Native Blood: The Myth of Thanksgiving
skep...@aol.com
Revolutionary Worker #883, November 24, 1996
Every schoolchild in the U.S. has been taught that the Pilgrims of the
Plymouth Colony invited the local Indians to a major harvest feast
after surviving their first bitter year in New England. But the real
history of Thanksgiving is a story of the murder of indigenous people
and the theft of their land by European colonialists--and of the
ruthless ways of capitalism.
* * * * *
In mid-winter 1620 the English ship Mayflower landed on the North
American coast, delivering 102 Puritan exiles. The original Native
people of this stretch of shoreline had already been killed off. In
1614 a British expedition had landed there. When they left they took
24 Indians as slaves and left smallpox behind. Three years of plague
wiped out between 90 and 96 percent of the inhabitants of the coast,
destroying most villages completely.
The Puritans landed and built their colony called "the Plymouth
Plantation" near the deserted ruins of the Indian village of Pawtuxet.
They ate from abandoned cornfields grown wild. Only one Pawtuxet named
Squanto had survived--he had spent the last years as a slave to the
English and Spanish in Europe. Squanto spoke the colonists' language
and taught them how to plant corn and how to catch fish until the
first harvest. Squanto also helped the colonists negotiate a peace
treaty with the nearby Wampanoag tribe, led by the chief Massasoit.
These were very lucky breaks for the colonists. The first Virginia
settlement had been wiped out before they could establish themselves.
Thanks to the good will of the Wampanoag, the Puritans not only
survived their first year but had an alliance with the Wampanoags that
would give them almost two decades of peace.
John Winthrop, a founder of the Massahusetts Bay colony considered
this wave of illness and death to be a divine miracle. He wrote to a
friend in England, "But for the natives in these parts, God hath so
pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are
swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God
hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in
these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our
protection."
The deadly impact of European diseases and the good will of the
Wampanoag allowed the Puritans to survive their first year.
In celebration of their good fortune, the colony's governor, William
Bradford, declared a three-day feast of thanksgiving after that first
harvest of 1621.
How the Puritans Stole the Land
But the peace that produced the Thanksgiving Feast of 1621 meant that
the Puritans would have 15 years to establish a firm foothold on the
coast. Until 1629 there were no more than 300 Puritans in New England,
scattered in small and isolated settlements. But their survival
inspired a wave of Puritan invasion that soon established growing
Massachusetts towns north of Plymouth: Boston and Salem. For 10 years,
boatloads of new settlers came.
And as the number of Europeans increased, they proved not nearly so
generous as the Wampanoags.
On arrival, the Puritans discussed "who legally owns all this land."
They had to decide this, not just because of Anglo-Saxon traditions,
but because their particular way of farming was based on individual--
not communal or tribal--ownership. This debate over land ownership
reveals that bourgeois "rule of law" does not mean "protect the rights
of the masses of people."
Some Puritans argued that the land belonged to the Indians. These
forces were excommunicated and expelled. Massachusetts Governor
Winthrop declared the Indians had not "subdued" the land, and
therefore all uncultivated lands should, according to English Common
Law, be considered "public domain." This meant they belonged to the
king. In short, the colonists decided they did not need to consult the
Indians when they seized new lands, they only had to consult the
representative of the crown (meaning the local governor).
The Puritans embraced a line from Psalms 2:8. "Ask of me, and I shall
give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts
of the earth for thy possession." Since then, European settler states
have similarly declared god their real estate agent: from the Boers
seizing South Africa to the Zionists seizing Palestine.
The European immigrants took land and enslaved Indians to help them
farm it. By 1637 there were about 2,000 British settlers. They pushed
out from the coast and decided to remove the inhabitants.
The Birth of
"The American Way of War"
In the Connecticut Valley, the powerful Pequot tribe had not entered
an alliance with the British (as had the Narragansett, the Wampanoag,
and the Massachusetts peoples). At first they were far from the
centers of colonization. Then, in 1633, the British stole the land
where the city of Hartford now sits--land which the Pequot had
recently conquered from another tribe. That same year two British
slave raiders were killed. The colonists demanded that the Indians who
killed the slavers be turned over. The Pequot refused.
