Community of goods

When Ann Lee led her small band of Shaking Quakers from Manchester to New York in 1774, she brought a theology that fused celibacy and shared property into a single discipline: withdrawal from private life meant withdrawal from private ownership as well. The United Society of Believers formalized this in written covenants that bound each member, on joining a Shaker community, to give up personal title to land, tools, income and inheritance in exchange for lifelong maintenance by the community as a whole. Stephen Stein's history of the movement traces how this was never treated as an economic convenience. It was read as the practical form the gospel took once a believer had renounced the fallen, generative order of family and marriage; a shared purse followed necessarily from a shared celibate life, since neither could function if the other were only half kept. Shaker communities built substantial collective enterprises, seed businesses, furniture workshops and herb gardens among them, on exactly this consecrated ground, and their well documented material success became, for outside observers, the clearest proof that communal property could work at scale in America rather than remaining a curiosity confined to scripture.

John Humphrey Noyes founded the Oneida Community in New York in 1848 on a reading of Acts that he pushed further than most communal groups before him. Spencer Klaw's history and the community's own compiled tracts, published under the name Bible Communism, describe a system in which property, labor and even exclusive marriage were treated as a single fallen structure to be dissolved together, not two separate reforms. Noyes argued that private property and monogamous marriage were the same sin of exclusive possession applied to different objects, so a community that renounced one while keeping the other had not actually restored the New Testament church at all. The result was the most controversial version of Christian communalism in nineteenth century America, its complex marriage practice drawing far more outside hostility than its shared ownership of land and workshops did on its own. Legal and public pressure forced the community to abandon complex marriage in 1879, and two years later its members converted the communal property itself into a joint stock company, Oneida Community Limited, the silverware manufacturer that carried the group's name and capital forward long after its religious communism had ended.