Libertarian communism

And this is why there is a left/right split within socialism, where the left wing - anarchists, libertarian socialists, left communists/libertarian communists, and a wide range of people using similar terms - argue for decentralisation and voluntary association as essential to safeguard the success of a socialist revolution.

You will also find that a portion of these ideologies argue for market mechanisms to various extents. There is nothing inherent in socialism that demands central planning. In fact, in most left socialist ideologies there would be no central organ with the power to impose central planning.

Even right wing socialists like the Bolsheviks were ambivalent about centralised planning to begin with, and initially did so out of pressing needs: They imposed strict planning initially during the civil war because a lot of people - the vast majority of who had either voted for other socialist parties (SR and the Mensheviks both did vastly better with the peasants than the Bolsheviks did) or the bourgeois parties in the 1917 elections - didn't exactly go out of their way to help provide resources to the Bolshevik government. But as soon as the threat of the civil war was over, Lenin introduced "New Economic Policy" that liberalised the economy substantially, undid a lot of the centralisation and allowed for a limited market economy. Lenin indicated he believed NEP, or variations, would need to be in place for decades. It was Stalin that led the extreme centralization under the Bolsheviks, after Lenins death.

But in any case: In the case of the Bolsheviks, the abusive concentration of power started with their coup d'etat against the democratically elected socialist government after the Bolshevik losts the preliminary elections in 1917, not with their subsequent changes to the economic system; by then it was far too late.

> You can have evil people as heads of organisations but their power tends to be limited.

And this was a central aspect of the left/libertarian socialist/communist/anarchist groups criticism against groups like the Bolsheviks and theories like Lenins "democratic centralism" and idea of a "vanguard". It's a debate that raged already from the 1850's, and continued as the Bolsheviks and their associates started murdering left communists together with everyone else opposing them.

What fails during implementation? When leftists of his time demanded plans from Marx, he scoffed and said he was not August Comte, and refused to "write recipes for the kitchens of the future".

Marx and Engels did note changes in production led to changes in relations of production, and the superstructure (society). Some scientists think human hunting and fishing being what is was may have led to behavioral modernity 50,000 years ago. This led to a different form of primitive communism. 10000 years ago slavery and agriculture arose. 1600 years ago feudalism began to arise. 600 years ago capitalism as a dominant economic system began to arise.

Since men began painting pictures of horses in caves 50,000 years ago, the world has seen four major economic systems. The current one is capitalism. You seem to say it is immutable, the three previous ones were flimsy, but you seem to say our current economic system is the final one (although the previous one said that as well - the czar was claiming God, the creator of the world, ruler of a life after life had appointed him to his throne - claimed this until he was felled by the bullets of Bolshevik soldiers).

We are entering a world where I film a video, or record audio, or write code, push a button and with almost no cost in replication, can have it distributed to billions. We are entering a world where with continual improvements in robotics and AI, there may eventually be no job a human can do that an AI robot can't do (and perhaps do better - my memory, prefrontal cortex processing etc. is limited by bandwidth, space and this sort of thing in a way that a neural network translating speech to text is not). When there is no need any more for humans to farm, or mine, or even to program, will the world still be under a system of capitalism?

However, looking a bit further reveals massacres between 1945 to 1947. The Wikipedia article about his secret police has "A List Of People Assasinated" by them...

And since we are talking about cherry-picking, this is a problem I have with people claiming to be "on the left": this selective blindness to obvious horrendous crimes by the regime and abuse of power that these things lead to.