[vvpan]

Perhaps the point of communes is not to convert the whole world forever, but to create the world you envision around yourself. Temporality becomes real only when one has a vantage point in the future and through written record. That it did not last until this very moment does not make a commune or a set of any conditions any less real to the people who participated in it. So I don't think one can say that they "failed", they actually succeeded.

[toasterlovin]

We can choose to define our terms however we want, I guess, but the bottom line is that these communes all set out to start some kind of community and the communities they created no longer exist. In my book, that is a failure to achieve the objective.

[k-mcgrady]

>> "[They] all set out to start some kind of community"

>> "the communities they created"

So the objective was to start a community, which you say they did.

[zbyte64]

Call it an experiment. Sure the communities failed, but they succeeded in giving insightful social data.