The Puritan preachers said, from Romans 13:2, "Whosoever therefore
resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that
resist shall receive to themselves damnation." The colonial
governments gathered an armed force of 240 under the command of John
Mason. They were joined by a thousand Narragansett warriors. The
historian Francis Jennings writes: "Mason proposed to avoid attacking
Pequot warriors which would have overtaxed his unseasoned, unreliable
troops. Battle, as such, was not his purpose. Battle is only one of
the ways to destroy an enemy's will to fight. Massacre can accomplish
the same end with less risk, and Mason had determined that massacre
would be his objective."
The colonist army surrounded a fortified Pequot village on the Mystic
River. At sunrise, as the inhabitants slept, the Puritan soldiers set
the village on fire.
William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth, wrote: "Those that escaped the
fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run
through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and
very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at
this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the
fire...horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory
seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God,
who had wrought so wonderfully for them."
Mason himself wrote: "It may be demanded...Should not Christians have
more mercy and compassion? But...sometimes the Scripture declareth
women and children must perish with their parents.... We had
sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings."
Three hundred and fifty years later the Puritan phrase "a shining city
on the hill" became a favorite quote of Ronald Reagan's
speechwriters.
Discovering the
Profits of Slavery
This so-called "Pequot war" was a one-sided murder and slaving
expedition. Over 180 captives were taken. After consulting the bible
again, in Leviticus 24:44, the colonial authorities found
justification to kill most of the Pequot men and enslave the captured
women and their children. Only 500 Pequot remained alive and free. In
1975 the official number of Pequot living in Connecticut was 21.
Some of the war captives were given to the Narragansett and
Massachusetts allies of the British. Even before the arrival of
Europeans, Native peoples of North America had widely practiced taking
war captives from other tribes as hostages and slaves.
The remaining captives were sold to British plantation colonies in the
West Indies to be worked to death in a new form of slavery that served
the emerging capitalist world market. And with that, the merchants of
Boston made a historic discovery: the profits they made from the sale
of human beings virtually paid for the cost of seizing them.
One account says that enslaving Indians quickly became a "mania with
speculators." These early merchant capitalists of Massachusetts
started to make genocide pay for itself. The slave trade, first in
captured Indians and soon in kidnapped Africans, quickly became a
backbone of New England merchant capitalism.
Thanksgiving in the
Manhattan Colony
In 1641 the Dutch governor Kieft of Manhattan offered the first "scalp
bounty"--his government paid money for the scalp of each Indian
brought to them. A couple years later, Kieft ordered the massacre of
the Wappingers, a friendly tribe. Eighty were killed and their severed
heads were kicked like soccer balls down the streets of Manhattan. One
captive was castrated, skinned alive and forced to eat his own flesh
while the Dutch governor watched and laughed. Then Kieft hired the
notorious Underhill who had commanded in the Pequot war to carry out a
similar massacre near Stamford, Connecticut. The village was set fire,
and 500 Indian residents were put to the sword.
A day of thanksgiving was proclaimed in the churches of Manhattan. As
we will see, the European colonists declared Thanksgiving Days to
celebrate mass murder more often than they did for harvest and
friendship.
The Conquest of New England
By the 1670s there were about 30,000 to 40,000 white inhabitants in
the United New England Colonies--6,000 to 8,000 able to bear arms.
With the Pequot destroyed, the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonists
turned on the Wampanoag, the tribe that had saved them in 1620 and
probably joined them for the original Thanksgiving Day.
In 1675 a Christian Wampanoag was killed while spying for the
Puritans. The Plymouth authorities arrested and executed three
Wampanoag without consulting the tribal chief, King Philip.
As Mao Tsetung says: "Where there is oppression there is resistance."
The Wampanoag went to war.
The Indians applied some military lessons they had learned: they waged
a guerrilla war which overran isolated European settlements and were
often able to inflict casualties on the Puritan soldiers. The
colonists again attacked and massacred the main Indian populations.
When this war ended, 600 European men, one-eleventh of the adult men
of the New England Colonies, had been killed in battle. Hundreds of
homes and 13 settlements had been wiped out. But the colonists won.
