Founding self-sustaining communes is legal, even under the current arrangement. In fact, Israel already has them with its system of Kibbutzim. But I guess the inhibitions towards inplementing such a system elsewhere would be to get the land you'll need to build such communes on, am I right?
Theoretically it should be possible to just do something like that. In practice it isn't for a variety of reasons:
- institutional bias for the
status quo, mainly built into property rights - not just buying land or amassing the capital to pay for for machinery, education/training and necessary materials, but the wide (and currently fast-expanding array) of
legal monopolies barring entry into businesses.
- organizational difficulties: 1) people do not necessarily care to think in the long-term, or not all people are inclined to do so, and declaring this kind of independence would require taking risks and making sacrifices; 2) those who have the most to bring into the table (more experience, more capital) are the ones who are relatively better-off in capitalist society and may expect that their leverage there will give them a greater pay-off. Etc.
- possible "political" instability of cooperative associations: even if they do give better odds of economic returns to the average worker, through a more equal sharing of the products of work, the issue of how to distribute
power remains. That was the one which has kept "the left" internally divided from the start.
They're not insurmountable: socialists or communists can capture political power and change laws to weaken or the disband legal monopolies of the plutocracy in a variety of ways; they can put their differences aside to successfully campaign for trying a communist organization of production (though those differences are likely to return later), and someone may yet come up with some power-sharing idea both workable and agreeable to most people. But they are not
easy to solve!
There is, though, one reason for optimist: every other alternative (that I can think off, at least) is riddled with as many or more tensions and conflicts. Get a society with enough material wealth and only the distribution of power remains a problem, wealth in a society of abundance may even become meaningless as a measure of status or a tool of power. The optimistic view that socialism is inevitable as a result of technical progress seems likely to me, even if the speed of progress is disappointing. It anything will stand in its way it is not lack of resources, but opposition to its full use by those who would have scarcity remain so as to preserve a social order where status and power are measured in terms of control of (artificially) scarce resources...
