A fundamental requirement of a command economy is that either everyone is voluntarily on board or you apply coercion as needed to get everyone to comply with your central planners.
It turns out that at scale it's very hard to get everyone on board, so you start having to apply coercion... and then any time your command economy is locally inefficient black markets spring up and you have to apply more coercion. Obviously this is a matter of degree; there's a good bit of coercion in economic matters that happens in today's "capitalist" economies too. But the point is that if you slip too far off what the vast majority of people agree to, you start running into sedition problems.
Now you also need a not-too-corrupt coercive apparatus (something that was sorely lacking in the places that have tried communism, I agree) _and_ you need quite saintly central planners.
The real litmus test here is whether you could combine a command economy with a political system that replaces the central planners when enough of the population loses faith in their general direction. _This_ is the thing no one has really managed to do yet, and I'm not sure how viable it is given that human nature you talk about.
But the the result is that most discussion of communism just ends up with the No True Scotsman fallacy, pretty much.... because every time attempts at it fail people say it wasn't really "communism". Including the people who claimed it was too "communism" at first.
That same coercion is required of a market economy. The primary difference is that both coercion and opposition tend to be distributed. E.g., bosses, management theory, police and sheriffs, courts, collections agencies, renter and homeowner evictions, military force, etc., etc.
Perhaps the success of the market system has to do with spreading the coercive element across more fronts (as it did some of the rewards).
One of the successes of the market system is that you get some amount of choice in who gets to coerce you (e.g. you can sometimes, not always, switch jobs to avoid a boss who is asking for things you don't want to do). So yes, spreading the coercive element is pretty key for that.
Importantly, "all" you need in the market system is to find _someone_ willing to pay you for doing whatever it is you would like to do for pay. I'm not going to claim that's easy (it's not), but it's a lot easier than convincing a small group of bureaucrats to pay you for that thing. This is what allows, for example, writers who cater to niche markets to exist... In theory, the central planners could be enlightened enough to fund (with food or services or whatever, if you want to assume a post-money society) that sort of thing, but in practice, why would they bother?
Rather than markets contra communism, I think we should think of it as property rights contra state ownership (of everything).
It is because people are allowed to own things that they can trade. In this system there's plurality whereas in a system where all is owned by the state, there's a monoculture.
This is why property rights are important to many things including intellectual freedom. However, the "market" can also create monoculture if one player gets too big.
I just saw that people seem to be downvoting your comment, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. :( It seems pretty spot on to me: the multipolarity of coercion (and the ability to set the coercive elements against each other) is the key difference between totalitarian and non-totalitarian systems!
No, the apparent success of market systems is just from allowing experimentation without permission from above. A non-market system that allowed that would work fine, and a market system that doesn't allow that (like, say, intellectual-property capitalism) won't work very well.
It turns out that at scale it's very hard to get everyone on board, so you start having to apply coercion... and then any time your command economy is locally inefficient black markets spring up and you have to apply more coercion. Obviously this is a matter of degree; there's a good bit of coercion in economic matters that happens in today's "capitalist" economies too. But the point is that if you slip too far off what the vast majority of people agree to, you start running into sedition problems.
Now you also need a not-too-corrupt coercive apparatus (something that was sorely lacking in the places that have tried communism, I agree) _and_ you need quite saintly central planners.
The real litmus test here is whether you could combine a command economy with a political system that replaces the central planners when enough of the population loses faith in their general direction. _This_ is the thing no one has really managed to do yet, and I'm not sure how viable it is given that human nature you talk about.
But the the result is that most discussion of communism just ends up with the No True Scotsman fallacy, pretty much.... because every time attempts at it fail people say it wasn't really "communism". Including the people who claimed it was too "communism" at first.