We started a commune

In the 1840s, if you wanted to change the world, you joined a commune. Over 100 utopian communities were founded in America between the Revolution and the Civil War [1], and as you know, I joined one of them. Many were religiously motivated, but others were secular, like the one I joined, which was based on Fourierist principles, or the transcendentalist-linked ones, like Brook Farm and Fruitlands.

There wasn’t really one goal or idea that unified all these movements (sometimes there was not even one goal uniting a single community), but Cain suggests that a common element of many of the reformers was “the relationship between human nature and social systems” [2]. Fourier and his American student Albert Brisbane were all about restructuring the economic system. 

In 2011, if you want to reform the world, you may be associated with the Occupy movement. The two movements aren’t really the same—for example, the utopian movements were largely about reform on an individual or very small scale, and the Occupy movement is global—but there are parallels in the sense that both are critical of established economic institutions and have entrenched themselves into popular consciousness and culture. Although the Occupiers have resisted defining a single goal or set of demands, their general aim is to “fight back against the richest 1% of people that are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future” [3] An FAQ with The Nation says that the slogan “People Before Profits,” fairly accurately represents the movement [4]. As a grassroots, popular-democracy movement, it fits well with Brisbane’s statement from an 1840 essay:

“The energies of the people are so absorbed in personal or party interests, that their attention is withdrawn from real, that is social progress. It is believed that the society in which we vegetate, is unchangeable, that the evils we suffer are attached to human nature, inseparable from it, and independent of the social organization.” [5]

We can’t tell right now what impact Occupy Wall Street will have on society and how it will be remembered, but in analyzing the utopian movements through the lens of Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, Gale Temple sees the desire for reform as a manifestation of American identity. She writes that Blithedale, a fictionalized version of Brook Farm, was less an act of withdrawal from mainstream life than an expression of yet another strain of quintessentially American rhetoric and longing," because the concept of America is continually being redefined, “as citizens act on existing forms—the land, the economy, the social realm—which, once ‘re-formed,’ acquire a new, more purified identity that can then be properly conceptualized as American” [6]. 

[1] Cain 334

[2] ibid 335 

[3] occupywallst.org 

[4] thenation.com 

[5] Brisbane 341 

[6] Temple 288, 289