It was human nature, not Mother Nature, that threatened the settlers with destitution. The settlement at Plymouth was a commercial enterprise but it operated, in effect, as a religious commune. The terms of the agreement by which the colony had been chartered, signed in London before the Mayflower
sailed, were strict: “All profits and benefits that are got by trade, traffic, trucking, working, fishing, or any other means” were to become part of “the common stock.” Moreover, “all such persons as are of this colony are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock and goods of the colony.”
As Nick Bunker writes in Making Haste from Babylon, his acclaimed 2010 history of the Mayflower Pilgrims and their world,
for the first seven years no individual settler could own a plot of land. To ensure that each farmer received his fair share of good or bad land, the slices were rotated each year, but this was counterproductive. Nobody had any reason to put in extra hours and effort to improve a plot if next season another family received the benefit.
To all intents and purposes, in other words, there was no private ownership. No one’s labor resulted in benefit for themselves or their family, so no one was motivated to work harder or more diligently. Whatever any individual produced would belong to all, and he would be entitled to get back only what was deemed necessary for him and his family. As Karl Marx would phrase it 255 years later, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his need.” Communism was destined to fail in 20th-century Europe, China, and Cuba. It fared no better in 17th-century Massachusetts.
The system “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment,” Bradford recorded. “For the young men that were most fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense. The strong . . . had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter [of what] the other could; this was thought injustice. . . . And for men's wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery; neither could many
husbands well brook it.”
Bad attitude led to bad crops — and worse. “Much was stolen both by night and day,” Bradford wrote of the 1622 harvest. “And although many were well whipped . . . yet hunger made others, whom conscience did not restrain, to venture.” It became clear that unless something changed, “famine must still ensue the next year also.”
It didn’t take long for the settlers to understand the built-in disincentives of the system they were operating under. The lack of private property, they realized, was stifling productivity and bringing out the worst in their characters. So in the spring of 1623, communism was replaced with capitalism.
As Bradford later recorded, it was decided to alter the rules, and to “set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. . . . And so assigned to every family a parcel of land. . . . This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise. . . . The women now went willingly into the field and took their little ones with them to set corn.”
The results were outstanding. In 1621, the colony had planted just 26 acres. In 1622, it planted 60. But in 1623, with families now working for themselves, 184 acres were planted. | 
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