&gt; If you have a central place to plan the economy to distribute via need, that place is going to be heavily concentrated in power.<p>And this is why there is a left&#x2F;right split within socialism, where the left wing - anarchists, libertarian socialists, left communists&#x2F;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.<p>You will also find that a portion of these ideologies argue for market mechanisms to various extents. There is <i>nothing</i> 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.<p>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 <i>during the civil war</i> 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&#x27;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 &quot;New Economic Policy&quot; 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.<p>But in any case: In the case of the Bolsheviks, the abusive concentration of power started with their coup d&#x27;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.<p>&gt; You can have evil people as heads of organisations but their power tends to be limited.<p>And this was a central aspect of the left&#x2F;libertarian socialist&#x2F;communist&#x2F;anarchist groups criticism against groups like the Bolsheviks and theories like Lenins &quot;democratic centralism&quot; and idea of a &quot;vanguard&quot;. It&#x27;s a debate that raged already from the 1850&#x27;s, and continued as the Bolsheviks and their associates started murdering left communists together with everyone else opposing them.