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IMAGINE UTOPIA
When the world is crumbling beneath our feet, we’re told we need a strong dose of common sense. Do what’s sensible rather than what’s ideal. This was Barack Obama’s message when he bailed out banks deemed “too big to fail” after they unleashed the Great Recession of 2008. It was sensible, he argued, to bail out the banks that had orchestrated the subprime mortgage debacle that wiped out a large chunk of US middle-class wealth. Think, more recently, about when the US Congress gave a trillion dollars in grants and tax breaks to major corporations after the COVID pandemic in 2020 left millions unemployed.
Here’s the secret about practicality: it pays rich dividends for the powerful. Just look at the profits that corporations turned during the pandemic—Facebook ($84 billion in revenue in 2020, compared to $70 billion in 2019), Amazon ($386 billion in revenue compared to $280 billion), Walmart ($520 billion in net global sales, compared to $510 billion). Practicality is the last thing you want when our world is in flux. Disaster is the best time to expand your imagination. When the cracks expose the façade of normalcy, an alternative future can be glimpsed. Embrace the impossible. Imagine utopia. It’s a future where needless suffering is gone. Where creativity is encouraged. A world in which people work and live, not live to work. Don’t be afraid of idealism!
This has been done before. It can be done again. Almost two centuries ago, Americans turned to the utopian imagination because the early fires of the Industrial Revolution were raging uncontrollably. If you were able to look beyond the smog-polluted air and past the gut-wrenching poverty, you’d see mind-numbing and backbreaking work in factories. Children, as young as five, were exploited in obscene ways, making up approximately 40 percent of the mill employees in New England in the 1820s. Young women recruited from rural Massachusetts would feverishly work eighty-hour workweeks in the cotton textile factories in Waltham, for the famed industrialist Francis Cabot Lowell’s Boston Manufacturing Company. The crisis of work at the dawn of capitalism broke more spirits than we can count.
So, if you were there, what would you have heard from the industrialists and their apologists looking to keep their operations flowing seamlessly? Perhaps they would have conceded that it’s unfortunate, yes, but “there’s nothing we can about it! It’s natural.” History has arrived. Sure, you can accept these arguments. Or you can do something else: choose life over death, and do everything you can to tell the world why.
On the day that Thomas Jefferson died, July 4, 1826—the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—Robert Owen, a former manager of the New Lanark cotton mills in Scotland, did just that. He gave a rousing speech in New Harmony, Indiana, a small rural town of several hundred. At the time, Owen was two years into presiding over what became one of the most well-known, even if short-lived, American utopian communal experiments. Within weeks of arriving in the US, the charming and soft-spoken Owen, rather than spread the gospel of industriousness, made elites listen to his criticisms: Individualism is soulless. Marriage is coercive. Organized religion impoverishes the soul.
Remember: radical ideas are most palatable when they’re boldly announced and proudly defended in the mainstream. Go to the halls of power and tell the ruling class why they’re wrong! Owen spoke with presidential candidate and soon-to-be president John Quincy Adams, and he visited Thomas Jefferson’s and James Madison’s homes, and even gave two speeches before Congress on Capitol Hill. He sent copies of his pamphlets to Napoleon Bonaparte and had a model replica print of his ideal town proudly displayed in President Quincy Adams’s White House. What is practical is what we agree can be done, should be done. Nothing wrought by people occurs naturally. “The members of any community may by degrees be trained to live without idleness, without poverty, without crime, and without punishment,” Owen said, “for each of these is the effect of error in the various systems prevalent throughout the world. . . . Train any population rationally, and they will be rational.”1
To build a new world, you need to imagine what it might look like. Otherwise, you can’t move beyond what’s familiar. Meticulously design your utopia, even if you’re chastised as naive. In the blueprint for Owen’s New Harmony, kitchens, gardens, libraries, and stores were surrounded by factories and farmlands. Work wasn’t the center of life, and leisure wasn’t a frivolous luxury. It was essential. Though the blueprint wasn’t built with the 240,000 bricks Owen himself purchased, what emerged in the commune of New Harmony was stunning regardless. If you walked through the village, you’d see economic equality between the eight hundred to nine hundred farmers and mechanics who took up residence there. Class distinctions and hierarchies between professions collapsed because residents held that all work ought to be dignified, and that no one was exceptional, above the rest. A “Constitution of the Community of Equality” was ratified by the entire community, enshrining the “equality of rights, uninfluenced by sex or condition,” and “equality of duties.”2 The constitution guaranteed every adult twenty-one and older an equal vote and gave them a right to the land, as well as everything produced upon it. Every Tuesday there was a neighborhood dance led by a brass orchestra, and people addressed each other by their first names, a move that would have scandalized many accustomed to the mores of polite society. Working mothers—for a small fee—could send their children to a communal daycare, where the youngsters learned through playing games rather than memorizing equations.
The beautiful thing about utopian experiments is that because they shock the senses and inspire dreams to begin anew—no matter how flawed or incomplete they might be—they live on as a testament for future generations. That’s what happened a thousand miles northeast of New Harmony fifteen years later. Brook Farm was founded in 1841 by Unitarian minister George Ripley and his partner, Sophia, on pastureland and wild forests in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, at the time nine miles outside of Boston proper. Like New Harmony, the Brook Farm commune was populated by feminists, abolitionists, writers, and fine artists. It operated as a joint-stock company, which meant that profits from agricultural work were shared. And Brook Farm residents edited a literary review, The Dial.
The towering essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson never joined Brook Farm, but he frequently visited, preaching what was its gospel and should be ours: Self-reliance is about cultivating moral character. Democracy will be eroded through the pursuit of private property. “Reliance on Property,” Emerson concluded in 1844, “including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. . . . Whilst the rights of all persons are equal . . . their rights in property are very unequal. One man owns his clothes, and another owns a country. . . . Property demands a government framed on the ratio of owners and of owning.”3
As part of a collectivist “phalanx,” inspired by the increasingly popular “associationist” ideas of the French socialist Charles Fourier—around 15,000 Americans were involved with Fourierist movements in the nineteenth century—Brook Farm is an example of how to make democracy work for social cooperation, and vice versa. It had a school for children that blurred the line between art and work. Geography, poetry, dancing, literature, and music were taught while children were out working the fields, for which they were paid ten cents a day. On weekends, there were lectures on the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and vigorous discussions about the economic value of collectivism. The initial makeup of Brook Farm was New England elites like the Ripleys. But this didn’t hold for long, and it soon gave way to something more inclusive. Shoemakers, carpenters, and other artisans joined, because they were drawn to the hope of freedom.
The freedom dreams behind nineteenth-century utopian experiments live on in unexpected ways. Utopia can’t be fully policed or restricted to the few, no matter how hard they might try. It belongs to those who claim it as their own. Consider that Black women, who were written out of New Harmony’s exclusionary racial covenant, and were nowhere to be found on Brook Farm, established in 2020 the Freedom Georgia Initiative on ninety-six acres of rural land in Toomsboro. Envisioned as a Black-centric community, the initiative aims to address legacies of racial domination. Its long-term goal? Providing economic and cultural development. Freedom Georgia was born exactly when a new world was necessary: the year that Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor were murdered and the COVID-19 pandemic devastated Black families. College students in small towns and big cities spontaneously design collective living spaces, where they share meals, housework, music, and friendship. Bookshelves of revolutionary literature, science fiction, and the occult form the backdrop for young people who envision liberation in the realms of work, race, gender, and sexuality. Utopia isn’t something you should abandon just to prove your maturity. Utopia reignites hope for growing up and growing old. Have faith that growing up is a worthwhile activity to be embraced, not a mindless chore to be tolerated.