Agreed, and that goes for capitalism at large.

Here's a rough outline for one proposed alternative to capitalism and the failed central planning alternatives of the past:

https://jacobin.com/2019/03/sam-gindin-socialist-planning-mo...

Some relevant snippets:

> Though planning and worker control are the cornerstones of socialism, overly ambitious planning (the Soviet case) and overly autonomous workplaces (the Yugoslav case) have both failed as models of socialism. Nor do moderate reforms to those models, whether imagined or applied, inspire. With all-encompassing planning neither effective nor desirable, and decentralization to workplace collectives resulting in structures too economically fragmented to identify the social interest and too politically fragmented to influence the plan, the challenge is: what transformations in the state, the plan, workplaces, and the relations among them might solve this quandary?

> The operating units of both capitalism and socialism are workplaces. Under capitalism, these are part of competing units of capital, the primary structures that give capitalism its name. With socialism’s exclusion of such private units of self-expansion, the workplace collectives are instead embedded in pragmatically constituted “sectors,” defined loosely in terms of common technologies, outputs, services, or simply past history. These sectors are, in effect, the most important units of economic planning and have generally been housed within state ministries or departments such as Mining, Machinery, Health Care, Education, or Transportation Services. These powerful ministries consolidate the centralized power of the state and its central planning board. Whether or not this institutional setup tries to favor workers’ needs, it doesn’t bring the worker control championed by socialists. Adding liberal political freedoms (transparency, free press, freedom of association, habeas corpus, contested elections) would certainly be positive; it might even be argued that liberal institutions should flourish best on the egalitarian soil of socialism. But as in capitalism, such liberal freedoms are too thin to check centralized economic power. As for workplace collectives, they are too fragmented to fill the void. Moreover, as noted earlier, directives from above or competitive market pressures limit substantive worker control even withinthe collectives.

> A radical innovation this invites is the devolution of the ministries’ planning authority and capacities out of the state and into civil society. The former ministries would then be reorganized as “sectoral councils” — structures constitutionally sanctioned but standing outside the state and governed by worker representatives elected from each workplace in the respective sector. The central planning board would still allocate funds to each sector according to national priorities, but the consolidation of workplace power at sectoral levels would have two dramatic consequences. First, unlike liberal reforms or pressures from fragmented workplaces, such a shift in the balance of power between the state and workers (the plan and worker collectives) carries the material potential for workers to modify if not curb the power that the social oligarchy has by virtue of its material influence over the planning apparatus, from information gathering through to implementation as well as the privileges they gain for themselves. Second, the sectoral councils would have the capacity, and authority from the workplaces in their jurisdiction, to deal with the “market problem” in ways more consistent with socialism.

> Key here is a particular balance between incentives, which increase inequality, and an egalitarian bias in investment. As noted earlier, the surpluses earned by each workplace collective can be used to increase their communal or individual consumption, but those surpluses cannot be used for reinvestment. Nationwide priorities are established at the level of the central plan through democratic processes and pressures (more on this later) and these are translated into investment allocations by sector. The sector councils then distribute funds for investment among the workplace collectives they oversee. But unlike market-based decisions, the dominant criteria are not to favor those workplaces that have been most productive, serving to reproduce permanent and growing disparities among workplaces. Rather, the investment strategy is based on bringing the productivity of goods or services of the weaker collectives closer to the best performers (as well as other social criteria like absorbing new entrants into the workforce and supporting development in certain communities or regions).

...

> No one paid greater economic homage to capitalism than the authors of The Communist Manifesto, marveling that capitalism “accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.” Yet far from seeing this as representing the pinnacle of history, Marx and Engels identified this as speaking to a new and broader possibility: capitalism was “the first to show what man’s activity can bring about.” The task was to build on this potential by explicitly socializing and reorganizing the productive forces.

> In contrast, for Hayek and his earlier mentor von Mises, capitalism was the teleological climax of society, the historical end point of humanity’s tendency to barter. Hayek considered it a truism that that without private property and no labor and capital markets, there would be no way of accessing the latent knowledge of the population, and without pervasive access to such information, any economy would sputter, drift, and waste talent and resources. Von Mises, after his argument that socialism was essentially impossible was decisively swept aside, turned his focus on capitalism’s genius for entrepreneurship and the dynamic efficiency and constant innovation that it brought.

> Despite Hayek’s claims, it is in fact capitalism that systematically blocks the sharing of information. A corollary of private property and profit maximization is that information is a competitive asset that must be hidden from others. For socialism, on the other hand, the active sharing of information is essential to its functioning, something institutionalized in the responsibilities of the sectoral councils. Further, the myopic individualism of Hayek’s position ignores, as Hilary Wainwright has so powerfully argued, the wisdom that comes from informal collective dialogue, often occurring outside of markets in discussions and debates among groups and movements addressing their work and communities.