Robert Owen had bought the land to create his utopian paradise. Thus he ushered in a strain of socialism known as Utopian Socialism, but he wasn't the only one to try it. Among others, the concept was also tried by Charles Fourier.
Fourier proposed his communes to be called phalanxes or phalansteries, which would allow residents to make use of their human passions and talents. Based on the number of personalities he believed existed, Fourier calculated that the maximum size of each phalanx would have to be around 1,600 people, a number he felt would get all the work completed by assigning every passion to its proper job. (So a person who loved working with dirt would help dispose of the waste and garbage in the commune.)
Fourier's writings inspired others to create their own utopian society of phalanxes. So he inspired a whole movement of intentional communities in the United States. They included Utopia, Ohio; La Reunion outside of Dallas, Texas; the North American Phalanx of Red Bank, New Jersey; Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts; the Community Place and Sodus Bay Phalanx in New York State, and several other communities in the United States.
Like Robert Owen's New Harmony, the phalanxes were abandoned over time as it never could achieve its goal of being a Utopia.
An even earlier experiment in ‘socialism’ was by William Bradford at Plymouth Plantation in 1620. That failed too.
The article also came with a slide show of pictures:
http://www.examiner.com/slideshow/new-harmony-indiana#slide=1
Anyone who has driven between Phoenix and Flagstaff on I-17 has gone right by this place: https://arcosanti.org/
I think Lousia May Alcott’s father was a co-founder of one of these. A good portion of her childhood was spent in one. I remember quite clearly reading in her autobiography of how brutal and full of hardships their years were there.
Communism — It fails every time !
“Do my work!” And “Give me your stuff!”. I wonder why that never works out. People gets paid lots of money in our universities to push it.
Like what Obola does.
Marx was all about self-actualization, too. It is a little opaque just how throwing off wage slavery and shoveling sh*t for free was supposed to liberate anyone but there you are. Presumably there would be someone in each village who enjoyed shoveling sh*t. That would actually be a pretty valuable feller to have, but in practice there are a lot more villages who need sh*t shoveled than fellers willing to do it for free. It is at that point in Marxism that the requirement for a more perfect human being crops up, one of whose extant characteristics, one supposes, involves a shovel and, well, you know...
The first is that there are no sexual rules which leaves people angry, confused and disinclined to cooperate. While the egg heads tend to disregard this segment of human personality we WANT to know that who we are sleeping with is only sleeping with us. If we leave for five minutes we don't want to come back and find them in the sack with someone else.
Lacking this kind of sexual rule we will be disinclined to leave them and angry and suspicious of the others around us who may have designs on them.
The other thing is the lack of reward for effort. People are willing to work together TO A POINT to help others but if they receive no reward they will quit doing so.
This very old tired "bright new way" has been tried repeatedly for thousands of years. It doesn't work.
New Harmony was an interesting case, but an even more intriguing (because longer-lived) U.S. example was the Amana colonies, which were founded by another of those innumerable German pietistic sects (as was George Rapp's Harmony colony). The Amanas were quite successful for several generations, but when economic and social pressures (and the Great Depression) brought matters to a head, the Brethren separated the church and the economically productive properties, and turned the economic base into a joint stock company. (You will probably recall Amana Refrigeration.)
Such experiments are quite interesting and are too little studied, in part because the religious and familial bases of successful communist communities are lessons the left does not want to recognize. Such communities also tend to thrive on a small scale but are defeated by problems of scale, which massively complicates decision making and requires structures beyond a conclave of church elders and heads of families. Retention of the next generation is also an issue; the deliberate retreat to rustic simplicity and communal living will always appeal to some people, but one's children are quite likely to have other aspirations.
Last but not least, all successful communal societies have been voluntary. None of the great experimenters in the story of U.S. communitarianism would have put a gun to people's heads to force compliance. It is impossible to think of George Rapp or Robert Owen or the Amana colonists running a gulag, or wanting to. They wanted to march to a different drummer, and build a better mousetrap. This country gave them the freedom to try. Theirs is a positive story, and I wish our strutting little would-be dictators on the left would learn from their example. I could respect the OWS types if they would actually trek out to the wilderness and try to build a different kind of life for themselves. This, of course, would require doing actual work, which is why most of them are not interested, but here and there you will trip across the grown up flower children running their little shops in out of the way places, or producing holistic organic macrobiotic stuff for the local foodie market, and I say good for them. Take a chance, break a sweat, and see what you can do.
Some people still find these kinds of living arrangements attractive. I have not seen a statistic in recent years, but there used to be, and probably still are, a rather large number of communitarian groups, mostly small, low key, and very quiet, which go about their own business and leave the rest of us alone. They also tend not to proselytize, but are quite happy to share if you ask. I imagine the greatest threat to alternative communities today is the relentless drive of the big government left to control and standardize everything that lives, moves, breathes, eats, and sleeps. The zone of personal autonomy is steadily shrinking.
Susan B. Anthony and her friends were also followers of Charles Fourier.