In their victory, the settlers launched an all-out genocide against
the remaining Native people. The Massachusetts government offered 20
shillings bounty for every Indian scalp, and 40 shillings for every
prisoner who could be sold into slavery. Soldiers were allowed to
enslave any Indian woman or child under 14 they could capture. The
"Praying Indians" who had converted to Christianity and fought on the
side of the European troops were accused of shooting into the treetops
during battles with "hostiles." They were enslaved or killed. Other
"peaceful" Indians of Dartmouth and Dover were invited to negotiate or
seek refuge at trading posts--and were sold onto slave ships.
It is not known how many Indians were sold into slavery, but in this
campaign, 500 enslaved Indians were shipped from Plymouth alone. Of
the 12,000 Indians in the surrounding tribes, probably about half died
from battle, massacre and starvation.
After King Philip's War, there were almost no Indians left free in the
northern British colonies. A colonist wrote from Manhattan's New York
colony: "There is now but few Indians upon the island and those few no
ways hurtful. It is to be admired how strangely they have decreased by
the hand of God, since the English first settled in these parts."
In Massachusetts, the colonists declared a "day of public
thanksgiving" in 1676, saying, "there now scarce remains a name or
family of them [the Indians] but are either slain, captivated or
fled."
Fifty-five years after the original Thanksgiving Day, the Puritans had
destroyed the generous Wampanoag and all other neighboring tribes. The
Wampanoag chief King Philip was beheaded. His head was stuck on a pole
in Plymouth, where the skull still hung on display 24 years later.
The descendants of these Native peoples are found wherever the Puritan
merchant capitalists found markets for slaves: the West Indies, the
Azures, Algiers, Spain and England. The grandson of Massasoit, the
Pilgrim's original protector, was sold into slavery in Bermuda.
Runaways and Rebels
But even the destruction of Indian tribal life and the enslavement of
survivors brought no peace. Indians continued to resist in every
available way. Their oppressors lived in terror of a revolt. And they
searched for ways to end the resistance. The historian MacLeod writes:
"The first `reservations' were designed for the `wild' Irish of Ulster
in 1609. And the first Indian reservation agent in America, Gookin of
Massachusetts, like many other American immigrants had seen service in
Ireland under Cromwell."
The enslaved Indians refused to work and ran away. The Massachusetts
government tried to control runaways by marking enslaved Indians:
brands were burnt into their skin, and symbols were tattooed into
their foreheads and cheeks.
A Massachusetts law of 1695 gave colonists permission to kill Indians
at will, declaring it was "lawful for any person, whether English or
Indian, that shall find any Indians traveling or skulking in any of
the towns or roads (within specified limits), to command them under
their guard and examination, or to kill them as they may or can."
The northern colonists enacted more and more laws for controlling the
people. A law in Albany forbade any African or Indian slave from
driving a cart within the city. Curfews were set up; Africans and
Indians were forbidden to have evening get-togethers. On Block Island,
Indians were given 10 lashes for being out after nine o'clock. In 1692
Massachusetts made it a serious crime for any white person to marry an
African, an Indian or a mulatto. In 1706 they tried to stop the
importation of Indian slaves from other colonies, fearing a slave
revolt.
Celebrate?
Looking at this history raises a question: Why should anyone celebrate
the survival of the earliest Puritans with a Thanksgiving Day?
Certainly the Native peoples of those times had no reason to
celebrate.
A little known fact: Squanto, the so-called "hero" of the original
Thanksgiving Day, was executed by the Indians for his treacheries.
But the ruling powers of the United States organized people to
celebrate Thanksgiving Day because it is in their interest. That's why
they created it. The first national celebration of Thanksgiving was
called for by George Washington. And the celebration was made a
regular legal holiday later by Abraham Lincoln during the civil war
(right as he sent troops to suppress the Sioux of Minnesota).
Washington and Lincoln were two presidents deeply involved in trying
to forge a unified bourgeois nation-state out of the European settlers
in the United States. And the Thanksgiving story was a useful myth in
their efforts at U.S. nation-building. It celebrates the "bounty of
the American way of life," while covering up the brutal nature of this
society.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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jayroth6
Published Nov 24, 2008 9:19 PM
Following are excerpts from a statement written by Mahtowin Munro
(Lakota) and Moonanum James (Wampanoag), co-leaders of United American
Indians of New England. Read the entire statement at www.uaine.org.
