When the commons are small enough, community pressure can work just as well. The issue is largely that of scaling. Communism works pretty well inside a nuclear family. Somewhat less well but sort of doable between roommates who are good friends. After careful selection of truly communal minded people, it can be stretched to the Dunbar number i.e. the kibbutz movement. Beyond that number, not at all.

I have this impression that succesful capitalisms often rely in microcommunisms on the nuclear family, extended family, close friends, or old-employees-who-are-almost-family-now level. When you have to transact for everything, things get tiresome and wasteful quickly. So it is useful to have small units of highly communal minded people work together and not transact but rather have on their micro level a to each according to needs, from each according to ability attitude (this is how a normal family works) because they know each other very well and know their needs and abilities, they cannot really be faked. And transacting being done between these small groups, not between individuals.

Ironically, also tragically, I think the problems of Eastern Europe partially come from Soviet type communism breaking down these natural microcommunisms, so now you see all these sad things like siblings fighting over inheritance instead of solving it amiably, or even tiny businesses operating on the boss gives orders to everybody level instead of the everybody notices what needs to be done and does it level (which would be natural for a family type small business where people are on good relations). This saps energy and effort away from focusing on transacting where it needs to be focused on i.e. between these groups.

The commons itself works. Read the 'Comedy of the commons' which was written as an answer to Garret Hardin's 'tragedy of the commons'.