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Once I was riding a train, and the conductor announced that only some cars would open their doors at the upcoming station, because the train was longer than the

Once I was riding a train, and the conductor announced that only some cars would open their doors at the upcoming station, because the train was longer than the platform. "I wonder why?" A stranger mused. "I know," her companion sneered, "it's because some engineer designed it." She wasn't wrong per say, an engineer had designed the platform - a hundred years ago, for a different train. The train we were riding had squeeked through the legislature on a shoestring budget, reusing the existing tracks and with only a few new platforms slated to be built. And many of those were axed along the way due to budget overruns and such. It was a political miracle the train existed at all. But this passenger wasn't really looking for context. She had stereotypes and narratives that explained the situation to her satisfaction. Are you quite sure that you are engaging your faculties of critical thinking here, rather than relying on narratives and stereotypes? Does it really seem likely to you that the people doing the work you're most familiar with are the only people capable of thinking critically? Or that the feedback loops that you've had in your career are the only ones available?

WalterBright 3y ago
Let me put it this way. Marxism doesn't fly, and nobody has yet found an example of it flying. But academics continue to push Marxism. That's a massive failure of critical thinking by the people who teach it. As for engineers, they make mistakes all the time. And the mistakes are very hard to talk one's way out of. Our society is built by engineers making things that work. Your car doesn't move by talking it into moving.
- maxbond 3y ago
  I've definitely met annoying Marxists who say things that you just don't know how to respond to because they're disconnected from reality. But I've also met Marxists who weren't weird tankies, who regarded eg the Societ Union as a failure which demanded their ideas be revised. I've heard the complaint that Marxist academics are corrupting the youth many times but I just don't see any evidence for it. No one I met in school was a Marxist. And not to Godwin the conversation but it's uncomfortably close to the literal Nazi conspiracy theory/propaganda of Cultural Marxism, close enough that I suspect this is the original source of the idea (which is, to be clear, a comment on the heritage of the idea, and not a comment about you or anyone else who holds the idea), so I just can't really give much credence to it. And it feels like we're discussing politics rather than critical thinking here. I think it's valuable to have your ideas challenged and to respond to some kind of feedback loop. Reality provides pretty good feedback loops, we're in agreement there. But there are plenty of times when you can talk your way into a bad engineering decision. Not to touch a nerve, but Boeing talked the FAA into approving various bad decisions about pilot training and tolerating a single point of failure around introducing MCAS to the 737 MAX. You might say this is an exception that proves the rules because they did result in an accident, but then why shouldn't we extend that same grace to the Marxists who aren't weird tankies? I think you're discounting other forms of feedback. In the social sciences you often have limited empirical feedback because you can only analyze natural experiments, and because it's very difficult to infer a cause from statistics alone. But I think you overstate the extent to which rhetoric dominates and reason is subordinate. Sophistry doesn't have an infinite hold across space and across time. Maybe you are able to talk someone into believing a bad theory; that doesn't mean you can convince everyone or that they'll stay fooled forever. You clearly have ideas about topics in the social sciences, at a minimum that Marxism is a failure. And I believe I've seen you comment about monetary theory. So you think that these things are epistemologically tractable, right? That it's possible to know these things? So why shouldn't it be possible to organize a field of inquiry into these topics? And if it's so vague and vulnerable to sophistry, how can you be sure you haven't been taken in yourself?
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    > demanded their ideas be revised. There have been many variations on Soviet Marxism. They all failed, too. > I've heard the complaint that Marxist academics are corrupting the youth many times but I just don't see any evidence for it. Ask any of them how the free market works. They have no idea. The latest generation of youth have leaned quite a bit left. > And it feels like we're discussing politics rather than critical thinking here. Sort of. My thesis is that if someone actually applied critical thinking, they'd reject Marxism. I cannot fathom how someone can claim to be educated in critical thinking yet embrace Marxism, a system that fails every time it has been tried History is full of examples. Did you know that the US has had over 20,000 communes tried? With a 100% failure rate. > why shouldn't we extend that same grace to the Marxists who aren't weird tankies? Because they've had the grace. It still doesn't work. > how can you be sure you haven't been taken in yourself? Tens of thousands of attempts to implement Marxism, with a 100% failure rate. > No one I met in school was a Marxist. Most Marxists deny they are Marxist, but when you listen to their philosophy, it's Marxism. BTW, there is one sphere where Marxism works. Hollywood. Hollywood loves to crank out shows where Marxism works. One of them is Star Trek. Before you all jump on me, I'm a Trekkie myself! But come on. The Enterprise is the perfect Marxist society, presided over by the incorruptible benevolent dictator. His loyal comrades are all selfless, also incorruptible, and utterly lack any ambition whatsoever other than serving the ship. Everyone selflessly shares equally. There's no money, and no crime. The bad guys, the Ferengi, are (naturally) capitalists, with their ugly faces and pointed teeth. They are always wrong about everything.
