this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Communism does work on a communal level - it's no coincidence they're rooted in the same word - but it absolutely needs a level of accountability at the top that can only come from actually knowing the people they're responsible for. Once you get beyond a couple of hundred people in a community at most, and it stops being an "everyone knows everyone" kind of thing, communism is just far too susceptible to corruption.
My gaming group takes a somewhat communist approach to starting out in survival games - Minecraft, ARK, etc - and it works well. No-one's going to destroy any friendships over half a stack of stone and two bits of cooked food so corruption isn't an issue. Plus it's more efficient for us to work together at that point rather than all try to individually collect everything we need. Sure, it's just video games, but it shows the system can work and have benefits. It just doesn't scale up at all.
Exactly. In the context of a small tribe, a family structure, a friend group, or a small commune, communism works. Why? Because there are social methods of enforcement. That is, if you're a greedy dick, everyone else will know and ostracize you for it. Thus, you have an incentive to play along fairly.
But once you get to a larger society — past Dunbar's number — you can no longer keep track of everyone and whether they're trustworthy or not. This allows bad actors to not play fairly with minimal consequence, breaking the system of relationships and trust that had allowed the system to work in the first place.