There’s a tendency to idealize amish, for their communitarian values or whatever else, but for the most part they’re an extremely regressive patriarchal / feudal society, as you pointed out. Control of land and distribution of their agricultural product is in the hands of the patriarchs, with all the subjugation of women and reactionary values that entails. Pretty much the main good thing about them is they don’t let community members starve, but so do mormons (and they don’t forsake capitalism to do that). A genuine communist among the amish would be excommunicated in a hot minute for wanting to overthrow the rule of the patriarchs.

I wouldn’t call them sustainable, any more than any other utopian socialist project is sustainable: they’re allowed some land and can support a small population, but that’s it. They’re a feudal form of society existing in world capitalism and they don’t and can never challenge it (and many amish communities nowadays run stores and restaurants to get some cash). Communism is revolutionary and seeks to wrest production from capitalists to serve all humanity, and advance the productive forces, the amish are reactionary feudalists who just want to be left alone.

edit: forgot to link Engels - Socialism: utopian and scientific, there’s audiobooks for it on youtube too.

I think they’d fit into the group Engels called reactionary socialists.

[ Reactionary Socialists: ]

The first category consists of adherents of a feudal and patriarchal society which has already been destroyed, and is still daily being destroyed, by big industry and world trade and their creation, bourgeois society. This category concludes, from the evils of existing society, that feudal and patriarchal society must be restored because it was free of such evils. In one way or another, all their proposals are directed to this end.

This category of reactionary socialists, for all their seeming partisanship and their scalding tears for the misery of the proletariat, is nevertheless energetically opposed by the communists for the following reasons:

(i) It strives for something which is entirely impossible.

(ii) It seeks to establish the rule of the aristocracy, the guildmasters, the small producers, and their retinue of absolute or feudal monarchs, officials, soldiers, and priests – a society which was, to be sure, free of the evils of present-day society but which brought it at least as many evils without even offering to the oppressed workers the prospect of liberation through a communist revolution.

(iii) As soon as the proletariat becomes revolutionary and communist, these reactionary socialists show their true colors by immediately making common cause with the bourgeoisie against the proletarians.

They’re proof positive of sustainable communist style economic communities, but most bona fide, card carrying communists like myself would criticise them for their narrow, religiously driven way of life. Communists aren’t dedicated to upholding one set of moral values over another, they’re committed to the political line that ensures the highest degree of egalitarianism possible. Whatever ensures such an egalitarian society is something we’ll support, even if that means suppressing views that are anti-egalitarian. Think Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance, it’s basically the same idea in effect.

I actually had a discussion about this with a few friends recently. Doing something similar without the religious aspects seems like it would be a really cool idea. If you could get enough people to buy into building a commune, but use technology as much as possible to minimize required work for everybody.

I don’t know much about them, apart from a (probably) heavily idealized “noble savage” media portrayal.

Overall they seem to be trying to do the right thing, for the wrong (at least for me, as I am an atheist) reasons, and ultimately end up doing some bad shit (eg. the concept of shunning, shallow procreation pool, etc.).

We could probably learn something from them, but exactly how much I don’t really know.