    - maxbond 3y ago
      > Tens of thousands of attempts to implement Marxism, with a 100% failure rate. Ten thousand attempts but you didn't seem to feel that the specifics of a single one would illustrate your point? It doesn't seem to me like you're making an evidentiary claim, it seems like an ideological one. And that's not an invalid thing to do but I do think we're increasingly debating politics and ideology and not discussing critical thinking. The closest you come to a specific example is here: > Did you know that the US has had over 20,000 communes tried? With a 100% failure rate. But come on, you must know that there are communes which are successful (eg Israel is well known for it's kibutzes, which are their mode of commune) and that Marxists don't have a monopoly on the concept of a commune. Eg, libertarian seasteading (which also has a rough track record) is a similar concept, but libertarians are seldom Marxists. Intentional communities usually fail, for more or less the same reason startups usually fail; it's a difficult, risky endeavor. > The latest generation of youth have leaned quite a bit left. > My thesis is that if someone actually applied critical thinking, they'd reject Marxism. I cannot fathom how someone can claim to be educated in critical thinking yet embrace Marxism[.] > Most Marxists deny they are Marxist, but when you listen to their philosophy, it's Marxism. To be completely honest, it seems to me like "Marxist" to you means, "someone who is young, politically left of center, and who's ideas I disagree with." Frankly I don't think you have a good grasp on what Marxism is? You're mostly using generalities and when you do get specific, it's usually weird stuff like "the crew of the Enterprise are loyal and selfless" that's entirely tangential. (The notable exception being where you mentioned Marx's prediction that capitalism would implode.) The Hollywood stuff is really reaching. Star Trek is utopian, but utopianism isn't Marxism, and the Ferengi aren't the villains (except in a handful of TNG episodes and one Voyager episode - and I haven't watched the newer stuff like Picard, so perhaps I'm missing some here and there). They're mostly in Deep Space Nine (where they're in nearly every episode), where they are protagonists. The workers do not own the means of production in Star Trek, there is no class struggle, there's nothing about historical materialism, there's nothing I can think of (also a lifelong Trekkie) remotely Marxist about it. If you lump Communism together with Marxism (they're not identical concepts but they're close enough, sure), and take the definition of Communism as "a stateless, classless, moneyless society where workers own the means of production," then there are some surface level similarities. The Federation is moneyless, and while they aren't classless (they're a meritocracy, so class still exists), they are egalitarian. That's pretty thin as far as it being Marxist or Communist. It's techno-utopianism, something I'd associate more with Libertarianism (in that I mostly hear it from people of that persuasion, eg Elon Musk [an avowed anti-Marxist], though I wouldn't call Star Trek Libertarian either). To respond more specifically: > The Enterprise is the perfect Marxist society, presided over by the incorruptible benevolent dictator. His loyal comrades are all selfless, also incorruptible, and utterly lack any ambition whatsoever other than serving the ship. Everyone selflessly shares equally. There's no money, and no crime. None of these things are related to Marxism (except money as discussed earlier), and there's tons of episodes about flaws in their society or crimes that happen. You're objecting to utopianism. > The bad guys, the Ferengi, are (naturally) capitalists, with their ugly faces and pointed teeth. They are always wrong about everything. They're regularly the heroes of the story in DS9, where their negotiating skill or enlightened self interest saves the day. (An arbitrary example from the top of my mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdQcGzbpN7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdQcGzbpN7s - in which the Ferengi Quark convinces someone to pursue diplomacy over violence because the "price of peace" is at all at time low)
- pixl97 3y ago
  Critical thinking isn't just realizing that Marxism has problems, it's also realizing whatever you've bought into whole hog has problems that will lead to the collapse if not remediated.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    > Marxism has problems It has deep, fundamental problems. > it's also realizing whatever you've bought into whole hog has problems that will lead to the collapse if not remediated. Marxism predicts the imminent failure of free markets, but free markets keep right on working.
