Communal ownership of the means of production means they're possessed by society altogether not by a the tiny group of workers who use them. Socialism is not the same thing as turning the economy into a web of private co-ops.

Of course.

Through their own struggles Lenin and Mao learned that the best way for them to coordinate the economy was through centralized planning. Decentralized tactics of coordination had yielded disorganization and confusion a planning bureau to analyze data and respond to it was required. In the later days of the USSR it was actually efforts to decentralized which helped stagnate the economy.

I'm opposed to unchecked and opaque centralization at the point of a gun by a state body. The structure of any organization which plans production and involves the collective action of workers needs to be fully transparent and have the willing consent of the workers involved as individuals, it must also include their full participation into the process. The easy solution is to eliminate the necessity of human workers in unsavory but necessary jobs, ala FALGSC style, near fully automated production in our future could be seized by a revolutionary body and then production could be planned centrally and minimal workers would have their lives commanded by a new boss in the mean time until fully-automated life-essential production is reached, mainly food. The workers under communists of the past were still subjected to mechanistic commodity production which the machinery of the time demanded. The commanding of the workers by the state planning apparatus involves a hierarchical relationship which mirrors that of the employee and employer, the physically labouring proletariat are still subjects in this system and can easily become subjects under a new capitalist system because the hierarchy of labour still exists due to the material conditions of the time. As long as there is physical labour to procure necessities people are going to have to do them, if there's more people needed to produce then are freely willing to do it we reach a junction in what we can do with regards to organizing society at this point. We can conscript individuals, using the state apparatus of power, and force people into doing the work using violence. Or, we can develop instead of the state apparatus model of government, a system which still performs the function of planning centrally, but involves consent and full involvement of those governed without the use of the threat of conscripting force on the governed by a violent big other state apparatus. Our vision and goal should always be a society that involves the full consent and freedom of the individual in all aspects of their lives. Why be a Communist if achieving that vision isn't directly in the game plan today? We're getting very close to a world where full automation of food production and distribution could be achieved.

That coordinators developed production plans for groups of workers as opposed to those workers drawing their own up in a vacuum from economic data on society's needs does not mean these coordinators constituted any kind of special privileged propertied class. Today do politicians possess true power? Can these politicians seize the properties of corporations like Microsoft and Exxon Mobile at will? Are they not on the contrary just servants of the bourgeois who have to obey these companies because it is really they who possess the power? Being an administrator within a socialist state is not a place of power but of servitude to the masses.

My gripe is that the USSR didn't have the proper check in place to ensure that the state apparatus really was embodied for and by the people in their best interest. What was the real chain of command in how production was planned?