Every year since 1970, United American Indians of New England have
organized the National Day of Mourning observance in Plymouth at noon
on Thanksgiving Day. Every year, hundreds of Native people and our
supporters from all four directions join us. Every year, including
this year, Native people from throughout the Americas will speak the
truth about our history and about current issues and struggles we are
involved in.
Why do hundreds of people stand out in the cold rather than sit home
eating turkey and watching football? Do we have something against a
harvest festival?
Of course not. But Thanksgiving in this country—and in particular in
Plymouth—is much more than a harvest home festival. It is a
celebration of pilgrim mythology.
According to this mythology, the pilgrims arrived, the Native people
fed them and welcomed them, the Indians promptly faded into the
background, and everyone lived happily ever after.
The pilgrims are glorified and mythologized because the circumstances
of the first English-speaking colony in Jamestown were frankly too
ugly (for example, they turned to cannibalism to survive) to hold up
as an effective national myth.
The pilgrims did not find an empty land any more than Columbus
“discovered” anything. Every inch of this land is Indian land. The
pilgrims (who did not even call themselves pilgrims) did not come here
seeking religious freedom; they already had that in Holland.
They came here as part of a commercial venture. They introduced
sexism, racism, anti-lesbian and -gay bigotry, jails and the class
system to these shores. One of the very first things they did when
they arrived on Cape Cod—before they even made it to Plymouth—was to
rob Wampanoag graves at Corn Hill and steal as much of the Indians’
winter provisions of corn and beans as they were able to carry.
They were no better than any other group of Europeans when it came to
their treatment of the Indigenous peoples here. And, no, they did not
even land at that sacred shrine called Plymouth Rock, a monument to
racism and oppression which we are proud to say we buried in 1995.
The first official “Day of Thanksgiving” was proclaimed in 1637 by
Governor Winthrop. He did so to celebrate the safe return of men from
the Massachusetts Bay Colony who had gone to Mystic, Conn., to
participate in the massacre of over 700 Pequot women, children and
men.
About the only true thing in the whole mythology is that these pitiful
European strangers would not have survived their first several years
in “New England” were it not for the aid of Wampanoag people. What
Native people got in return for this help was genocide, theft of our
lands and never-ending repression. We are either treated as quaint
relics from the past or are, to most people, virtually invisible.
When we dare to stand up for our rights, we are considered
unreasonable. When we speak the truth about the history of the
European invasion, we are often told to “go back where we came from.”
Our roots are right here. They do not extend across any ocean.
National Day of Mourning began in 1970 when a Wampanoag man, Wamsutta
Frank James, was asked to speak at a state dinner celebrating the
350th anniversary of the pilgrim landing. He refused to speak false
words in praise of the white man for bringing civilization to us poor
heathens. Native people from throughout the Americas came to Plymouth
where they mourned their forebears who had been sold into slavery,
burned alive, massacred, cheated and mistreated since the arrival of
the Pilgrims in 1620.
But the commemoration of National Day of Mourning goes far beyond the
circumstances of 1970.
Can we give thanks as we remember Native political prisoner Leonard
Peltier, who was framed up by the FBI and has been falsely imprisoned
since 1976? Despite mountains of evidence exonerating Peltier and the
proven misconduct of federal prosecutors and the FBI, Peltier has been
denied a new trial.
To Native people, the case of Peltier is one more ordeal in a litany
of wrongdoings committed by the U.S. government against us. While the
media in New England present images of the “Pequot miracle” in
Connecticut, the vast majority of Native people continue to live in
the most abysmal poverty.
Can we give thanks for the fact that, on many reservations,
unemployment rates surpass 50 percent? Our life expectancies are much
lower, our infant mortality and teen suicide rates much higher than
those of white Americans. Racist stereotypes of Native people, such as
those perpetuated by the Cleveland Indians, the Atlanta Braves and
countless local and national sports teams, persist. Every single one
of the more than 350 treaties that Native nations signed has been
broken by the U.S. government. The bipartisan budget cuts have
severely reduced educational opportunities for Native youth and the
development of new housing on reservations, and have caused cause
deadly cutbacks in healthcare and other necessary services.
Are we to give thanks for being treated as unwelcome in our own
country?
