Actually, the questions discussed in Ronald Coase's "Theory of the Firm" are alive and well

Central planning and command economies work really well inside corporations, such as Apple or Google. They don't make internal decisions by hosting mini-markets and pitting their workers against each other, they have departments who study demographics and departments that study research and logistics and so on.

Tankies claiming the fall of communism is just around the corner are in the same bucket of "bad" as free market libertarians who adore corporations.

>Central planning and command economies work really well inside corporations, such as Apple or Google.

That's because they can fire anyone that works for the company who doesn't agree with the goals. Do you propose to jail or disappear people that disagree and work against the direction defined by the central plan?

I mean that's only if you have some over arching entity that does all of the planning that commands from the top down. Some people argue for planning at a regional level and cooperating on a larger scale as needed, or organizing work into industry wide unions where leadership is democratically elected, immediately revocable, and the unions go around to communities to gather input for what is needed. If people were being difficult they would likely be kicked out, like a company today. I would hope people still provide for them

Again though, I'm not here to talk about the failings of autocratic state planning advocated by tankies.

The government equivalent would be loss of citizenship or residency rights (exile), not jail or death.

Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't -- corporations fail all the time. The crucial difference is that when a corporation gets it wrong, it fails and is replaced by another that does not get it quite as wrong.

Iirc, even old man Marx back in the day considered central planning a stop gap measure for the transition, not a end goal.

That said, while most people seem to barely know about his writings in Capital Volume 1, Volume 2 and 3, published by Engels after Marx death, went on to point out that while there was a struggle between the factory owning capitalists and their workers. There was also a struggle going on between production capitalists and finance capitalists. And that the ultimate culprit of capitalism was likely to be finance.

IIRC, Marx even noted that in the long run it would likely be better for production capital to ally themselves with the workers against finance. But that production capital was more likely to squeeze the workers as they themselves got squeezed by finance (with landlords and other rent seekers lumped into finance).

Note: I'm not an advocate of central planning. However, I do believe that technology could make it viable. Our purchases in markets are used as inputs to companies so they can plan and allocate resources. I don't see any reason this sort of interaction couldn't be emulated by people giving input as to what they desire. We also have to admit that the USSR and China saw possibly unprecidented growth with centralized economic planning, although I wouldn't really argue that's necessarily a good thing and came at great costs. Personally I believe in more of a transitional approach by converting all corporations to cooperatives and allowing communities to democratically manage property, and seeing where that leads us.

The problem is how could a central planner ensure technological progress and manage people in a bureaucracy composed of the entire country population.

Managing static resources is easy.

Now, cooperatives are interesting. They mostly don't work, but when they work, they are great.

Central planning doesn't work because to achieve a perfect result the people in charge of the planning have to be perfect too. This clearly doesn't work in practice. Think of it this way. Communism has a better best case scenario than capitalism but this is rarely achieved. On the other hand capitalism has a better average case scenario and gives us consistent results.