communism ends up top down in every implementation we’ve seen in the wild. but maybe you should think of the question not as ‘who is doing the planning?’ and instead as ‘what do we actually need to plan centrally’. i think you’d be surprised about how little you actually need to plan centrally. I ended up settling on worker protections.

classical communism’s take is its the economy and the state. both which means its ripe to collapse into corruption/authoritarianism and its very hard to protect. particularly once the system has established itself and is relatively stable. gives time for bad actors to start needling into the processes and abusing them.

You’ll never be able to control ‘who is doing the planning’ in a reliable manner over a long term in a centralized system. just take a look at every tech company that gets majority market share. soon as it happens they begin abusing their control as people within the company shift. can also use political parties in democracies as an example, even with voters deciding on the final candidates there isnt really a choice. this is why communism in the wild has never had the bottom up result you’re claiming it has, and no i don’t care about the purist written version of communism I care how it plays out in practice.

and the distinction between public servant vs executive is fairly immaterial if they’re both functioning as ‘making the final decision for the group’ what matters isnt who the decision maker is but how that decision maker was chosen to speak for the group.