Planning is obviously different from metaphysical 'plan.' Capitalism is planned, which neither contradicts Marx & Engels with respect to 'anarchy of capitalist production' nor obviates the condition that M called 'production without regard to the limits of the market.' Charles B's posts to this thread revolved around difference between private and public planning although he didn't use those terms (CB's comments were dialectical in character, my experience has indicated that many self-identified marxists are woefully deficient when it comes to such thinking).
Capitalists command (term used by bourgeois economists to describe Soviet-style central planning) factors of production, meaning that they decide how to employ land (natural resources), labor (humans), and capital (goods used to produce other goods - capitalism because capital in its money form is used to produce more money?). Of course, bourgeois economists further the mystification and mythification of all this by calling capitalists 'entrepreneurs.'
If so-called marxists/socialists do not think that conscious planning of publicly owned and socially controlled means of production will improve upon capitalism's clumsy and costly privatized way of governing and correcting balance of production between main and subsidiary sectors of economy, then we may as well give up and become left Keynesians (or maybe pomo leftists, abandoning political economy and its critique).
Why go on about the failure of planning in Soviet Union given the circumstances in which it was attempted? And if comparative analysis 'is to be done,' the appropriate comparison (if any exists) is between 'actually existing' capitalism during industrialization and 'actually existing' socialism during industrialization (i.e., US between 1870s and 1920s & USSR between 1920s and 1970s, fifty year periods (long waves?) after which both experienced generalized crisis).
Planning isn't a panacea. Nor are worker control and worker democracy. But such decisionmaking seems the only humane way to deal with matters that capitalist decisionmaking and planning can neither address nor even adequately recognize. And such planning doesn't have to preclude using markets and market techniques although 'the market' (note metaphysical similarity to "the plan") would not be the governing factor. The crucial issue for marxists/socialists should be how to move away from *market regulation* of economic relations. Misgivings about Bertell Ollman's utopianism notwithstanding, he points out the alienation of market social life and its rule by 'violence of things.'
Interestingly, Marx's critique of market economics in _Poverty of Philosophy_ is outlined in a polemic against Proudhon's 'market socialism.' I've commented several times on this list (including post that initiated thread under this header) about the 'high price in unemployment, among other things, of Yugoslav market socialism. And David Schweickart's invocations of China's marketization ring increasingly hollow in light of mass layoffs, rural depopulation, and rising discontent (strikes and food riots).
While *I* wouldn't want areas such as housing, transportation, and education to be subject to market forces, *decommodification* of labor-power holds the key to transcending 'the market' and assuring social access to the means of life. But I guess these decisions would be the responsibility of mass, comprehensive, democratic planning. Michael Hoover