waton: A commie factory was ordered to produce x number of footwear ( as calculated by Central Committee for need), promptly produced the most convenient to make, and at Kaganovitch pace and quality. not wanted, left the needy in need.
Just a nit-picking correction. The calculation of the number of shoes to produce would not be made by the Central Committee. This calculation would have been made by the Central Planning Bureau. Likely you have over-simplified the planning process in order to make your point. It's a mistake to do that in order to attempt to make an ideological point
Otherwise, I have no criticism of your criticism of the potential problems involved with Central Planning or with the motivation.
But I would like to note that often people who just work for some business enterprise, are often very unmotivated. That's true whether they work for the government or a private company-(I could write a lot of words about that facet of human life, I'd likely start with Aristotle's concept that there existed a "natural" slave class of humans, that is, they were born to be slaves, or today, as welfare dependents).
Back in the day, I managed a small factory, making custom products. Based on the material cost and the processes required we'd quote a price for the product, which meant we had to carefully watch production times to be sure of our gross profit. It was hard to keep the guys motivated. Sometimes, I'd chide them and tell them the world was changing and there were hungry people out there who wanted their job. That usually brought gales of laughter, but it was true, and lots of those jobs no longer exist in OZ.
I am unsure if problems with Central Planning (if it was in universal use from 1949 until Den Xiao-Pings time) led the Chinese government to make the change to a market led economy? In any case, Deng's decision to harness the energy of ordinary people to make a quid unleashed the tremendous energy now obvious in the Chinese economy
You may also be interested in the fact that after the Korean war ended in 1953, the DPRK (with Russian assistance) and despite the fact that nearly every structure had been damaged by US bombing, re-built far faster than the ROK. (Now the ROK is a long way ahead of the DPRK)
That was likely because decisions could be made faster. But the whole process came unstuck with the death of Kim Il-sung. Kim Il-sung had acted like the CEO of a vast corporation and it is said that he spent most of his day on the telephone sorting out problems.
When he died and Kim Jong-il became President (in 1994), he refused to do that, and left the nation's factories and companies to their own devices. Problems and stuff-ups soon brought all kinds or problems and this one thing likely led to the problems of the late 1990s.
Interestingly again (I think, for you guys) Out of the famine conditions of the late 1990s, came the first glimmerings of a market economy in NK. People were desperate, and whatever they could scrounge to sell they did, little shanty markets started to spring up all over NK (sometimes selling goods obtained from relatives in China, where across a small river - in places - over two million ethnic Koreans live (the are Chinese citizens) and sometimes from Zainichi Koreans living in Japan, who, for whatever reason gave some loyalty to the DPRK (its complicated). This process, from a slow start, has accelerated in recent years and is now an important part of the north Korean economy, The strange thing is, that its mainly an area where women have taken a lead and that's also changing NK social mores, because the women make more money than their husbands. (NK claims to have full employment, so all the males have a job, even if they have no work to do, and even if their salary is worth very little. But the rules are they must turn up at their office/factory every day, anyway)