If that's what you took away from the book then I'm afraid you did a shallow reading of it. Animal Farm was specifically a critique of Stalin and the USSR, and how Stalin hijacked the revolutionary vanguard and turned it into a fiefdom for the loyal party members.

Orwell himself was a left anarchist and staunch antifascist and anticapitalist. His critique is that of authoritarianism. If you take away from Orwell that he supports capitalism in any form then you may have missed his point.

Animal Farm is not an anti-communist book. The first half captures communism working perfectly well under the rule of the Lenin-Trotsky analogue - the animals work hard, are well-fed, and organise themselves to create new industry - the windmill - with the goal of eventually eliminating the need for labour.

Everything goes to pot when the Stalin-analogue takes over, because the book is a reflection of Orwell's opinions of the Soviet Union and his experience fighting with the communes in Spain and the subsequent purges committed Stalinist factions against the Trotskyists. If you read the Ukranian prologue, which is included with most modern published editions, Orwell even outlines that Animal Farm is an attack on Stalinism, and he firmly believes in socialism.

The takeaway of Mao, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, etc. is not that communism is bad but rather that concentrating too much power in too few hands is bad. For instance Hitler, Shah of a Iran, etc. Especially when the leaders have simplistic notions. For example, Idi Amin, Maduro, Baby Doc Duvalle, etc.

Sure - communism simply requires the centralization and concentration of power and so is incredibly vulnerable to authoritarian takeover.

Since when a prerequisite for communism is nationalisation? As far as I'm aware the actual communism was supposed to be ran by worker committees and not "party" or "leader". And does not have to involve central planning at all. Do not confuse it with authoritarianism. Or stalinism which was a variant of it.

I'm not confusing it, I'm going from what Marx and Engels said.

"Only conscious organisation of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the social aspect, in the same way that production in general has done this for men in their aspect as species. Historical evolution makes such an organisation daily more indispensable, but also with every day more possible."

"If it should become necessary for communist society to regulate the production of men, just as it will have already regulated the production of things, then it, and it alone, will be able to do this without difficulties. It seems to me that it should not be too difficult for such a society to achieve in a planned way what has already come about naturally, without planning, in France and Lower Austria. In any case it will be for those people to decide if, when and what they want to do about it, and what means to employ"

Organization and planning are not the same as centralization and concentration of power. It would be absurd to conflate the two. So do these quotes justify your claim or not?

In order to effectively execute such planning and transition from capitalist to communist, it required concentration of power in the federal government - further management was required to maintain equitable distribution of population, labor and resources.

That's why, in the transition period, power would end up concentrated in the hands of a small group of people.

Obviously eventually the idea was that the State would cease to be anything more than a mechanism for distribution of resources and stop managing people, but there are an awful lot of problems with that, conceptually.

Also, the guy I responded to said it didn't have to involve central planning. It kinda does, at least Marx and Engel's version does.

purposed organizations were worker committees or what is essentially the more democratic version of worker union. With some relatively minor central oversight. Sometimes committee of experts (not government ones). Definitely the policies were not supposed to be subsumed by national ideology or ideas of people in charge.

I’m upvoting this comment because it would be a shame for the excellent responses to lose their context.