Write a book about the problems with 20th century communism and propose new solutions

I listen to a podcast done by two seemingly reasonable Marxists, I have slowly come to realize that all they are good at is describing the problems and they are kinda clueless when it comes to solutions that wouldn't be total disasters.

The basic problem is that planned economy would be an insanely complicated problem in practice especially if you want people to have any kind of freedom, people can't just be allowed to quit their job if the algorithm tells us they have to make 5 pizzas an hour.

Corporations are essentially planned economies on the inside and everyone who worked at a big one knows how much of a clusterfuck it is even when people are given little choice and are there by (mostly) free will. Infact within corporations you can observe things normally associated with East block economies, like insane bureaucracies and huge lead times on "consumer goods" like PC's and accesses. Most managers I've worked for has had extra laptops "hidden" for since requesting a new one can take weeks.

Isn't this more of an an argument against large firms than market vs planned economies though? Large firms are surely better than small at several things, it's just that those things (market control etc) aren't geared towards your personal desires or (often) even workplace productivity. It all comes down to giant fucking computers if we want a hypothetical fully planned economy to work in my opinion, which is a possibility for sure. If not though, there's always more market based forms to take, like China or whatever.

>The basic problem is that planned economy would be an insanely complicated problem in practice especially if you want people to have any kind of freedom
Literally basically no one advocates that except eccentric loons like in OP.

Is there a name given yet to a system in which basic necesities like food and shelter are planned, but the rest of economic activity are basically a big free for all? If so i want to claim to have come up with that ideology and for it to bear my name :^)
Also, what are its possible criticisms, since i can't think of any. It would basically get rid of primary insecurities without completely compromising individual freedom

the economic calculation problem is a real problem and it made the soviet union more inefficient.
They had to instate a huge bureaucracy to determine prices and production and it led to shortages.
What Cockshott is advocating is solving it via computers, that's it.
Its not space age AI communism.
Its more of an accounting problem.
He also advocates for a democratic form of government as opposed to marxist-leninism among other things.

Because modern marxists are larpers in the most deep and sincere sense of the word.

This isn't that far off of the China model - core industry, banking, telecoms, staple foods, transport etc planned and state owned with the rest left to regulated/lightly directed but highly competitive markets. The criticism is that the two systems are necessarily antagonistic, though it can still be extremely productive

It's an optimization problem with as many variables as there are people and goods. Even if it's in polynomial time (complexity increases linearly as variables increase) it gets pretty insane pretty quick. Offhand i don't think it would be polynomial but i could be totally wrong about that desu.
You also need perfect information in order to do this. Basically you would need to go full 1984 in order to make meaningful predictions. (Thanks to google and faceberg this one might become reality sooner than we want though.)

So what happens if you one morning decided you don't want to go to the job that the computers have decided for you or you don't want to eat the food that has been democratically decided? The freedom to starve to death in a market economy is still a freedom. Solzhenitsyn makes the joke somewhere that being an excon in the soviet union was actually pretty comfy since the authorities were obliged to give everyone jobs even if they for all intents and purposes were unemployable.

>Isn't this more of an an argument against large firms than market vs planned economies though?

A large firm is a planned economy. One that by the proponents of planned economy is always accused of only chasing profits/efficeny and never caring about people and they are still hugely inefficient - the thing forcing them to try to be efficient is the fact that they have to compete on a market. If you could make them efficient with the use of "giant fucking computers" don't you think that would be the only thing talked about in the business pages? Instead the trend is towards delegating more responsibilities to lower levels and less micromanagement in order to get less bureaucracy.

>From the moment when society enters into possession of the means of production and uses them in direct association for production, the labour of each individual, however varied its specifically useful character may be, becomes at the start and directly social labour. The quantity of social labour contained in a product need not then be established in a roundabout way; daily experience shows in a direct way how much of it is required on the average. Society can simply calculate how many hours of labour are contained in a steam-engine, a bushel of wheat of the last harvest, or a hundred square yards of cloth of a certain quality. It could therefore never occur to it still to express the quantities of labour put into the products, quantities which it will then know directly and in their absolute amounts, in a third product, in a measure which, besides, is only relative, fluctuating, inadequate, though formerly unavoidable for lack of a better one, rather than express them in their natural, adequate and absolute measure, time. Just as little as it would occur to chemical science still to express atomic weight in a roundabout way, relatively, by means of the hydrogen atom, if it were able to express them absolutely, in their adequate measure, namely in actual weights, in billionths or quadrillionths of a gramme. Hence, on the assumptions we made above, society will not assign values to products. It will not express the simple fact that the hundred square yards of cloth have required for their production, say, a thousand hours of labour in the oblique and meaningless way, stating that they have the value of a thousand hours of labour. It is true that even then it will still be necessary for society to know how much labour each article of consumption requires for its production. It will have to arrange its plan of production in accordance with its means of production, which include, in particular, its labour-powers. The useful effects of the various articles of consumption, compared with one another and with the quantities of labour required for their production, will in the end determine the plan. People will be able to manage everything very simply, without the intervention of much-vaunted “value”
F. Engels

>he quantity of social labour contained in a product need not then be established in a roundabout way; daily experience shows in a direct way how much of it is required on the average. Society can simply calculate how many hours of labour are contained in a steam-engine, a bushel of wheat of the last harvest, or a hundred square yards of cloth of a certain quality. It could therefore never occur to it still to express the quantities of labour put into the products, quantities which it will then know directly and in their absolute amounts, in a third product, in a measure which, besides, is only relative, fluctuating, inadequate, though formerly unavoidable for lack of a better one, rather than express them in their natural, adequate and absolute measure, time. Just as little as it would occur to chemical science still to express atomic weight in a roundabout way, relatively, by means of the hydrogen atom, if it were able to express them absolutely, in their adequate measure, namely in actual weights, in billionths or quadrillionths of a gramme. Hence, on the assumptions we made above, society will not assign values to products. It will not express the simple fact that the hundred square yards of cloth have required for their production, say, a thousand hours of labour in the oblique and meaningless way, stating that they have the value of a thousand hours of labour. It is true that even then it will still be necessary for society to know how much labour each article of consumption requires for its production. It will have to arrange its plan of production in accordance with its means of production, which include, in particular, its labour-powers. The useful effects of the various articles of consumption, compared with one another and with the quantities of labour required for their product

>figure out a way to do my work faster
>hide it from everyone since doing that is the only way to benefit from it.

>A large firm is a planned economy
Internally, yeah somewhat, though as you yourself claim, they 'plan' for things quite different than you or I might desire. It's not enough on its own just to amalgamate firms until they're big enough that 'planning' is a necessity, though some socialists of old may have disagreed.
>don't you think that would be the only thing talked about in the business pages
No, insofar as business leaders since at least Ford's time have understood that automation has a hard limit in that computers aren't consumers of commodities. Of course in many ways the trend of the business world is in fact towards further automation regardless, though they damage themselves in the long run by doing so. Again, I think you risk characterising large firms as inefficient by different criteria than those who own them might use. I'm not even necessarily only talking about the obvious one, profit, though that's massive obviously. Business leaders are often quite open about their desire for hegemony as well as 'just' profits for example - although the two often overlap in a society dominated by the profit motive of course, it's not always so simple.

>the economic calculation problem is a real problem and it made the soviet union more inefficient.
the Soviet problem wasn't even that since they never abolished pricing but had all kinds of other stupid bureaucratic and misincentives

Bureaucracy is just the administrative force behind large structures, there's no reason to use it as a boogeyman phrase.