Actually, it works BETTER in a large system with skilled individuals and formalized democratic procedures / profit sharing. A small unskilled bunch of hippies not being able to boost-strap a corporation proves nothing. Different systems succeed on different scales.
Try running the Third Reich with half a dozen people. Then say Nazism would have been an ineffective way to manage a nation.
Want to know what a democratic socialist workplace would look like? look up
Ricardo Semler CEO of Semco in Brazil, he radically changed the company he inherited from his father to be run in a democratic fashion, similar to how you could run things under Marxism. The result - they went from $4 million a year to $200 million a year in revenue. Because the workers get half the profits, they work hard.
I find it hard to believe workers will bust a gut for half the profits without needing to be whipped, while the right-wingers would have us believe that if they were working for 100% of the profits, they'd get lazy.
saying adult workers won't work for their own interests, but need a "boss" to hold the whip to them, is the true heights of paternalism, whether government or corporate-style. Because we're constantly told how if the bosses get more money, it'll incentivize them to boost productivity. It seems it's opposite day, every day, when talking about the effect of profits on rich or poor.
Basically Marx's "socialism" stage, talked about workers talking control of the workplace, i.e. employee owned corporations run democratically (by a council called a commune), just like the example of Semco. Marx's fundamental idea, and it took me a while to realize this, is that if the workers ARE the shareholders, then there is no fundamental enmity, no labor/management disputes, no unions. In fact, the unions are weak in Semco, because the conditions are so good and everyone gets a vote on company decisions.
In Marx's model there is no room for bosses, whether they be company bosses, party bosses, union bosses, or government bosses.
In fact, Marx's definition of Communism was the local communes forming federations, making the nation state obsolete. Just like worker ownership of the workplace collapsed the hierarchy of business, the union of many communes was to collapse the heirarchy of government. Note that competition and trade still exist under this basic model, because each commune can only make a range of products, they will have to trade for other essentials, and there are no monopolies or empires (because each factory is owned by the workers there).