William Paul Cockshott (born 16 March 1952) is a Scottish academic in the fields of computer science and Marxist economics. He is a Reader at the University of Glasgow. Since 1993, he has authored multiple works in the tradition of scientific socialism, most notably Towards a New Socialism and How the World Works. Cockshott advocates for a moneyless economy and the use of computers to aid a planned economy.
Scientific career Cockshott earned a BA in economics (1974) from Manchester University, an MSc (1976) in computer science from Heriot Watt University and a PhD in computer science from Edinburgh University (1982). He has made contributions in the fields of image compression, 3D television, parallel compilers and medical imaging, but became known to a wider audience for his proposals in the multi-disciplinary area of economic computability, most notably as co-author, along the economist Allin F. Cottrell, of the book Towards a New Socialism, in which they strongly advocate the use of cybernetics for efficient and democratic planning of a complex socialist economy. He proposes a moneyless socialist economy, akin to Karl Marx's description of a socialist society in Critique of the Gotha Programme, realized by today's computer technology:
In our proposal people would be paid not in money but with nontransferable electronic work accounts. Purchases would be made with smart cards as they are today, but with the difference that the only way people could accumulate work credits would be by actually working. The more hours you work the more credits you get. Goods in the shops would then be priced in hours, and the exchange principle is basically one for one. For one hour of work you get goods that took one hour to make.
Political views In the 1970s, Cockshott was a member of the British and Irish Communist Organisation (B&ICO), but he and several other members became unhappy with B&ICO's position on workers' control, claiming that it promoted power over the proletariat at their workplace rather than giving power to the proletariat. Cockshott and several other B&ICO members resigned and formed a new party, the Communist Organisation in the British Isles, until its dissolution in 1980. Cockshott advocates for a system of a moneyless economy based on a computerized planned economy and direct democracy, a form of technologist socialist planning. He has criticized the economic calculation problem on the grounds that planning can be made feasible via computerization and allocation based on labor time.
Published works Cockshott, W. P. (1990). Ps-Algol Implementations: Applications in Persistent Object Oriented Programming, Ellis Horwood Ltd. ISBN 978-0745808277 Cockshott, W. P. (1990). A Compiler Writer's Toolbox: Interactive Compilers for PCs With Turbo Pascal, Ellis Horwood Ltd. ISBN 978-0131737907 Cockshott, W. P., Cottrell, A. (1993). Towards a New Socialism, Spokesman. ISBN 978-0851245454 Cockshott, W. P., Renfrew K. (2004). SIMD Programming Manual for Linux and Windows, Springer. ISBN 978-1852337940 Cockshott, W. P. (2010). Transition to 21st Century Socialism in the European Union, Lulu. ISBN 978-1445715070 Cockshott, W. P. (2011). Glasgow Pascal Compiler with vector extensions, Lulu. ISBN 978-1447761563 Cockshott, W. P., Zachariah, D. (2012). Arguments for Socialism, Lulu. ISBN 978-1471658945 Cockshott, W. P., Cottrell, A., Michaelson, G., Wright, I., Yakovenko, V. (2012). Classical Econophysics, Routledge. ISBN 978-0415696463 Cockshott, W. P., Mackenzie, L., Michaelson, G. (2015). Computation and its Limits, Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198729129 Cockshott, W. P., Nieto, M. (2017). Ciber-Comunismo Planificación Económica, Computadoras Y Democracia, Editorial Trotta. ISBN 978-84-9879-721-3 Cockshott, W. P. (2019). How the World Works: The Story of Human Labor from Prehistory to the Modern Day, Monthly Review Press. ISBN 978-1-58367-777-3 Cockshott, W. P., Dapprich J. P., Cottrell A. (2022). Economic Planning in an Age of Climate Crisis, self-published. ISBN 979-8357728739 Cockshott, W. P., Kolozova K., Michaelson G. (2024). Defending Materialism: The Uneasy History of the Atom in Science and Philosophy, Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781350447349
References
External links Paul Cockshott's YouTube channel Paul Cockshott's blog "Paul Cockshott - Towards a new Socialism (1/3)". Video produced by Oliver Ressler on Paul Cockshott and his planned economy-model. Transcription Archived 26 February 2018 at the Wayback Machine of a video by O. Ressler, recorded in Glasgow, GB, 25 min., 2006 Towards a new socialism, complete book download. Len Brewster on "Towards a new Socialism? by W. Paul Cockshott and Allin F. Cottrell. (Nottingham, U.K.: Spokesman Books, 1993)", Review Essay, The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Vol.7, No.1 (Spring 2004): 65–77.; Paul Cockshott, "Notes for a critique of Brewster" (20 June 2009).
