‘Communism works poorly on a small scale’
What about tribal societies where you’d have to share a common pool of resources? Though that starts breaking down quickly once you get beyond a certain size since social stratification takes hold. I know it’s not actually communism, but some of the ideas are there.
Yeah, primitive communism's the clear counterpoint to that -- and unfortunately, the sort of people who usually use the "communism fails at small scales" argument overlap with the people who would consider their own society inherently superior to those tribes, usually by dint of having conquered them, which is usually where this derails into nationalism. Setting that aside, there are legitimate questions to be asked about how the definition of need changes when a society moves away from the subsistence level, as well as how abilities change as people are able to specialize; in an overly reductive nutshell, whether a society can be said to be communist by default, having solved the integral challenges of communism, when everyone's abilities and needs are unambiguous and largely homogeneous.
I don't particularly endorse that argument, since it amounts to calling an inconvenient solution trivial, but nevertheless it's worthwhile to consider.
That all having been said, when I say people complain about communism not working on a small scale, I mean in the sense of the problems I listed parenthetically: how the bureaucracy swells to account for every loaf of bread, in their understanding, and people slip through the cracks, and how individual workers have no incentive to perform beyond requirements without what would eventually amount to a pay rise and therefore some manner of wages. Communists worry about multinational corporations rather than lemonade stands; capitalists worry about individuals more than countries.