My point was that Libertarian Marxist ideologies, such as Luxembergism and Council Communism, reject the need for formal leaders or centralised governments, so the flaws which you mention, which all exist within a statist system, are not relevant, or at least not directly so. They're honestly more like Anarchism than they are like Leninism.
And my point is that whatever you believe as an ivory tower scholar, when you have the power, inevitably you will have to deal with such problems. Authoritarianism is the nature answer to all of them, especially if one has the predisposition of thinking he knows better than others. If Marx were to lead the October Revolution, I'm fairly sure he'd roll out similar policies as Lenin did, though he might be able to justify them better. As I've argued in other threads, both Marx himself and his theory were authoritarian to the bones. That was because he had very different interpretations of democracy and liberty.
Pure anarchism works out in the real world not unlike Leninism. Unchecked power takes over the system in both cases. The most obvious example would be Somalia, where the warlords run the country, and the people barely have any rights. Modern doctrine of limited government does not solve all of the questions I raised, but it offers pretty strong guards against things that may go horribly wrong. I don't see how democratic socialism can offer such guards.
Apart from the fact that philosophy is not nutty just because it's not strictly scientific, there are plenty of Marxists who do not hold that Marxism is a science. Marx himself did not hold that belief for all of his prolific life.
Also, the creation of narratives is not something that science is free of. The real distinction that science has is the requirement of empirical evidence. Yet evidence often needs to be interpreted, which means science is more rigorous but not foolproof. In any case, to charge that criticism can be used to explain any development and is therefore practically useless ignores the fact that it can actually tell us something useful and interesting. Take Habermas' historical account of the creation and dissolution of the bourgeois public sphere. Do I buy his account? To a large extent, no. But do I think that it's therefore not very useful? Not at all.
Only people who have not studied much think in such black-and-white terms.
Well, if you think like that, it's good for you. Marx on the other hand would denounce Habermas as much as he denounced pretty much everyone else apart from Engels. That's his problem, and that's why people who do not have black-and-white views must be resolutely against him: in his world there's not much place for anyone else.
You should read some Popper, or indeed Marx. The latter's claim to scientificity was precisely that he was postulating from empirical evidence - records of past history. Popper's counter-argument was that empirical evidence does not prove a theory as Marx thought it would. It merely means the theory works for a particular case. Popper's original idea was to judge a theory on its predictive power, rather than on how many verifying evidences you can find. For dialectics, everything in the world can be interpreted in such a way as to verify the thesis-antithesis-synthesis circle. But that means its predictive power is precisely zero, for the reason I mentioned in the last post. Basically, only if a theory makes a somewhat dangerous prediction - that can refute the theory if it did not realise - the theory is meaningful. The fact that science is not infallible is not a concession, but the very reason it is rigorous: it's not dogmatic. If Newton's mechanics is proved wrong in certain circumstances, it's wrong in those circumstances, and scientists don't preach it as the absolute truth.
Why? Their arguments are fairly lengthy and sophisticated. The problem of trying to simplify them to a few sentences is that it will inevitably pepper those sentences with catchphrases that will immediately put logs in your eyes. It's not going to be helpful at all.
I'll let you off the hook on this one
Actually, in theory, communism is anarchistic, and so by definition non-centrally planned. What you're referring to is the form of socialism advocated by statist communists, which is an altogether different thing.
This is a point I wanted to address in another thread but haven't gotten to. I think "communism is anarchistic" is a misunderstanding, more so than thinking communism is authoritarian. Marx almost assuredly did not want small, isolated collectives. He wanted to abolish division of labour, which is only possible when an economy is large enough to accommodate all kinds of trades. In addition, he did talk about "society regulates the general production", in the sense that if you were hunting in the morning, and you want to go fishing in the afternoon, the "society" somehow magically arranges production so that we'd still have an abundance of meat, regardless of what you do.
Here is the tricky part: Marx regarded the bourgeoisie government not as a regulator and social welfare provider, as today's left wing sees it, but as purely an instrument of class oppression. That was what he meant to abolish. Marx did not want anarchism as in everyone for himself. He wanted anarchism as in nobody has more power than others, so that nobody is in a position to exploit anyone else (note how similar this line of thought is to the modern libertarians). Such a society is not incompatible with central planning, if you accept his assumption that planning is inherently trivial, that is, the best plan is
manifest. Unlike today's leftists who moan about capitalism's ruthless efficiency, he was actually arguing that capitalism is not efficient enough. The bourgeoisie government was in fact the reason you could not have proper planning, because it's controlled by, well, the bourgeoisie, who are by virtue of their class short sighted, hence all the commercial crises. If this government is abolished, and production is regulated by the proletarians, who by virtue of their class are far sighted, and know what's the best for everyone, we'd obviously release a lot of new productive forces. This is the source of his abundance, and also what he meant when he said advanced productive forces (thesis) and obsolete relations of production (antithesis) would lead to a more advanced relations of production, which in turn boosts productive forces even further (synthesis). But this is not the disorder as we would understand an anarchy.
