The religious and spiritual communes are often regarded as attempts to create utopian societies and their success has inspired many thinkers and philosophers to try to design ideal social organizations that people could live happily and peacefully under.
The first to apply political ideology to the communal model were communists, left-wing socialists, and anarchists. These groups saw the Commune as a model for the liberated society that will come after the masses are liberated from capitalism, a society based on participatory democracy from the grass roots up.
In Marxist theory, the commune is a form of political organization for the proletariat, sort of poor man’s parliament and which supported the communist principle of collectivism.
The communist version of communes was more political and focused on social organization. Like many of the religious communes, socialist communes were also organized around an industry or farming in accordance to the communist principle that the people should control of the means of production rather than an oligarchy.
Despite the lofty ideals and common-sense principles of a communal society, the reality put into practise under the socialists was a different animal altogether.
Under Communism in Russia, farming communities were forced to form collectivist communes under the pretext of freeing the workers from landlords and improving production. The result was the famine of 1932–1933 in which estimates of the number of people starved to death range from 5.5 to 8 million, with some estimates going even higher.
In 1958 in China, Mao Tse-tung, apparently oblivious to the Russian example, likewise undertook one of the most ambitious and, in terms of the sheer number of people involved, staggering social experiments in modern times: the drive to bring the entire rural population of China into huge monolithic units called The Peoples’ Communes. Under the lofty title of The Great Leap Forward, Mao forced all agricultural communities to adopt a collectivist commune system.
Within a year, China was devastated by a famine that lasted three years and was responsible for between 15 to 36 million deaths.
Clearly, socialist attempts at communal living were unmitigated human disasters. It is difficult to determine whether these were genuine attempts at creating utopian societies, or merely that the noble ideals of communal societies were used as the pretext and cover for totalitarian control and mass murder. But, since the religious and spiritual communes tended to be so successful, proving the social model was workable, one must conclude the socialists never had any intention of creating a utopia.
The key lesson from socialist communism is that while small communes formed through the free and willing participation of its members can succeed, forcing large numbers of people into a communal system by a political hierarchical government guarantees disaster.