Well here’s another thread full of idealism*1 and people who’ve avoided reading post-Service Soviet historiography.
Gosplan barely influenced sector economic decisions and rarely influenced firm level decisions. Soviet sectors and firms acted like western firms, but with a deep pocketed buyer of last resort: like a permanent bail-out. Gosplan worked. It funded commercial banks to lend to sectors quite well. Sectoral balance was broadly what was chosen*2. What didn’t work was firm labour motivation after 1945, “they pretend to pay us so we pretend to work.”
Now I don’t know what you call a wage labour society where commodities are produced for sale for profit and the value form therefore expands, but there’s a rather old socio-economic analytical tradition that calls that Capital (Engels Ed.; Marx _Capital_).
For this tradition lower and higher communism, or socialism and communism are potential analytical categories to analyse post value-form societies where the working class rule and class are abolished respectively. We have seen socialism in this sense in the Kronstadt commune in 1921, in Catalonia in 1936, Budapest in 1956, developing in Czechoslovakia in 1968 etc. None of these societies relied on people being nice, but on factory seizures, collective selfishness, and convincing the army or militia to side with them. We’ve not seen a classless society.
In contrast we’ve seen Marat or Napoleon clones flailing to claim they act on behalf of the working class while wages are still paid. Now there might be a great way to analyse this phenomena; or, to claim that any autogestation by the proletariat necessarily results in a Mao or Zhao; or that it just won’t work because capitalism is an eternal an unchanged human relationship and the vast increase in productivity from 1760 is a miracle that appeared from Gods arsehole and not associated with a strange new productive reinvestment of money as capital for profit. You can claim all these things and you might have an argument. (But you’d be wrong).
What you can’t legitimately claim is: That workers controlled the Soviet-style societies. That a new economic relationship replaced wage labour. That they failed because people weren’t nice enough: Kronstadt wasn’t nice, and it was defeated by military incompetence. That Gosplan didn’t work (remember: firm level go slows by workers). That Gosplan was socialism (remember: the criteria is workers rule).
This is a tiresome topic. If you’re genuinely interested this critical attack on misallocations to 1940 is a good start:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/strauss/index.htm . Then go after Andrle for firm level relations.
Sam.
*1 the belief that ideas and thoughts produce social situations en Toto
*2 light industrial underdevelopment and commercial agriculture (non-grains) in the 1930s; but this was part of the “shadow plan” ala those “tractor” factories