    - maxbond 3y ago
      Is the free market working? Why can't we seem to make progress on income inequality and climate change? What happened to the 15 hour work week Keynes predicted? If free markets have no "deep or fundamental" problems, and free markets are our modus operandi, why aren't we in living in some kind of Jetsons utopia? Is it really critical thinking to score ideas pass/fail like that? When I think of critical thinking I think of something synthetic - improving ideas, rather than binning them into narrow categories. Deciding that an idea is worthless and doesn't need any further consideration - that would seem to me to be the death of critical thinking.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        > Is the free market working? Yes. > Why can't we seem to make progress on income inequality Income inequality is a fake problem, invented by Marxists because the poor in America are actually rather well off (note that the poor from other countries are desperate to get in to the US). It's largely driven by envy. > What happened to the 15 hour work week Start a company and work 15 hours a week if you like. > climate change We'd be a lot better off if the leftists would stop blocking the most pragmatic solution - nuclear power. Besides, communists have a very sorry environmental record. > why aren't we in living in some kind of Jetsons utopia? We are. Have you noticed that we have quite a few of the Jetsons' futuristic gadgets? > Deciding that an idea is worthless and doesn't need any further consideration - that would seem to me to be the death of critical thinking. You're welcome to think all you like about how great Marxism is. If you try to implement it here, I'll vote against you.
- gmerc 3y ago
  Humans dreamt of flying of millennial, but until the 19th century the first sentence of your answer applied as well.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    If humans could be engineered, you might be right. You're also implicitly right that Marxists believe they can alter fundamental human nature, aka the "Soviet Man". No Marxist organization has ever altered human nature one iota. Even the most committed Marxists remain, fundamentally, selfish humans subject to their base emotions.
    - lukev 3y ago
      In the words of Ursula Le Guin: "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings" Fundamental social and economic system change can, and has, happened. The fact that we can't yet see exactly what the other side looks like from where we are now is not contraindicative of that fact.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        Le Guin wrote works of fiction, where anything can work. > Fundamental social and economic system change can, and has, happened. The selfishness and greed of people has not changed at all. Every society that moved towards Marxism became worse off.
        maxbond 3y ago
        Okay, I'm sorry, but you can't talk about critical thinking and then reject Le Guin's historical observation because she's a fiction author. That's a bridge too far for me to respond to seriously. That's the complete absence of critical thinking, that is a shallow dismissal based on rote categories. We might as well conclude that your views on Marxism aren't valid because you're an engineer rather than a political scientist or historian, or that your views on teaching critical thinking aren't valid because you aren't an educator. Which would make this entire conversation meaningless.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Let me put it this way. Marxism doesn't fly, and nobody has yet found an example of it flying The best example of it "flying" is the evolution of the economic systems of the industrialized world in the direction Marx laid out and away from the system he described as "capitalism" since his time, and particularly from the early-mid-20th Century. Far from a perfect example, but there it is. Lots of people say "Marxism can't work" because Leninism, which, viewed cynically, is a thin veneer of Marxist rhetoric around naked authoritarianism or, viewed generously in its own overt terms, is an adaptation of Marxism to bypass the extensive period of the development of market capitalism and proletarian class consciousness under it, has had pretty poor results in the real world. But Leninism's failures can tell something about Leninism, but very little about Marxism.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Voluntary Marxism doesn't work, either. See the 20,000 American communes, which all failed, and the Israel kibbutzen, which cannot survive without generous subsidy from the government. It's legal to start a commune in the US. You can always start one, and prove voluntary Marxism works.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Voluntary Marxism doesn't work, either There's no such thing as “Voluntary Marxism”. > See the 20,000 American communes, which all failed, and the Israel kibbutzen, which cannot survive without generous subsidy from the government. Its false to say all American communes have failed (in fact, recent counts have many more with a much larger total population than when they were getting lots of attention, they just aren't an interesting novelty anymore), but there is nothing in Marxist theory that involves small voluntary communities doing their own thing separate from the state they are embedded in. Some communes may have been started by people who were personally Marxist in ideology, but communes in the sense that you are referring to have little to do with Marxism (I suppose that some Marxist might adopt a praxis in which they are seen as a means to advance a broader revolution which is Marxist, but that's still doesn't make their success or failure relevant to Marxism as a system.)

