The Meaning of Utopia

What I want to do is talk a little bit about how we understand the American tradition of utopianism. It is not always a clear or easy story to tell. There’s different ways we could approach it. For the purposes of today, I will largely be drawing on the history of specific utopian communities that were enacted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as spaces of reinvention of everyday life. That is usually what we subsume under the utopian tradition.

These traditions are really powerful in the American experience but they’re not always that well-known or discussed all that much. They are not the same as what we would consider “revolutionary movements” necessarily. They might parallel and intersect and complement what we think of as more traditional forms of revolutionary organizing and political activity, but the utopian tradition itself is a little bit different. That’s a relationship we’re going to be puzzling out today. When we think about utopian communities in the US, it’s not the same as indigenous resistance. It’s not the same as Black Power. It’s not the same as the workers’ movement. But at the same time, there are some similarities, and we’ll argue today, that there is quite a bit of inspiration to be drawn from these kind of bizarre—and failed, or incomplete—traditions of remaking the world. That might again flesh out our understanding of what it means to organize in a revolutionary way. 

Utopianism in the American tradition is a kind of homegrown dissent. But it’s not just a rejection of the world. It’s the active creation of new ways of living. This is why the utopian tradition in the Americas speaks to us. It is about the creation of new forms of collective life. There are all sorts of communities that broke away from mainstream society and tried to refashion existence—a shared existence—in incredible ways. What they actually wanted to do was to separate themselves out. They denounced society as it exists and they wanted to create, in miniature, new forms of life. And they often thought of themselves as exemplary, or righteous, communities that would lead the way to a transformation of the whole of American society, just by the force of their example.

They have two major waves in American history. One, you get in the middle of the nineteenth century—the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, before the Civil War. And then the story that’s probably more familiar is what happens in the second half of the twentieth century: the post-war period, the rise of the counterculture, revolutionary movements in the 1960s, and then the back-to-the-land movement in the 1970s. We’re going to be using those two examples to talk about how they thought about remaking the world, how they thought about engagement with the world, what their responsibility to the world was, and more specifically, what are some of the practices of care that were created within these breakaway communities.

It is an inspiring legacy, if sometimes full of warnings of what not to do. That’s the messiness we’re going to talk about today. But these really became innovative spaces of re-envisioning collective life. The idea of the individual was questioned. It was a critique of industrialism. It was against the ideology of competition and an embrace of cooperation. They remade art, architecture, literature, expression. We’ll talk today about sex and love—the utopian tradition is very strong on re-imagining what those mean. Re-imagining health and care, re-imagining the family, time, space, diet, the reign of property. The utopian tradition is extremely strong on a critique of what we can clearly identify as the rise of global capitalism today. So I want to talk about them as complementing what we traditionally consider revolutionary movements.

There’s other reasons to be interested in them too. Even in the nineteenth century, American utopia was probably where you can cite the origins of the emancipation of women. Likewise, the abolition of slavery is deeply tied up with the utopian tradition. So is resistance to war, notions of pacifism, and consciousness objection. These are all American traditions that take shape within utopian communities.

What I want to say in general, before we get into some of the details, is that we see today in the world—as the counterculture saw in the 1960s and 1970s, and as the utopian socialists of the 1840s saw—a world of isolation, despair, loneliness, sickness, poverty, anxiety, misery, and loss. It’s a kind of existential devastation that we’re living. This world, in a sense, is not livable. That’s what we’re up against.

When I think about utopia, care, and communalism—these ideas that interest us so deeply, and that we in our small ways are trying to practice—I think about Martin Buber, the great Jewish thinker, who has probably the best book on utopia that you can read. He says it very simply. You have to understand the turn in the modern period, all over the world, to new forms of collective life and communal living as fundamentally resistance to loneliness. I couldn’t come up with a better definition of the utopian project, of collective living, or even of revolution in the modern period, than this.

