There is immense power when a group of people with similar interests gets together to work toward the same goals.

For capitalism to develop, customary ties between people and the land must be severed, and communal obligations among people disrupted.

A commune of library employees in Moscow created an "extreme" commune in which all clothing - including undergarments - was collectivized. According to Mehnert, if a communard preferred to wear his or her own underclothes "it would be characterized as a backslide into darkest capitalism; as prejudice originating in a petit-bourgeois ideology".