In his novel Terug naar Walden (Back to Walden) of 2009 Belgian author Walter van den Broeck refers intertextually to the Walden project of the Dutch writer and psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden. At the end of the nineteenth century, Van Eeden established a number of agricultural settlements in the Netherlands conceived to develop an alternative to the prevailing capitalist system. His work also inspired the establishment of the Van Eeden Colony in the United States. In his novel Walter van den Broeck tells the tale of Ruler Marsh, the richest man in the world, who in his youth had the option to counter capitalism from within the Van Eeden Colony in North Carolina, or, alternatively, to create his own business empire. His ultimate goal was to destroy the economic system that was responsible for the financial ruin of his family. Finally, he decided to enter the world of business in order to combat capitalism at a strategic moment. After causing a global economic crisis, Marsh answered the calling of his Flemish ancestors and travelled to the Kempen area close to Antwerp. His experience of community life in the town of Wallem brought him to the realisation that he had made an incorrect choice and that the Walden project merited reconsideration. This paper discusses the utopian vision in Terug naar Walden and the interface between Van den Broeck’s revisiting of the Walden project with Hardt and Negri’s theory in Multitude (2005) that the interweaving of technologies and shared interests in the global order has given rise to the production of the “common”, a potential source of oppositional action against the capitalist hegemony. This begs the question whether individual agency, e.g. the attempts by Ruler Marsh to undermine the global economic system, becomes stigmatised in the light of communality as the designated focus area for oppositional action.