WalterBright 3y ago

Let me put it this way. Marxism doesn't fly, and nobody has yet found an example of it flying. But academics continue to push Marxism. That's a massive failure of critical thinking by the people who teach it. As for engineers, they make mistakes all the time. And the mistakes are very hard to talk one's way out of. Our society is built by engineers making things that work. Your car doesn't move by talking it into moving.

maxbond 3y ago
I've definitely met annoying Marxists who say things that you just don't know how to respond to because they're disconnected from reality. But I've also met Marxists who weren't weird tankies, who regarded eg the Societ Union as a failure which demanded their ideas be revised. I've heard the complaint that Marxist academics are corrupting the youth many times but I just don't see any evidence for it. No one I met in school was a Marxist. And not to Godwin the conversation but it's uncomfortably close to the literal Nazi conspiracy theory/propaganda of Cultural Marxism, close enough that I suspect this is the original source of the idea (which is, to be clear, a comment on the heritage of the idea, and not a comment about you or anyone else who holds the idea), so I just can't really give much credence to it. And it feels like we're discussing politics rather than critical thinking here. I think it's valuable to have your ideas challenged and to respond to some kind of feedback loop. Reality provides pretty good feedback loops, we're in agreement there. But there are plenty of times when you can talk your way into a bad engineering decision. Not to touch a nerve, but Boeing talked the FAA into approving various bad decisions about pilot training and tolerating a single point of failure around introducing MCAS to the 737 MAX. You might say this is an exception that proves the rules because they did result in an accident, but then why shouldn't we extend that same grace to the Marxists who aren't weird tankies? I think you're discounting other forms of feedback. In the social sciences you often have limited empirical feedback because you can only analyze natural experiments, and because it's very difficult to infer a cause from statistics alone. But I think you overstate the extent to which rhetoric dominates and reason is subordinate. Sophistry doesn't have an infinite hold across space and across time. Maybe you are able to talk someone into believing a bad theory; that doesn't mean you can convince everyone or that they'll stay fooled forever. You clearly have ideas about topics in the social sciences, at a minimum that Marxism is a failure. And I believe I've seen you comment about monetary theory. So you think that these things are epistemologically tractable, right? That it's possible to know these things? So why shouldn't it be possible to organize a field of inquiry into these topics? And if it's so vague and vulnerable to sophistry, how can you be sure you haven't been taken in yourself?
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > demanded their ideas be revised. There have been many variations on Soviet Marxism. They all failed, too. > I've heard the complaint that Marxist academics are corrupting the youth many times but I just don't see any evidence for it. Ask any of them how the free market works. They have no idea. The latest generation of youth have leaned quite a bit left. > And it feels like we're discussing politics rather than critical thinking here. Sort of. My thesis is that if someone actually applied critical thinking, they'd reject Marxism. I cannot fathom how someone can claim to be educated in critical thinking yet embrace Marxism, a system that fails every time it has been tried History is full of examples. Did you know that the US has had over 20,000 communes tried? With a 100% failure rate. > why shouldn't we extend that same grace to the Marxists who aren't weird tankies? Because they've had the grace. It still doesn't work. > how can you be sure you haven't been taken in yourself? Tens of thousands of attempts to implement Marxism, with a 100% failure rate. > No one I met in school was a Marxist. Most Marxists deny they are Marxist, but when you listen to their philosophy, it's Marxism. BTW, there is one sphere where Marxism works. Hollywood. Hollywood loves to crank out shows where Marxism works. One of them is Star Trek. Before you all jump on me, I'm a Trekkie myself! But come on. The Enterprise is the perfect Marxist society, presided over by the incorruptible benevolent dictator. His loyal comrades are all selfless, also incorruptible, and utterly lack any ambition whatsoever other than serving the ship. Everyone selflessly shares equally. There's no money, and no crime. The bad guys, the Ferengi, are (naturally) capitalists, with their ugly faces and pointed teeth. They are always wrong about everything.
