TankieJerk

You might be interested in the idea of workers' self-management, like in market socialist Yugoslavia. In that, some small firms are just strictly regulated personal businesses (private business was allowed with up to 5 employees + the owner's family); but most are controlled by democratic elections rather than a top-down state authority. As it's a market socialist system, rather than being given quotas by a central power, each firm essentially acts in a recognizable way to our Western eyes, choosing to buy and sell goods - except that workers have more say in it.

There's a reason socialist Yugoslavia could allow its people to go and visit the rest of the world whenever they liked - they weren't trapped in a complete dystopian hellhole that the outside world would disillusion them of. It was still a dictatorship (or strongman regime, rather), but people enjoyed some control over their own economic output, and that counts for a lot. Not only that, but it's much more efficient than the Soviet system - Yugoslavia enjoyed greater growth from a lower starting point, and had higher living standards than Warsaw Pact states with similar GDP.

I don't think any of us here on tankiejerk would welcome a dictatorship even for a good socialist economy, but I also think it's fair to regard the economic regime of Yugoslavia as not irreducibly welded to the political regime of Yugoslavia, in the same way that there are market capitalist dictators and market capitalist democracies. It's definitely, regardless of agreement or disagreement with the economic system, a fascinating topic of study.

Curiously(?), I would regard its eventual economic failure on Marxist terms - it actually had very good ROI, and as long as the world economy was healthy and Western loans were available, they could accumulate the capital to improve their own economy. When those loans dried up, they began to struggle. Had they been a developed nation first, and then transitioned to a socialist state, it might've worked out well (at least economically - politically, God knows it's the Balkans, and Yugoslavia was always a very artificial construction). Marxism, traditionally, posits that a state needs bourgeois capitalism to accumulate capital first, and only THEN seize it when production heightens to the point where capitalism's internal contradictions begin to destabilize it. At that point, you have all these nice factories built up, workers who are used to fighting The Man and capable of self-organizing, and a general understanding of a modern economy - all necessary things to start building a real socialist state.

MLs, like Soviets and Maoists, believe that you can take the socialist step first, and deal with accumulating capital later - something which, by a Marxist analysis, would lead right back into a feudal regime by not changing the underlying economic relationship of people to the society.

H-ha ha, g-good thing the USSR and PRC didn't devolve into some clientistic system of personal loyalties of the elites where the workers had no input, th-that would be horrifically bad and prove Marx right all along...