This article isn't really a discussion of the details of the planned economics of communist countries.

There are lots of things which could have been elaborated on to explain why planned economics does not always work well. One could also go into many of the screwed up ways the regimes held power and managed people.

However that was never the point of the article. The whole point was to explain why the common comparison of communist regimes and capitalist countries such as East and West Germany never made much sense.

Sure one can compare, but it would be wrong to make that comparison based on the assumption that they had equal starting points or conditions to develop apart from a different economic system.

Force collectivasation is part of the problem of being dictatorships which I remarked on. This is a crucial point when comparing sociaism to capitalism. For the comparison to be fair, both systems must be democratic, otherwise all bets are off. A dictatorship will seldom be well run regardless of economic system employed.