  - maxbond 3y ago
    > Tens of thousands of attempts to implement Marxism, with a 100% failure rate. Ten thousand attempts but you didn't seem to feel that the specifics of a single one would illustrate your point? It doesn't seem to me like you're making an evidentiary claim, it seems like an ideological one. And that's not an invalid thing to do but I do think we're increasingly debating politics and ideology and not discussing critical thinking. The closest you come to a specific example is here: > Did you know that the US has had over 20,000 communes tried? With a 100% failure rate. But come on, you must know that there are communes which are successful (eg Israel is well known for it's kibutzes, which are their mode of commune) and that Marxists don't have a monopoly on the concept of a commune. Eg, libertarian seasteading (which also has a rough track record) is a similar concept, but libertarians are seldom Marxists. Intentional communities usually fail, for more or less the same reason startups usually fail; it's a difficult, risky endeavor. > The latest generation of youth have leaned quite a bit left. > My thesis is that if someone actually applied critical thinking, they'd reject Marxism. I cannot fathom how someone can claim to be educated in critical thinking yet embrace Marxism[.] > Most Marxists deny they are Marxist, but when you listen to their philosophy, it's Marxism. To be completely honest, it seems to me like "Marxist" to you means, "someone who is young, politically left of center, and who's ideas I disagree with." Frankly I don't think you have a good grasp on what Marxism is? You're mostly using generalities and when you do get specific, it's usually weird stuff like "the crew of the Enterprise are loyal and selfless" that's entirely tangential. (The notable exception being where you mentioned Marx's prediction that capitalism would implode.) The Hollywood stuff is really reaching. Star Trek is utopian, but utopianism isn't Marxism, and the Ferengi aren't the villains (except in a handful of TNG episodes and one Voyager episode - and I haven't watched the newer stuff like Picard, so perhaps I'm missing some here and there). They're mostly in Deep Space Nine (where they're in nearly every episode), where they are protagonists. The workers do not own the means of production in Star Trek, there is no class struggle, there's nothing about historical materialism, there's nothing I can think of (also a lifelong Trekkie) remotely Marxist about it. If you lump Communism together with Marxism (they're not identical concepts but they're close enough, sure), and take the definition of Communism as "a stateless, classless, moneyless society where workers own the means of production," then there are some surface level similarities. The Federation is moneyless, and while they aren't classless (they're a meritocracy, so class still exists), they are egalitarian. That's pretty thin as far as it being Marxist or Communist. It's techno-utopianism, something I'd associate more with Libertarianism (in that I mostly hear it from people of that persuasion, eg Elon Musk [an avowed anti-Marxist], though I wouldn't call Star Trek Libertarian either). To respond more specifically: > The Enterprise is the perfect Marxist society, presided over by the incorruptible benevolent dictator. His loyal comrades are all selfless, also incorruptible, and utterly lack any ambition whatsoever other than serving the ship. Everyone selflessly shares equally. There's no money, and no crime. None of these things are related to Marxism (except money as discussed earlier), and there's tons of episodes about flaws in their society or crimes that happen. You're objecting to utopianism. > The bad guys, the Ferengi, are (naturally) capitalists, with their ugly faces and pointed teeth. They are always wrong about everything. They're regularly the heroes of the story in DS9, where their negotiating skill or enlightened self interest saves the day. (An arbitrary example from the top of my mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdQcGzbpN7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdQcGzbpN7s - in which the Ferengi Quark convinces someone to pursue diplomacy over violence because the "price of peace" is at all at time low)
pixl97 3y ago
Critical thinking isn't just realizing that Marxism has problems, it's also realizing whatever you've bought into whole hog has problems that will lead to the collapse if not remediated.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > Marxism has problems It has deep, fundamental problems. > it's also realizing whatever you've bought into whole hog has problems that will lead to the collapse if not remediated. Marxism predicts the imminent failure of free markets, but free markets keep right on working.
