical sources like Weber and those who built on their distortions without ever bothering to look at the primary material. Spargo's paper notes that in Europe the rise of "modern socialism" is a by-product of Darwinism, something which even a casual reading of Darwin and especially writings by Ernst Haeckel, especially his book, Freie wissenschaft und freie lehre that Darwin endorsed, fully, would have noted what is obvious, that natural selection is entirely at odds with not only democracy but, especially any democratic socialism. Any socialism that is built on Darwinism is an inevitable destruction of genuine socialism and is bound to turn into a horrific nightmare, as happened to the perhaps fatal damaging of the word "socialism".
In his entirely putrid book, The Chance of Death And Other Essays In Evolution, Karl Pearson, mentioned in my morning post, he goes into how, despite what Haeckel said about that in the book which Charles Darwin endorsed, wholeheartedly, in his anti-democratic, top-down controlled, you might even say proto-Leninist-Stalinist view of socialism, the control necessary to impose what he believed would be a restored replacement for "natural inequality" was possible [See: Volume 1: Socialism and Natural Selection] whereas it would be impossible under democracy. Pearson's was the socialism of the atheist, hostile to religion, certainly hostile to Christianity, Fabianism, which while nominally feminist was feminist only on behalf of those they deemed the best and the brightest. A socialism in which, as Marilyn Robinson has pointed out, the Fabians "those most sedulous of strainers of mercy" in their tracts and sociological study always couched the most stingy of "relief," reducing the poor to the most deprived and desperate margin of bare, perhaps less, subsistence into the greater goal,ensuring their social utility, their exploitation by industry and other profit making ventures. I've read Karl Pearson's scientific, Darwinist version of that and he explicitly calls for measures that ensure that lots of them would die in childbirth, both mothers and children on the basis of aiding that culling, what he calls "socialism".
As I said, I could go on but I've got chores to get to this morning and this is just what I can give you off the top of my head.
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