[cstross]

Internally, every large corporation in a capitalist system is a miniature Stalinist centrally-planned economy. The key differences are that (a) corporations are generally several orders of magnitude smaller than a state (hence, easier to plan for and amenable to real-time adjustments if the plan veers into the long grass), and (b) the corporation can dump overheads into the external state -- downsizing, for example. (If you try to reduce the head-count of a nation-state by 10% that tends to earn you a place in the history books, and not a good one.)

If you step down to an even smaller scale factor most families operate on a communal basis, with married/cohabiting adults holding shared assets and funds, contributing their earnings from external employment and disbursing in accordance with need -- a pattern that goes back into deep antiquity.

So the dysfunctional aspects of communism emerge when you scale it up too far -- which suggests to me that it's an information processing problem.

[ladyattis]

I would argue most governments at a point start looking more pseudo-anarchic due to how departments often compete with each other for resources without much in the way of a referee even if you factor in the secretary or under-secretary level positions. So the command in command economy is largely just giving general directives that rarely amount to much unless the underlying organizations know how to play well with each other.