Communism can be drastically more efficient than capitalism on these fronts. There are still technical debates about socialist planning, but essentially your critique can become a communist critique just by replacing government with multi-national corporation. Large corporations are essentially doing planning since they don’t allocate resources within them by internal markets (Sears tried that and it was disastrous) and in real life, corporations try to induce demand with marketing and a lot of the assumptions to make markets and marginalism make sense don’t actually function in a real business (e.g. despite “deminishing marginal returns and increasing marginal costs” it costs less not more to build your 1,000,001st car rather than your first). Even in your example of food allocation, a small number of corporations (e.g. Cargill and Kroger), rather than “locals” decide those things. They might not be able to get away with only selling gruel and meal worm paste, but this is a highly consolidated sector (and markets would always lead to that) and the US and “the west” have extreme amounts of food waste. Additionally, local people don’t have more control and input in capitalism even in the abstract. There are certain sectors where the capitalist ideology of “voting with your wallet” can approximate local input, but usually that is not the case.

The religious belief that capitalism is efficient and voting with your wallet gives local input comes from the hyper simplistic thought experiments about markets in the abstract or Alice and Bob deciding to trade a widget. The most important and foundational assumption, but is not stated, about efficiency of markets is that everyone has an infinite amount of money, but finite and equal value of a dollar, so willingness to pay only amounts to how much you want/need something. So, we can say that markets allocated resources efficiently, because if this guy didn’t buy necessary, life-saving medicine, it must be because he valued $3000 more than his life rather than not having a way to get that sum of money. And then using markets to advocate for Capitalism use neoliberal dodges about making Capitalism about markets, rather than who owns capital and how much control over society and resources they get from owning capital. Additionally, there is Hayek’s understanding of the price mechanism as aggregating and computing resource allocation. But this only works as the most crude form of feedback (there is a shortage of this, use less. There is an overabundance of this, so consume more even to the point of wasting it). To say that markets are efficient means that “externalities” don’t matter. e.g. “The environment doesn’t matter and shouldn’t be considered since markets don’t naturally price it in, so use more fossil fuels and dump toxic byproducts into the drinking water.” Or “well, now that we have been privatizing and have sub-contracting in universities to be more capitalist, there are more middle-men and bureaucrats. So there should be less education, and anyone that gets educated should be in debt for the rest of their lives. this is efficiency”

local officials exist and are elected from local populations in a communist society. Unlike Amazon and other corps who ship in fresh mangement with no links to the community. This seems pretty straight forward.

Through responsiveness between local and national (or global) concerns, something that the market system is not as good at as Neo-classical economists want us to believe. It is a bit myopic to think that capitalist firms today don’t engage in decision making about resources 100km away either. Large firms already engage in significant economic planning internally, markets are not a resource efficient mechanism as much as they are a profit mechanism. I still have not seen a convincing argument as to where the breaking point is between a large firm engaging in internal planning and a planned national economy. Even capitalist economies engaged in widespread planning and non-market mechanisms of resource allocation during the second world war, and they did it without the widespread computing we now have.

If you want a short but detailed book to read which also dives into the mathematics of how to compute this, Economic Planning in an Age of Climate Crisis is good as it deals with optimal uses of resources and consumer demand. Two of the authors also wrote Towards a New Socialism which also deals with similar issues. We’ve had the mathematical concepts to do this for a hundred years, there is a reason Kantorovich won a nobel prize in economics. Linear programming is still taught today as a way to calculate efficient uses of resources, not to mention the advances capitalist firms have created since then in figuring out efficient ways to produce and move good internally without a market mechanism.

There are a few other authors who have long books engaging with how to do this as well which I can recommend to you if you want more.

If you want to bring up the criticism that soviet planners failed to respond to local conditions, just remember they used abacuses almost right up to the end to compute things, and information traveled slowly. Its amazing they were able to accomplish what they did tbh.

I don’t think there’s many “local companies” managing factory farms, or importing food from overseas neocolonies. Also 100s of km away.

I’d say just look at the levels of food waste occurring and food insecure billions, within markets today, to know something’s fucked. There’s certainly a better way of centrally managing production and distribution, especially with the levels of technology available today.

When a central government is planning, what signals do you think they use?