Planned economies are grossly inefficent, a handful of planners creating chains of production results on an economy that works only on paper.
Marxism works as a critique of lassiez-faire capitalism, but as a standalone system always results in the creation od totalitarian regimes. A well regulated market economy, with publicly funded infrastructure and services has the best of both worlds.
Planned economies are actually very efficient, look inside of Walmart and Amazon, and what you’ll see is a ton of planning, this planning isn’t based on ‘a handful of planners’, but instead based on a fuckton of data, usually collected and analysed via SAP business planning software. These companies are able to respond to trends and price goods in a way that their profits remain high, and both of these companies at least have some of their supply chains under full control for themselves.
I’m pretty sure we can create this kind of planning and enact control over it for different goals apart from profit, and there are countries where this is already being tried like here
Even if the data collection software was perfectly informed in regards to goods and services (very doubtful) it is still a bad idea to put the reins of economy into the hands of a few people. Consolidation of state power and the power of capital into a single entity has resulted in totalitarian regimes. Even the examples listed are basically exemplars of everything bad about modern corporations. Putting politicians in charge of such a system won’t automatically make it a force for good.
No but putting the workers that work in these systems in control would, workers councils, and other worker representation in the companies are steps in that direction and a worker/customer co-op is the endgame. The more people with real knowledge of what a system is doing have democratic control over it the better imo. And the more different specific systems we have the less consolidated the power will be. But we can’t make systems arbitrarily small simply because large tasks require large organizations.
This obviously is not putting politicians in charge of these systems, but crucialy for these systems to create internal political action, which can lead to real accountability by the workers and other affected groups. So yes the Argentinan post opening an online store isn’t really enough, but at least the Argentinan post is controlled by people whos job is shipping, and by people who are likely already unionized.
Essentially I don’t really subscribe to Marx’s idea of a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat, because I think dictatorship can’t be ‘of the proletariat’, but crucialy I still think communism can potentially be reached via this fractalised democratization of different systems. As much as I think you should have more of a say about things physically close to you, local democracy, I also think you should have more of a say in what you and your colleagues do, worker democracy, and you should have more of a say over things that you rely on, ?! Needs based democracy. And from lemmy we can see this should also be the case for social groups probably, so group democracy.
