"All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had."
- Acts 4:32

A communist society would be a community where all members agree on two basic rules: first, anybody able to work would voluntarily do its best to produce goods and services for the community and second, all members of the society would adopt a frugal lifestyle, consuming only what they really need. In such a society, private property - of the means of production and even of everything else - is pointless and you therefore don't need markets or money. But the most important feature of communism, the key aspect that distinguish it from socialism is that such a society would be based on voluntarism. Communism is a stateless society where social cooperation is neither driven by individual interests nor by state coercion but by a common will to contribute to the well-being of the overall community.

To be sure, the Soviet Union has never, at any point of its history, been a communist society. It was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a system that was entirely based on state coercion. In the original Marxist project, socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat was the intermediate phase between capitalism and communism. Communism was the final destination - at least officially - and socialism was the way to get there. But as a matter of fact, former USSR just like all the attempts to build a communist society remained stuck in the inferior phase of the process: brutal, totalitarian, socialist regimes. Rewording Trotsky's famous analogy, the chrysalis never turned into a butterfly.

But does that really mean that communism, as they say, has never been tried? Certainly not: communism or, at least, some form of communism have been tried since the early childhood of human societies, it still exists today and, as far as I know, it seems to be working fairly well... but only on small scale. One of the very best example I could come up with are hutterite colonies. Save for the religious aspect (I know, I know...), these people live under communism or, at least, something very close to communism. They own virtually everything in common, they only use money to trade with the outside - capitalist - world and community management is ensured by three elected leaders. And guess what? Some of these communities in North America have worked that way for more than a century and they are flourishing!

So what's happening there? Why don't we have any example of workable, large-scale communist societies while smaller communities seems to live and flourish that way?

Well, here is what I think: when you build a communist society, you have to find a way to coordinate everybody's efforts without using individual incentives and with a minimum of coercion. That is, you must define common objectives - should we [...]