| Summary: | <p class="first" id="d139698e93">Historians studying the utopian Oneida Community have often located its demise in
rising internal dissent and failing consensus among its members, with special emphasis
on the personal jealousies and generational tensions that its practice of group marriage
may have produced. Those studies step past the essential place of work and industry
in communal life and especially the community’s theology, which equated economic prosperity
with Christian virtue. This essay reframes our understanding of the political economy
of the Oneida Community, with specific attention to their last decade, and the social
tensions stoked by their reliance upon market capitalism and waged labour. While acknowledging
the internal dissent that accompanied the structural demise of the commune, the present
study asks how such discord arose from business-centred theology within the social
environment of competition and a prolonged economic depression. The Community’s dependence
upon the surrounding capitalist economy challenged their self-described ‘Bible communism’
and precipitated its demise.
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