Care to weigh in on this, as FR’s resident historian?
It’s true that both the Jamestown colony and the Plymouth colony was socialist when they first arrived, which is to say they used communal food bins and commons. But the number of people working shrank, while the number of people taking from the common food storage rose. So John Smith in VA and Bradford’s predecessor in MA both parceled out the land and turned the systems capitalist, and within a few months they had surpluses.