What is the orthodox Marxist take on economic planning? I found some things online, but I'd like to know if anyone here has some more specific answers. This is what I've been able to get so far: "[Kautsky's] idea of economic planning also seems incompatible with 'market socialism'. In his view, economic planning would amount to the entire community of consumers negotiating output volumes and prices with the branch producers. Since this implied that a lot of time would be needed to build an efficient system of statistical records, Kautsky believed full economic planning was a remote prospect. But what would a fulfillment of those plans actually guarantee? Kautsky failed to realize how complex a question that was [...]" - Marxian Economics: The New Palgrave by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate And, from Wikipedia: "Libertarian socialists, Syndicalists, Trotskyists, orthodox Marxists and democratic socialists advocate various forms of de-centralized planning and self-management. In a de-centralized planned economy, economic decision-making is based on self-management and self-governance from the bottom-up without any directing central authority (in a spontaneous manner). On the other hand, Leninists, Marxist-Leninists, Social democrats and some state-oriented socialists advocate directive administrative planning where directives are passed down from higher authorities (planning agencies) to agents (enterprise managers), who in turn give orders to workers." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_planning
Trotsky (in The Revolution Betrayed IIRC) supported the Soviet economic system (although he attacked the supposedly "bureaucratic" aspects of it) adopted under Stalin and believed that it vindicated the correctness of economic planning. The Wiki article is lame.
State control is a bit of an inevitability after immediate expropriation. As to planning, most modern corporations already use near to complete inner-corporate planning (nearly all done by computers) for its further production needs. So logically we are not in the 20th century or undeveloped capitalist societies anymore, we already would expropriate organs of intelligent planning: the corporation. The state representatives and workers voted representatives would extract the knowledge from the capitalists to then educate their workers on the democratic running of their enterprise and gradually socialising the whole (state-capitalist) economy to build socialism > communism. Complete Socialisation of the economy is a necessary prerequisite for Communism, and the answer lies in the capitalist corporation. I wrote more about this here.
Trotsky never advocated de-centralized planning and self-management. That sounds like some myth put out by an anarchist twat who wants to romanticize him. He advocated a heavily centralized planned economy, but he imagined that workers would have a lot of input at a grassroots level too. The interesting thing is that during the early 1920's, virtually everyone opposed central planning. It was Trotsky who proposed that the scope of Gosplan be enlarged to encompass state wide planning of all industry.. everyone thought he was crazy. Eventually Lenin was convinced and supported the idea. A lot of early Soviet policy, including the NEP and the planned economy, were first pioneered by Trotsky and then later adopted. Economic planning was not something that was talked about much prior to the Russian Revolution.
Keep in mind, comrades, that even Trotsky did not envision the kind of directive planning that was to be implemented by Stalin. As comrade Cockshott noted, the planning envisioned by Trotsky was at best indicative (similar to that of Kosygin and Liberman).