  - maxbond 3y ago
    Is the free market working? Why can't we seem to make progress on income inequality and climate change? What happened to the 15 hour work week Keynes predicted? If free markets have no "deep or fundamental" problems, and free markets are our modus operandi, why aren't we in living in some kind of Jetsons utopia? Is it really critical thinking to score ideas pass/fail like that? When I think of critical thinking I think of something synthetic - improving ideas, rather than binning them into narrow categories. Deciding that an idea is worthless and doesn't need any further consideration - that would seem to me to be the death of critical thinking.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      > Is the free market working? Yes. > Why can't we seem to make progress on income inequality Income inequality is a fake problem, invented by Marxists because the poor in America are actually rather well off (note that the poor from other countries are desperate to get in to the US). It's largely driven by envy. > What happened to the 15 hour work week Start a company and work 15 hours a week if you like. > climate change We'd be a lot better off if the leftists would stop blocking the most pragmatic solution - nuclear power. Besides, communists have a very sorry environmental record. > why aren't we in living in some kind of Jetsons utopia? We are. Have you noticed that we have quite a few of the Jetsons' futuristic gadgets? > Deciding that an idea is worthless and doesn't need any further consideration - that would seem to me to be the death of critical thinking. You're welcome to think all you like about how great Marxism is. If you try to implement it here, I'll vote against you.
gmerc 3y ago
Humans dreamt of flying of millennial, but until the 19th century the first sentence of your answer applied as well.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  If humans could be engineered, you might be right. You're also implicitly right that Marxists believe they can alter fundamental human nature, aka the "Soviet Man". No Marxist organization has ever altered human nature one iota. Even the most committed Marxists remain, fundamentally, selfish humans subject to their base emotions.
  - lukev 3y ago
    In the words of Ursula Le Guin: "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings" Fundamental social and economic system change can, and has, happened. The fact that we can't yet see exactly what the other side looks like from where we are now is not contraindicative of that fact.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      Le Guin wrote works of fiction, where anything can work. > Fundamental social and economic system change can, and has, happened. The selfishness and greed of people has not changed at all. Every society that moved towards Marxism became worse off.
      - maxbond 3y ago
        Okay, I'm sorry, but you can't talk about critical thinking and then reject Le Guin's historical observation because she's a fiction author. That's a bridge too far for me to respond to seriously. That's the complete absence of critical thinking, that is a shallow dismissal based on rote categories. We might as well conclude that your views on Marxism aren't valid because you're an engineer rather than a political scientist or historian, or that your views on teaching critical thinking aren't valid because you aren't an educator. Which would make this entire conversation meaningless.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Let me put it this way. Marxism doesn't fly, and nobody has yet found an example of it flying The best example of it "flying" is the evolution of the economic systems of the industrialized world in the direction Marx laid out and away from the system he described as "capitalism" since his time, and particularly from the early-mid-20th Century. Far from a perfect example, but there it is. Lots of people say "Marxism can't work" because Leninism, which, viewed cynically, is a thin veneer of Marxist rhetoric around naked authoritarianism or, viewed generously in its own overt terms, is an adaptation of Marxism to bypass the extensive period of the development of market capitalism and proletarian class consciousness under it, has had pretty poor results in the real world. But Leninism's failures can tell something about Leninism, but very little about Marxism.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Voluntary Marxism doesn't work, either. See the 20,000 American communes, which all failed, and the Israel kibbutzen, which cannot survive without generous subsidy from the government. It's legal to start a commune in the US. You can always start one, and prove voluntary Marxism works.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Voluntary Marxism doesn't work, either There's no such thing as “Voluntary Marxism”. > See the 20,000 American communes, which all failed, and the Israel kibbutzen, which cannot survive without generous subsidy from the government. Its false to say all American communes have failed (in fact, recent counts have many more with a much larger total population than when they were getting lots of attention, they just aren't an interesting novelty anymore), but there is nothing in Marxist theory that involves small voluntary communities doing their own thing separate from the state they are embedded in. Some communes may have been started by people who were personally Marxist in ideology, but communes in the sense that you are referring to have little to do with Marxism (I suppose that some Marxist might adopt a praxis in which they are seen as a means to advance a broader revolution which is Marxist, but that's still doesn't make their success or failure relevant to Marxism as a system.)