You do realize the people's communes were only established as part of the great leap forwards, right?
Of course not, I just steal memes from the memegathred, do you think I'm some kind of nerd that understand them?
do we not like the great leap? like portions of it were certainly fucked but I thought there were some good bits as well
i don't think we're a hivemind... right? wait, are we? oh shit i'm already talking like a hivemind!
anyway, we really need to understand things as they work inside a historical process
so it's not that the ideas behind the great leap forward were bad, but that it wasn't the moment to use them and it ended up being a big mistake
they could be wrong, they also disavow the cultural revolution
I'm sure people in the CPC have different opinions too. The party line isn't the end all be all.
For some historical context, the communes weren't exactly working and the farmers themselves were the ones who wanted the changes. Deng's role is sometimes overstated, the party as a whole had to make reforms to address a serious economic crisis. Nobody ever really points towards what the "correct" thing they should have done was.
Yeah, from what I've read on them they were more of a temporary thing functioning like the Civilian Conservation Corps but on a larger scale. The plan was to organize the peasants into hierarchical battalions for 3 years and use their labor to develop infrastructure in the countryside. It worked, but not as well as expected and led to some primitive accumulation through the commune hierarchy and a massive wage/quality of life disparity between the urban proletariat and the peasants. There's a reason the model was never applied to the cities. The need for that type of productive unit is pretty much gone now as China has developed their productive infrastructure massively through foreign investment (for better or worse) and it wouldn't need to be re implemented unless something truly catastrophic happened and their infrastructure just disappeared. You don't need a million peasants to dig a canal when you can just manufacture 5,000 backhoes.
I hate having to learn every detail about this bullshit. At least give me a link to some bullshit explaining why the obscure leftist bullshit was good or bad. Fuck.
You know what I don’t fucking get? I don’t get how people keep acting like “oh dang the Peoples Socialism Commune of Communist Liberation Fronts where just at the cusp of getting communism, but suddenly everyone stoped and agreed to do the opposite for no fucking reason.” Like I don’t fucking have to go and look up what that fucking bullshit reason was now.
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.
and it's not like deng was the sole responsible for the changes, the CPC was (and still is) a very dynamic party, constantly revising their ideas, and deng's were the result of large discussions happening throughout the 50s and especially the 60s and 70s
edit: revising your ideas =/= revisionism