Next we’re going to talk more specifically about care and offer some examples in which care practices and the rise of medicine are tied very specifically to the American utopian tradition.

Shakers & Hippies

If we want to talk about the legacy of the counterculture, it’s not global revolution. It’s wellness. What we get out of the counterculture is the commodification of wellness. That’s probably its “greatest” contribution to American history. This is a history that’s recounted in a fabulous book called Retreat by Matthew Ingram. He looks at practices in the 1960s and 1970s that the counterculture adopted as alternative lifestyles and the way over time that they would be commodified into a culture of wealth and wellness. They didn’t invent this stuff, but they popularized it in American culture: yoga, organic farming, natural foods, meditation, macrobiotics, “Eastern spirituality,” transcendental meditation, psychedelics, the very notion of paying to go on a retreat. Now we have this “digital detox” retreat, a kind of contemporary version of that. We have primal screams, we have tantric sex, all of this stuff that we know as a legacy of the 1970s. When they adopted these practices, it was an intense exploration of inner psychic life and our ability to reinvent social relations. But it’s a little depressing sometimes to think that what we get out of that tremendous period of creative flourishing is things you can buy on the market. This is a classic critique, and a valid one, of the counterculture.

That is one legacy that utopianism in the modern period gives us. There’s others that are more interesting, that we might be a bit more favorable about. In the same way that the counterculture gives us the modern idea of wellness, it also gives us the idea, in the US context, of the free clinic. For instance, in San Francisco in 1967, you get the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. That was the case of a sympathetic doctor watching the influx of young people—many of whom were malnourished, who were not receiving medical or dental care, many of them on bad trips—were flooding into San Francisco for the Summer of Love. This doctor realized the establishment was actively denying care to them. We are still talking about essentially white, middle class drop-outs. The refusal of medical care is a classic technique of discrimination and racism. But it was weaponized against the counterculture in this specific instance, to which the response was the organization of a volunteer-run free clinic that still exists in a fashion. The very origin of the phrase “health care is a right, not a privilege” came out of some of the planning meetings for the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. It was a pioneer in addiction medicine, in the modality of harm reduction. There’s a very interesting way to look at that moment of countercultural experimentation, as it really did set us up for some positive aspects of community healthcare today. It didn’t address the systematic disparities within the healthcare system, or the entire fucked up foundation of it being run for profit, but we do get a legacy out of the utopian aspirations of the counterculture for the idea of the free clinic.

To move back in time, something else we could talk about regarding the connection between care and utopia is the Shakers, one of the most beloved and well-known American communal societies. They are still around. They pre-date the founding of America and they still exist. One of their great legacies is the popularization of herbal medicines. Of course, the very fact that they were able to practice this at all is because they learned it from the Mohican people. They went to the nearby swamps and Mohican people taught them about herbs. Eventually, the Shakers would begin growing those herbs, as well as foraging them, and using them for healthcare within their communities. Later on, they would commercialize them and begin to sell them—as tinctures, remedies, and syrups—and they became some of the primary purveyors of herbal and natural medicines in the US, back in the 1850s and 1860s. 

Part of the weird, coincidental history of utopia is that the first modern pharmaceutical company, the Tilden Company, was founded in the adjacent plot to a Shaker herb garden. The very neighbors of one of these Shakers communities ended up growing the same things, practicing the same medicines, and using the same techniques of drying, bottling, and selling, basically creating the national drug market in the nineteenth century. It came out of this utopian-adjacent experiment in herbalism. One of the even stranger parts of this story is that there was someone who defected from the Shakers— who got fed up with this religious communal society and left—who stole some of the equipment from the herb garden and gave it to this pharmaceutical company. In a way, it’s the defection from utopia, the dissatisfaction with the utopian experiment, that gives us the rise of Big Pharma.

