In Response to Yuan's Points and their Criticisms

I would pause before suggesting that what Yuan desires is “dismissing the validity of Locke’s rhetoric based on the aforementioned actions”. What Yuan pinpoints are a couple of the very real repercussions Locke’s work and words—his role in the propagation of a theory of property acquisition that legitimizes or at least tolerates the enslavement of millions, the procuring of land people has no original tie to, and the sidestepping of the people who did/do in the process. I don’t think it can be denied, Locke committed work to justify the colonization of the Americas, and the exploitation of peoples and lands to derive value. Locke writes how in “several nations of the Americans are of this, who are rich in Land, and poor in all the Comforts of Life; whom Nature having furnished as liberally as any other people, with the materials of Plenty, i.e. a fruitful soil, apt to produce in abundance… have not one hundredth part of the Conveniencies we enjoy.” The only explanation Locke offers for such seemingly senseless wealth or value inequality (or its thought) is while an “Acre of Land that bears here Twenty Bushels of Wheat, and another in America, which, with the same Husbandry, would do the like, are without doubt, of the same natural, intrinsic Value…yet the Benefit Mankind receives from the one, in a Year, is worth 5 l. and from the other possibly not worth a Penny, if all the Profit an Indian received from it were to be valued, and sold here; at least, I may truly say, not 1/1000. 'Tis Labour then which puts the greatest part of Value upon Land, without which it would scarcely be worth any thing.” According to Locke labour alone derives value for humankind. Labour gives land and the fruits of the land worth. The lack of labor in the Americas and by the natives peoples of these continents is what determines low value of lands, despite their abundance. What this leads to is, first, the thinking that the native peoples of the Americas are inferior for their inability to labour or negligence to, and secondly, given that the earth was given to human kind to share in common and each person has the right to labour and thence acquire property, a European settler laboring the land they arrived to is justified in claiming it and sidestepping the original peoples of that land. According to such logic, Locke’s writing leads concretely to colonization and the justification of it. It's thence such processes and their propagation (the repercussion of Locke's writing) that we now understand as fundamentally oppressive and which Locke advocates for that we must be aware of when considering Locke's own rhetoric.