When the descendants of the Aztec, Maya and Inca flee to the U.S., the
descendants of the wash-ashore pilgrims term them “illegal aliens” and
hunt them down.
We object to the “Pilgrim Progress” parade and to what goes on in
Plymouth because they are making millions of tourist dollars every
year from the false pilgrim mythology. That money is being made off
the backs of our slaughtered Indigenous ancestors.
Increasing numbers of people are seeking alternatives to such holidays
as Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. They are coming to the conclusion
that if we are ever to achieve some sense of community, we must first
face the truth about the history of this country and the toll that
history has taken on the lives of millions of Indigenous, Black,
Latin@, Asian, and poor and working-class white people.
The myth of Thanksgiving, served up with dollops of European
superiority and manifest destiny, just does not work for many people
in this country. As Malcolm X once said about the African-American
experience in America, “We did not land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth
Rock landed on us.” Exactly.
***
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kaishi...@gmail.com
> Write: Box 3486, Merchandise Mart, Chicago, IL 60054
> Phone: 773-227-4066 Fax: 773-227-4497
> (The RW Online does not currently communicate via email.)
Hey, after reading this, I went to Wikipedia to see what it said on
Thanksgiving, and no matter on which page relating to Thanksgiving you
find, its all about the fake Thanksgiving that hides the truth. I
don't believe I am qualified to edit the Wiki pages accurately, but
maybe you or some other people you know should inject some truth into
those falsehoods that Wikipedia is perpetuating; just a thought...
Sydney Diego
JW
<all...@email.com> wrote:
>.
Happy Thanksgiving, Syd!
Sydney Diego
this game is everythign that's wrong with the nfl
ford pumps millions of $$ of advertising into the nfl, who will not
dare to piss him them off by taking the lions off of this calendar
JW
<all...@email.com> wrote:
>On Nov 27, 10:37 am, JW <Jo...@clearwire.net> wrote:
>> On Thu, 27 Nov 2008 09:22:08 -0800 (PST), Sydney Diego
>>
>> <all...@email.com> wrote:
>> >.
>>
>> Happy Thanksgiving, Syd!
>
>this game is everythign that's wrong with the nfl
>
>ford pumps millions of $$ of advertising into the nfl, who will not
>dare to piss him them off by taking the lions off of this calendar
It's just a great day to veg, Syd. The Lions are a minor irritant in
the whole scheme of NFL things. Soon the Boyz will be on and then you
can watch some real football.
Oh! They're playing the Seachickens! Back to the couch and some
more munchies.
JW
<all...@email.com> wrote:
>On Nov 27, 10:37 am, JW <Jo...@clearwire.net> wrote:
>> On Thu, 27 Nov 2008 09:22:08 -0800 (PST), Sydney Diego
>>
>> <all...@email.com> wrote:
>> >.
>>
>> Happy Thanksgiving, Syd!
>
>this game is everythign that's wrong with the nfl
>
>ford pumps millions of $$ of advertising into the nfl, who will not
>dare to piss him them off by taking the lions off of this calendar
And Culpepper wondered why nobody wanted to sign him at the beginning
of the season? Like one fan said, "the Lions have them right where
they want them." Watch for a comeback after the half! :)
Bill Thompson
<skep...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:fb42144f-9f68-43da...@t26g2000prh.googlegroups.com...
[article snipped]
I get it, you're a communist and anti-capitalist and anti-american. I'm ok
with that, there's all kinds of sheep out there that seem to need some kind
of faith, be it religion, science, or a system of government.
What I don't get is who you're criticizing with this article. It isn't
about people who would have categorized themselves as capitalists or
americans. The British maybe? The Puritan church? (does that still exist?)
Smallpox bacteria?
skep...@aol.com
>
> > This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker
> > Onlinehttp://www.mcs.net/~rwor
> > Write: Box 3486, Merchandise Mart, Chicago, IL 60054
> > Phone: 773-227-4066 Fax: 773-227-4497
> > (The RW Online does not currently communicate via email.)
>
> Hey, after reading this, I went to Wikipedia to see what it said on
> Thanksgiving, and no matter on which page relating to Thanksgiving you
> find, its all about the fake Thanksgiving that hides the truth. I
> don't believe I am qualified to edit the Wiki pages accurately, but
> maybe you or some other people you know should inject some truth into
> those falsehoods that Wikipedia is perpetuating; just a thought...