You have all these interesting historical connections between care and utopia, and they’re not always positive ones. These two short anecdotes in the American experience raise two additional questions for us in the present. In the case of the Shakers and the commercialization of herbal medicine, you have to think about this. In their aspiration to separate themselves from the world and enact a kind of sinless Christian perfection, they strove to become self-sufficient. But pretty much the whole history of that utopian community—which was a pretty successful one—was dependent upon the commercial revenue from selling these seeds and herbs to the outside world. Even in this breaking away and rejection of society, you have this continued dependence upon the economy, upon the market, and upon capitalism. I want to come back to this idea of “autonomy,” because that really encapsulates the dilemma. How much can you break away from the world? How much of our lives are determined by the market? Is it possible to have a life unmediated by capital?

In the experience of the counterculture, the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic is an unambiguously positive legacy. But you have to wonder about something else: who was it serving and whose community was that? That experiment was contemporaneous with the Young Lords taking over Lincoln Hospital in New York City and the Black Panther Party founding a series of free medical clinics all around the country. When we think about the way in which the counterculture began as part of a revolutionary youth movement, but turned away from its responsibility to engage and to actively participate in those revolutionary transformations—that kind of inward turn, solipsistic and individualistic, that eventually gives us wellness culture—it’s really difficult to puzzle out some of these concerns. Why was it that the free clinic didn’t advocate for political education? Why did it mostly serve white, middle class folks? Where was the responsibility to other communities at that time?

I raise these both as stories of the intersection of care and utopia and because these are still active questions for us. How much can you really break away from capitalism? How can you negotiate your dependence on it or distance from it? How can you create internal interdependencies on one another? What responsibilities and obligations do we have, even as we organize in our own communities, to at the same time be engaged in a much larger and broader context of revolutionary transformation?

Ideas of Happiness

Fundamentally, when we look at utopia, we’re talking about the enacting of a collective idea of happiness and regrounding social relationships in relationships of care.

I want to talk about a couple experiments utopian communities have done to overcome the influence of the old world on ourselves and on our social relations. But before I mention some of the specific practices, I want to mention a foundational concept I think is important for us. I’m borrowing this from the brilliant feminist and abolitionist writer M. E. O’Brien, who talks about a world of care only becoming possible when there exists the universal material basis for life. A world of care is only possible when a universal support system is there. This to me is the legacy of American utopianism: providing food, shelter, care, dignity, free expression, joy, and pleasure to all, by establishing the material basis for it. That was the goal and occasionally, but not always, the actual success of some of these communities in the nineteenth and then into the twentieth century.

In the American tradition, utopia almost always includes the abolition of property, the equality of the sexes, the abolition of the wage, the abolition of the biological family, and the abolition of prisons and the police. The American utopian tradition is emphatically clear: these are the things that would have to be done to establish the universal material basis for what we could understand as material societies of care. When we say the word commune today, I think this is essentially what we mean: the practical reorganization of everyday life with care at its center.

That’s what I want to say is important in the tradition. Now here are some of the lessons, here is what they tried to do. I want to mention just a couple of some of the more elaborate, or strange and curious ways, in which utopian communities attempted to address some of these fundamentals: family, sex, childcare, decision-making, labor, group therapy, the soul. As I mentioned in the beginning, utopian communities are fertile experimental grounds where these things can be re-imagined.

When we think about childcare in these utopian spaces, education is universal and childcare is collectivized. In almost all the examples of the communities, children have their own houses. There’s all sorts of interesting ways in which childcare is collectivized within this tradition. The kids learn to make decisions together. In the case of the Onedia Community—one of the very interesting nineteenth century communities in Upstate New York—parents didn’t have the right to name their child. When a child was born into the community, it was the community that would name the child. There’s all this work that goes into utopia about reimagining who’s responsible for the rearing of children.

The family is an institution that almost categorically is demolished in the utopian tradition. I don’t mean the idea of choosing a romantic partner or having kids or not having kids, but the idea of a bourgeois, nuclear, biological family. Even in the nineteenth century, they were done with it, they were over it. Looking at Oneida, that’s where the very term “free love” comes from. They had a very complicated system of polyamorous, rotating relationships, called “complex marriage.” They were against the idea of the couple-form, because it was a form of selfish rather than communal love. They encouraged the breaking up of these individualistic units that were the basis for the rest of American society.

