I was thinking about Karl Marx and Communism. Wouldn't Communism work better in small communities rather than whole countries. I mean Communism can be established in a country, but it is divided, into small sections, like towns or small communities, and the wealth was distributed around the communities rather than the whole country. Wouldn't that work better? Or is that in place somewhere? I mean wasn't that what Karl Marx thought it should have worked, for small communities?
Yes, the smaller the commune the better the chances of it 'working'. That's what I think anarcho-communism is all about. But once the more productive members start to feel taken advantage of they will leave, and that is the fatal flaw of communism, and usually why violence is required to sustain it.
Communing must occur inbetween localized groups, but the collaborative efforts could trancend their community and operate with larger scales of human cooperation. The communist idea though is simple and effective, it is very easy to provide for everyone when you recycle your materials, share, and continue to create.
Communism doesn't work, period. If you want to say it 'works' in a communal 'society', that's fine, but that's not an actual Government. It would never work in a society of more than like 100 people or so. At some point, labor needs to be given value other than 'helping everyone', which is really just an ethical cop-out to get people to do things they don't want to, short of using force. Communism also has no price system/mechanism, and has no private ownership, therefore the true value of items is literally a mystery. In the USSR, they had to price items based on what capitalist (semi-capitalist) countries around them were charging for goods, because they had no clue.
A family is essentially a commune, and they seem to work... Although my family currently consists of 5 people... Sharing a room with a roommate is also a commune. Most people share things like food and furniture and split the bill down the middle. Communism works, there just needs to be a motive other than 'helping everyone' like love or strangely enough, finances. And yes, always on the small scale... Everything is better the smaller it is. Smaller means closer to the individual, more power to the individual, more value in the individual.
my own personal (highly subjective) estimate places the top population of successful communism around 5,000. and that would be a long stretch.
A true Communist state has never existed so we really dont know if it would work or not. Mini Communist systems (communes) have and do work.
this is true. communism has always been co-opted by the existing or emergent ruling class. but that in itself is kind of why it will only work in a micro setting.
Communism is best when run from the communities in a country but there also has to be a lot of other communist countries. If not you will have the situation in the cold war where russia was being outnumbered by capitalists. It would be very hard for a new capitalist country to succeed if it had 10+ countries with nukes pointing at them, economic sanctions and sabotage. Plus russia hadn't shaken off its authoritarianism yet(nor has it).
only if you wanted to be a 'superpower' which, by definition, a communism would not. yeah russia has always been an autocracy/oligarchy....china too. i wonder how the world at large would view communism/socialism if it had not been so readily co-opted by the existing autocracies in the world?