With the communist agriculture in China, the reason why they failed is not that people didn’t want to work. The communes were actually so enthusiastic, with workers working long days, to outdo the other communes that they reported producing more rice than they actually did to the government, and so got taxed more than they could spare. The government was too obsessed with industrializing and pushed its money (and rice) to industrial workers to increase exports, without supporting the farmers as much asthey needed to. Then locusts and natural disasters made the whole thing worse and the situation spiraled into a famine.
