In the end, Trotsky was right, and so, by extension, were Marx and Hayek (which is an enjoyably outrageous sentence to type): ‘really existing’ planning was centralised and undemocratic. Without the ‘tacit knowledge’ of workers in localities, planning broke down, replaced by top-down command which increasingly failed to keep in touch with reality. This is not the place to go into the nature and failings of the Stalinist system, but suffice to say: there is a lot of historical context left out of the above, and the more fundamental failures of such ‘state capitalist’ bureaucratic capitalist
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