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.