..simply do not produce enough to sustain themselves. Capitalist farmers do, with a surplus they sell. All such voluntary collectives have collapsed (unless they get subsidies from the government).
> have nothing to do with mass slaughter
I strongly suggest reading "The Black Book of Communism". Every advocate of communism needs to read it, if only to prepare an answer.
You're right that nothing in the principles of communism suggest mass slaughter. But those who try to implement it time and again resort to it. The reason is fairly straightforward - people resist having all their property expropriated and being forced to work on collectives. The response is to kill them.
Again and again.
"having all their property expropriated and being forced to work on collectives" is also not a principle of communism. Forced labor is not a communist value.
In simple terms, capitalist farmers produce a surplus, kibbutz farmers produce a deficit. Kibbutzen operate within a market economy and have all the resources of it that are available to the capitalist farmer - they still can't make a go of it.
> not a principle of communism.
Collective ownership of the means of production means confiscating it.
> Forced labor
When the collective decides that certain work must be done, and with no market forces, that means assigning people to the jobs. I.e. forced labor.
If you wanted to say that there are major fundamental problems with having no markets, I'd agree completely. Communism is not a set of ideas necessarily anti-market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
Or, to be pragmatic, if we agreed for this exchange that "communism" meant precisely an economic structure without markets, then I'd agree that's simply unworkable. All of my points in this thread rely on my assumption that the term "communism" refers to a wider scope of ideas and models, some of which have some merit but which nobody ever should dogmatically advocate (nor should they dogmatically reject as being synonymous with Lenin/Stalin/Mao).
And communist ideas also had zero to do with those countries committing mass slaughter.
Communism, even in a very flawed form, has indeed succeeded. See Cuba. The main reason they would be wealthier with capitalism is because the U.S. would have proactive economic ties instead of working to isolate them. Given their isolation and inherent lack-of-wealth relatively speaking, communism there is at least in a state no reasonable person can describe as 0% successful, even if you have points of criticism.
In terms of kibbutzen, you do realize that the entire premise of self-suffiency, i.e. sustinance farming, is basically the definition of poverty, right? I mean, the whole premise that a small community can achieve for themselves in isolation a whole decent standard of living is nonsense. We acheive the greatest standards of living through widespread connection in larger groups on larger scales. Trade and all and specialization… No effort for tiny isolated communes could ever achieve the quality of life of large cosmopolitan economies, That issue isn't a strictly communist vs capitalist one.
Communism is indeed a simplistic model that is unworkable in a rigid dogmatic sense, just like anarchy or capitalism. There's no example of pure version of any of these ever existing.
Being closed to discussing the actual ideas of communism by just talking about Stalin's atrocities or tiny communes failing is a good way to just close yourself to actually engaging with the intellectual questions. Obviously, all philosophical / political principles are distinct from the complexity of real-world economic practice. We can still discuss the principles as a way to think about and explore the issues. Communist principles, as ideas, have nothing to do with mass slaughter.