Unfortunately, a lot of people have been told that "socialism" means "state power over the economy" and refuse to engage with enough socialist/communist theory to see what it actually is. Which gets you strange projects like the above.
For that audience, and over-simplifying greatly: all communists are trying to create a decentralized system that evenly spreads power, and the main split among them is how to actually do that. Anarchists think we should build decentralized power structures until they've replaced our current centralized ones. Marxist-Leninists think we should replace the state with one that promises to implement communism later.
Distributism reads a lot like somebody heard of Marxism-Leninism, thought it was dumb, reinvented anarcho-communism in response, and then described the result as opposed to communism, even though it's largely the same idea as one of the main branches of communist theory.
> create a decentralized system that evenly spreads power
That's simply not feasible, because many centralized systems are a lot more effective than decentralized ones. And centralized systems can't be run via a committee or via direct democracy either, so you will always have some people with outsized decision-making power. At least when you reward these actors with wealth (as opposed to raw political influence, as in socialist countries) they can then go and deploy that wealth on pro-social things, like many of wealthiest businesspeople do in the US. Distributism has the right idea, it's just not universally applicable.
There is no socialist philosophy that objects to centralization of power as long as it is kept in check and limited to it's usefulness
Even Anarchism doesn't say that no one should have outsized decision-making power. Just that it shouldn't be the same people every time, that there should be a good reason for it and that it should be kept in check. The old anarchist example was that of the pirate ship :)
Also, decentralized systems are not always less efficient than centralized systems. Sometimes they are much more efficient, it depends on what you are optimizing for exactly.
Indeed, centralized decision-making, while viable sometimes, need not be pluripotent, and it can be limited enough that it doesn't actually create a power imbalance. Many human societies actually operated in such a way.
If you actually wish to read up a bit more on that, I'd suggest in the extreme of reading up on anarchism. If you use debian, you should be able to apt-get install anarchism :)
> Just that it shouldn't be the same people every time, that there should be a good reason for it and that it should be kept in check. The old anarchist example was that of the pirate ship
Peter Leeson has written extensively on the way actual pirate ships were run. He sometimes calls himself an anarchist, but he makes it clear in his work that these ships were relying on carefully-tuned institutional designs that were not all that far from what we would now call liberal, representative government.
I don't see how that conflicts at all with what I said.
Even in the most extreme of situations, such as a pirate ship, there would be less hierarchy than in our society (this is due to analysis of economic hierarchy).
For that audience, and over-simplifying greatly: all communists are trying to create a decentralized system that evenly spreads power, and the main split among them is how to actually do that. Anarchists think we should build decentralized power structures until they've replaced our current centralized ones. Marxist-Leninists think we should replace the state with one that promises to implement communism later.
Distributism reads a lot like somebody heard of Marxism-Leninism, thought it was dumb, reinvented anarcho-communism in response, and then described the result as opposed to communism, even though it's largely the same idea as one of the main branches of communist theory.