by Raven
The commune movement in the US during the 1960s was not an isolated phenomena. There have been waves of communal movements, many dating back to long before Europeans discovered North America. One very fertile period for communities in the US (often called ‘utopian experiments’ at this time) was in the nineteenth century.
I was reading a very important book called Collective Courage by Jessica Gordon Nembhard (subtitled, “A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice”.) It’s a great book giving a detailed look at Black cooperative organizations and Black mutual aid from early in US history. An early section in the book was entitled ‘Black Communities or Communes and Utopian Ideals’. Of course I read this section with great interest.
The book talked about three early communal attempts. I knew about two of them. The Nashoba Commune was, of course, mentioned–a well meaning attempt by suffragist Fanny Wright to create a community for ex-slaves. A second one was the Combahee River Colony, a group of “several hundred African American women who occupied abandoned farmland where they ‘grew crops and cared for each other’” during the Civil War. I’d heard of it but didn’t know much about it. But I had never heard of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry.
I’m currently living in a small commune in western Massachusetts and we visit Northampton occasionally. I’ve visited Northampton since I was a student at UMass/Amherst in the 1970s. I had never heard of this place. It wasn’t really a Black community, but an abolitionist community that practiced racial and gender equity in the 1840s. Sojourner Truth was a member there and this was where she became an abolitionist. Frederick Douglas was a frequent visitor and said of the place: “The place and the people struck me as the most democratic I had ever met. It was a place to extinguish all aristocratic pretensions. There was no high, no low, no masters, no servants, no white, and no black. I, however, felt myself in very high society.” I had to know more about this place.
I looked for more information about the Northampton Association and found a book called The Communitarian Moment by Christopher Clark (subtitle, “The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association”). It was in the local library system, so I ordered it and read it.
The Northampton Association of Education and Industry was not a Black community. It was a predominantly white community with only a few black people there. But it was a community devoted to equality. Not only were black people and white people treated equally, but also women and men, at a time when that wasn’t usually true, even in the abolitionist movement. It started off as an attempt to create an abolitionist community focused on silk manufacturing and although it started as being connected with a company with ‘wages’, “In what the historian Arthur Bestor once referred to as a ‘coup’, a majority of members took steps during 1843 to move the community in noncapitalist direction… at the annual meeting… members ensured that the wage system would be scrapped. In a succession of votes they overturned the founders assumption that the association would operate like a company.
“The meeting… moved the association firmly toward a more communal organization.”
The author situates the Association in the nineteenth century communal movement, particularly in the 1840s, the period he calls ‘the communitarian moment’. While he refers to many other communities occurring during this period, he focuses on the Northampton Association and compares it to three other communities, also in Massachusetts during this period: Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Fruitlands in the town of Harvard, and “Adin Ballou’s ‘Practical Christian’ community at Hopedale.” He also says, “Recent scholars of utopian movements have pointed out that communities were being founded throughout the nineteenth century and were not less common at other times than they were in the 1840s. Otohiko Okugawa found 119 communal societies established in the United States between 1800 and 1859, and Robert S. Fogarty lists 141 more that were set up between 1860 and 1914… Nevertheless, there is merit in the view that the 1840s were an especially significant period for communitarianism. At least fifty-nine new communities were founded between 1840 and 1849, more than in any other decade.”
The Northampton Association lasted four and a half years (1842-1846), which was longer than forty-three of those fifty-nine communities (the average lifespan was two years or less). There was always a tension between the aims of the community and the economic needs of running a business. It was a nonsectarian Christian community, started by abolitionists, with interests in “nonresistance” (ie, nonviolence), moral reform, temperance, diet, and health. All of the original founders were white men, active in the abolition movement, but included businessmen, including two with silk manufacturing experience. The founders brought their families and soon it was almost thirty people. By 1844 there were a hundred and twenty.
“Early in 1843 they declared that ‘association’ together provided the best means of enacting ‘the principle of equal brotherhood, the all-embracing law of love so emphatically taught by true Christianity.’ They rejected the ‘distinction of rights or rewards’ made in ordinary life ‘between the strong and the weak, the skilful and unskillful, the man and the woman, the rich and the poor’ and sought a social equality that would ask ‘only of all honest effort according to ability.’” While I’m not sure the Northampton Association would qualify as an income-sharing community, it was certainly headed in that direction and they were working hard toward egalitarianism.
Unfortunately, they never did well with silk production, lost a lot of money, and had several ideological rifts. This all culminated in moving from being a community to functioning as a business. “Northampton’s change after 1846 from community into factory village was another strand in the shift from social critique to acceptance of industrial capitalism.” The author saw it as part of a bigger movement at the time, “a retreat of sorts, one that left abolitionists less likely to perceive the need for communitarian ventures, less likely to criticize social conventions, and more likely to accept… the growing consensus that the ‘free labor’ system was the only logical alternative to slavery. The collapse of the communitarian moment, in other words, helped cement the alliance between abolitionism and capitalism that some radical reformers sought to avert at the beginning of the 1840s.”
As far as I can see, the problem with the Northampton Association, the problem with most of the nineteenth century communities, and the problem with many of the twentieth and twenty-first century communities, is that changing an established way of life like capitalism and creating a brand new culture in addition to starting a new community, often on the fly, is just not going to be easy. A more egalitarian and communal way of living seems logical to many people and this book is just one example of creating communities to meet those desires, but we are going to have to be smarter and more persistent if we actually want it to work within a society that’s heading in the opposite direction. The ‘communitarian moment’ may have passed in the 1840s and the 1960s but I believe that we can bring it back around and make it a communitarian way of life if we’re willing to work hard enough.
(Here’s a bit more about the Northampton Association.)
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