From 1847 to the mid 1860's the Mormons in Utah could best be described as capitalist with strong elements of central control and communal ideals.

The Mormons had tried a failed experiment in communal living in Missouri between 1831 and 1834. After this failed attempt the idea was established that development of communal living would be necessary to usher in Christs reign but that the time had not yet come.

In the first decade after Brigham Young arrived in the Salt Lake Valley migration and settlement followed a basic pattern. From mid spring to late summer companies of people would begin the trek from the Mississippi to the Salt Lake Valley. Once arrived in Salt Lake the companies would live in temporary housing until the following spring. Temporary housing could mean everything from simply living in the cart that brought your goods or living with a family already in the valley to building a full house. When spring arrived Brigham Young would send the members of the company on a "mission" to establish a town somewhere in the Mormon territory of Deseret. The missions had various individual purposes but most were directly related to making The Mormons self sufficient. For example: The mission to what became Cedar City Utah was to mine iron. The mission to what became St. George Utah was to grow cotton.

The Mormon Church provided varying levels of support to each of these mission sometimes providing considerable supplies and other times sending a company on with little besides what they had brought with them.

Once settled in Utah you would generally live as in a capitalist society. Goods would be bought and paid for and could be sold to church members and non members at will. However, unlike most capitalist societies the Mormons were prepared to give up everything they owned, with a relatively small amount of complaining, to The Mormon Church. If asked to let a family live with you you would open your door. If asked to move out of the house you just built in the Salt Lake Valley to move to Brigham city you would (This one is a story from my own family, Great Great Great Grandfather, My grandmother has his diary and the letter from Brigham Young)

In the mid 1860's The Mormon's once again tested a more communal society. Early results were good and in 1868 ZCMI was established to provide Mormons with nearly wholesale prices on goods with the profits going to the Mormon Church. In 1873 Brigham Young began the United Order Movement which once again attempted to establish a more communal type of society. Despite some successes the movement was largely considered a failure by the early 1880's.

The Mormon's could be described as both a theocratic hydraulic society and a capitalist society.

If you're interested in early Mormon economics, I'd recommend reading the classic standard text on it: Leonard Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: Economic History of the Latter-Day Saints, 1830-1900 (1958). The fellow who wrote it was a professional economist who then turned historian. The book is old, definitely, but despite its age it is still cited fairly routinely in modern histories.

(Warning: I’m going to be long-winded. My apologies ahead of time.)

To answer your question, it feels necessary to explain some background on the topic.

First, Mormonism is a religion. (Yeah, I know--no duh.) But it was also a culture (and by far it was the predominant culture of early Utah). It wasn’t just a Sunday thing. Living a pious life was a mark of a faithful Mormon, but so was, for example, being a hard worker. Day-to-day living in early Utah was utterly pervaded by Mormonism, and Mormonism was generally pragmatic. Preaching a sermon on Sunday was just as “Mormon” as it was to get together with the neighbors on Monday and start up a cooperative hat factory. Separating out a “spiritual sphere” from an “economic sphere” of a Mormon’s life at that time is about as impossible as trying to compartmentalize aspects of an Orthodox Jew’s life or maybe even a faithful Protestant of the same time period in the eastern US.

Second, the place where Mormons had settled was to them Zion or the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God was both the physical place prepared for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the righteous people who lived there who were to be prepared to meet Him. For Mormons, the act of physically gathering and settling as a community was immensely important in their doctrine, and it made the physical place where they settled sacred. (BTW, an interesting read that explores the Utah side of this idea are the first couple of chapters of: W. Paul Reeve, Making Space on the American Frontier: Mormons, Miners, and Southern Paiutes, University of Illinois Press [2006].)

“Building the Kingdom of God” was a very common phrase among Mormons of this time, and it was frequently used in a wide variety of contexts. “Building the Kingdom” could mean preaching the gospel and baptizing people, or it could mean encouraging Mormons to live more Christian lives, or it could mean plowing a field of grain. All were different facets of the same goal.

Soooooo, yes, Mormons were capitalists (for the most part—I’ll explain below). But they were capitalists with the mindset I described above. Everything was to build the Kingdom of God! Building the Kingdom was to improve yourself and your community physically and economically as well as all of the spiritual and moral stuff typically associated with religion. They were capitalists with an inordinately strong sense of community.

