Here's a writeup on the communes by a Trotskyist. He brings up some good points about how the communes were not the greatest and were actually incredibly hierarchical and extractive. I would say that the need for them is non-existent now seeing as how China utilized the economic reforms to use foreign capital to develop productive capacity and infrastructure instead of brigades of peasants. The comparison to the TVA at the end makes a lot of sense. The communes utilized an excess of labor power to build public works instead of industrial machinery like the TVA did. They definitely weren't some dreamlike utopian communist unit.
Also, feel free to call me out if this is a bad source or something. It seemed to have a bit of bias, but isn't too harsh one way or the other and has a lot of primary sources in the citations.
Here's a writeup on the communes by a Trotskyist. He brings up some good points about how the communes were not the greatest and were actually incredibly hierarchical and extractive. I would say that the need for them is non-existent now seeing as how China utilized the economic reforms to use foreign capital to develop productive capacity and infrastructure instead of brigades of peasants. The comparison to the TVA at the end makes a lot of sense. The communes utilized an excess of labor power to build public works instead of industrial machinery like the TVA did. They definitely weren't some dreamlike utopian communist unit.
Also, feel free to call me out if this is a bad source or something. It seemed to have a bit of bias, but isn't too harsh one way or the other and has a lot of primary sources in the citations.