That mainly seems to happen at the large scale. At the small, community scale, there are plenty of examples of communal societies with many decades of history

That mainly seems to happen at the large scale. At the small, community scale, there are plenty of examples of communal societies with many decades of history that continue as an ongoing concern. For example, the Bruderhof's in New York and Pennsylvania: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruderhof_Communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruderhof_Communities