Because of this mindset, Mormons were willing to share the costs and labor of community improvements that in non-Mormon towns would probably require taxes or private enterprise to raise the funds to get the job done. For example, you just don't see other arid states in the western US producing the irrigation projects on the scale that the Mormons did. Irrigation in particular is very expensive because it required so much labor to dig ditches and to maintain them. For the good of the community—and by extention, to build the Kingdom of God—Mormons were willing to tithe (or donate) their labor. Poor Mormons (very often new immigrants) who couldn’t otherwise find work were set working on these community projects and they were paid out of church funds. Many of these kinds of projects were determined by top church leadership, like Brigham Young, but many other projects were determined autonomously by locals—both men and women (yay for the Female Relief Society!)—for their own communities.

And, of course, not all motivations for working on these projects were completely selfless. For example, in the beginning, community irrigation projects was just as much a matter of survival as a way to build Zion. Prior to the 1869 trans-continental railroad and the ability to easily import supplies, Mormons were fully reliant on their local agriculture to survive, and in fact suffered through several years of severe food shortages. Irrigation was a dire necessity, especially during their first 20-odd years in Deseret.

Mormons had experimented in the past with variants of highly communal economic systems. (None of them had been resounding economic successes.) They experimented with it again in Utah, generally calling these efforts part of the United Order plan. Some of these efforts relied on “consecration” which meant giving your property to the church (this was above and beyond tithing required of all Mormons), and then the church returning how ever much property you needed to function. Essentially it was a form of redistributing wealth with the idea that the rich would fill the needs of the poor, and then there would be no rich or poor.

There was no one-size-fits-all approach in Utah. Most communities didn’t rely on consecration, but instead pooled their efforts to form cooperative enterprises that could take the form of agricultural improvements, or small factories such as a woolen mill or a shoe factory, or co-ops like, most famously, the Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institute (aka ZCMI which was one of the earliest department stores in the US).

Leonard Arrington divided the different ways the United Order was administered in early Utah into 4 types (all of the places he names are towns in Utah):

First, there were the St. George-type orders in which persons in the community contributed all of their economic property to the Order and received differential wages and dividends depending upon their labor and the property contributed. Gains were achieved through the increased specialization of labor and the rationalization of agriculture by cooperative farming. . . .

A second type of United Order did not involve the consecration of all one's property or labor, but contemplated an increase in the community ownership and operation of cooperative enterprises. This is the Brigham City plan, and . . . the United Order was simply used as a device to reinforce and extend the cooperative network already in existence. . . .

A third type of United Order was essentially a modification of the Brigham City arrangement. Designed for wards in the larger cities of the territory--Salt Lake City, Ogden, Provo, and Logan--a single cooperative or corporation was organized in each ward to promote some needed enterprise. All ward members were asked to participate in financing it. The theory seems to have been that . . . while there would be little or no opportunity for cooperative labor, surplus capital would be mobilized to create employment and develop the territory. . . .

Perhaps the most interesting of the orders were those established on a communal plan. . . Settlers contributed all their property to the community United Order, had no private property, shared more or less equally in the common product, and lived and ate as a well-regulated family. (Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 330-333.)

By the numbers, most Mormons participated in the third type of Order that Arrington describes. (The fourth, “most interesting” type are by far outliers, but at least one community—Orderville—managed to make their system work for decades.) The majority of Mormons owned their own property and worked to get rich. They saw themselves as stewards responsible for righteously overseeing the money, property, and land they owned.

So, basically, most Mormons were capitalists, but they had veins of varying degrees of communalism running throughout the Territory of Deseret. And all Mormons, essentially without exception, were highly invested in their communities, and that personal investment showed in successful communal projects.

So, how does this fit in with Worster? I’m afraid I don’t know, because I’ve not read any of his stuff. What do you think of him? Is he worth putting on my to-read list if I’m interested in the history of the US West?

TL;DR: Yes, Mormons were capitalists, but the majority of Mormons were highly involved in communal projects that benefited the community or church at large (but some few Mormons shared all of their property with their immediate neighbors and were clearly not capitalists).