To go back as well, the Shakers were celibate, but they ran orphanages. That’s often how they recruited new members, for better or for worse. They organized themselves into non-biological families. A “family” was simply the name for the collective unit of people living together in the same house or in the same village. So they had the idea of the family, but it’s no longer the biological family.

We could take this into the realm of sex, the realm of pleasure, desire, attraction—all of these are reinvented in the space of historical utopias. The same thing can be said for the division of labor. One of the difficult things about confronting the counterculture is that they give themselves credit for being part of the women’s liberation movement. They have a lot of nice things to say about emancipating women, but unfortunately quite often the gendered division of labor would reassert itself on the communes almost automatically. Even though they sought to decentralize labor, to make it more egalitarian and more fair, it’s still women doing what was called “women’s work.” I subsume this under a care practice because the attempt to attack the specialization of labor that capitalism has indoctrinated us into, to share and discuss openly what it means to work together, would be a practice of care.

There’s a lot of interesting and weird stuff around confession and this idea of criticism. Quite often you would have open criticism sessions, where someone would sit in the middle of a room and admit their own faults. Then they would go quiet and listen to every other member of the community criticize them. Can you imagine? If you read accounts of it, it’s frightful. But it was an intentional way to develop forms of collective conversation, egalitarian relations, and to break down resentments—which we know are incredibly harmful to community-building. To speak openly and publicly about our faults, our failures, what irks us about one another—that’s a therapeutic collective care practice. They might have taken it to extremes in certain instances, but there might be something valuable in that experience.

Something else I want to mention, that this conversation is leading us towards. The utopian tradition is also about care for the soul. It’s the case that historically most of the communes and communal societies in this country were religiously motivated. That goes for Oneida, for the Shakers, any number of other groups. They were fervent and devout believers. They organized their lives to reflect those beliefs. Whatever our critiques of organized religion may be, this was an attempt to speak to the needs of the human soul.

This reoccurs in the counterculture too—that attention to the deep inner sense of humanity or interiority, the idea of spirituality, the legacy around the occult, the New Age, the cosmic inclinations of the counterculture. We can say whatever we want about it, but at the end of the day, it was a tremendous creative experiment in speaking to our inner needs, that capitalism simply cannot, or will not, or is incapable of, addressing in us. So the cosmic or existential dimension of our individuality and our sense of collectivity—utopia becomes a way to explore that. That in itself might be one of the valuable care practices we see in this legacy. 

I could go on endlessly about all the practices that were enacted in historical communities, but here’s where I want to end. There’s this lovely book that just came out in English by Marcello Tarì, a wonderful theorist, comrade, and friend. He talks about the idea of utopia not as the model to be implemented, not as the vision of the future that we necessarily want to enact. How he approaches it instead is this. When we think about utopia, we’re actually making an inventory of things in the present, about our own lives, that make existence unlivable, undesirable, and make us unable to actualize ourselves. Utopia, in this sense, is not what is to be enacted into the future, but what is to be destroyed in the present. To again name some of these categories, as recurring themes in the American tradition: work, family, the soul, property, isolation, decision-making, sex, love. All of these aspects of our existence were subject to intense creative experimentation.

If there’s something to take from those experiments, it isn’t the idea that they figured it out—much less the idea that we ourselves have figured it out, as if we could tell anyone what to do. Instead it’s to know that we’re still up against some of the same challenges. Even in the 1840s, at the origins of early modern industrial capital in the US, they were in many respects the same challenges, and then the same challenges reappear in the 1960s and 1970s. As we organize today, we confront a lot of similar problems. I think that there might not be an answer. There’s only the process. There’s only the path we try to walk together to figure out a better way of living. That, I think, is the legacy of the utopian tradition.