What a great idea Kashinin, thanks for the idea!
skep...@aol.com
> <skepti...@aol.com> wrote in message
The British started the genocide, but the scumy US created even larger
scale genocide and is today starving, mistreating abusing and even
murdering Native Americans right as we speak. This year the scumy
Canadian government just gave Natives $10 billion dollars for genocide
against the Native North American kids incarcareted in their pirson
schools (last school closed in 1996) there the Native children were
systematically raped (everyone of them) and beaten and tortured to the
point where 50% of the Native kids didn't survive school. 50%! The
Catholic and Protestant priests who ran the torture schools, would
line up young Indian boys like a slave auction and bugger them tied to
a foot of a bed for hours, --some of the little boys died. The
Canadian govt. would deliberately put sick Native children in to rooms
with healthy Native kids (with disease like small pox) to try to kill
the healthy kids (no medical treatment of course) denistry without
anesthics to traumtize the small kids. All this was going on from
1880s, up through the 1980s and into the 1990s. The suffering of
Native peoples today, from drug and alcohol abuse from surviving the
schools and parents who had no ability to relate to kids because of
the suffering from the torture prison schools, goes on today, in
Vancouver alone about 4 or 5 Native men die a week, from police
beatings and shootings. It is a holocaust.
Bill Thompson
news:d21b4751-d42b-4c73...@w24g2000prd.googlegroups.com...
------------------------
Newsreader didn't quote your message... maybe it didn't consider
it quote-worthy.
I'm writing this for your own good.
You seem to be laboring under the misaprehension that there is something
intrinsically wrong with Americans. What you are describing is the way
humans have treated each other for all time. Europeans slaughtered other
Europeans just as indiscriminately as they slaughtered other people. And
guess what? Africans slaughter Africans, Asians slaughter Asians, and
Arabs slaughter Arabs.
What it comes down to, is that humans are tribalistic, and everyone in
the tribe are human, and everyone outside the tribe are not, and thus
eligible for death (you can actually witness an ongoing microcosm of
this behavior in fan sites, such as, say, alt.sports.football.pro.sf-49ers).
Ironically, rarely is any one tribe truly any better than any other tribe.
Furthermore, each tribe is run by an aristorcracy so that, on the whole,
members of the tribe live very poor lives compared to the tribal leaders.
In short, you're a tool. A lackey. And naive.
Oh, and P.S. could you please keep it to football in this NG?
skep...@aol.com
All my posts are monitored and recorded by Google. Google is the worst
engine for spying on people and turning them in. Google is notorious
for doing this to Chinese citizens who are oppressed by Capitalism.
Marxism is a creative,
self-critical and developing theory on how to interpret history.
Socialism in China was vibrant and the majority of people were wildly
enthusiastic about revolutionary politics because Socialism made
their
lives so much better than what it was under Feudalism and Capitalism.
What do you do when the new society comes up against what the
bourgeoisie has invented as 'human nature' and selfishness? There is
no innate or unchanging "human nature." People's thinking, behavior,
and values are shaped by the economic structure and corresponding
institutions and culture of a given society. Ancient Greek society
and
America's "founding fathers" regarded slavery as perfectly "normal."
Capitalism is organized around the private accumulation of profit and
economic competition. Selfishness, greed, and individualism are
rewarded by the workings of capitalism and promoted by the
institutions of capitalist society. They are not "hard wired" into
our
genes, and neither is racism or male supremacy, which are common
prejudicial ideas taught in the United States.
There was real and unparalleled democracy for the masses of people
when China was Socialist. The dictatorship of the proletariat in a
revolutionary society gives the masses the right and the ability to
change the world and participate in society in an all around way.
Thinking and action were unleashed from the bottom up in diverse ways
unimaginable in Capitalist society.
Communism aims for a worldwide society, in which all classes and
class
distinctions have been overcome; all systems and relations of
exploitation abolished; all oppressive social institutions and
relations of social equality, like racial discrimination and the
domination of women by men are put an end to and all oppressive and
backward ideas and values cast off and the world's abundance can be
shared by people together in all of society, the resources being held
in common. Capitalism does not have these goals.