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 , 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 description of a socialist society in Critique of the Gotha Programme, realized by today's computer technology:
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.
[ What is the Communist Organisation in the British Isles? in Proletarian, No. 1, c. 1974.] 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.
Published works
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Cockshott, W. P. (1990). Ps-Algol Implementations: Applications in Persistent Object Oriented Programming, Ellis Horwood Ltd.
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Cockshott, W. P. (1990). A Compiler Writer's Toolbox: Interactive Compilers for PCs With Turbo Pascal, Ellis Horwood Ltd.
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Cockshott, W. P., Cottrell, A. (1993). Towards a New Socialism, Spokesman.
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Cockshott, W. P., Renfrew K. (2004). SIMD Programming Manual for Linux and Windows, Springer.
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Cockshott, W. P. (2010). Transition to 21st Century Socialism in the European Union, Lulu.
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Cockshott, W. P. (2011). Glasgow Pascal Compiler with vector extensions, Lulu.
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Cockshott, W. P., Zachariah, D. (2012). Arguments for Socialism, Lulu.
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Cockshott, W. P., Cottrell, A., Michaelson, G., Wright, I., Yakovenko, V. (2012). Classical Econophysics, Routledge.
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Cockshott, W. P., Mackenzie, L., Michaelson, G. (2015). Computation and its Limits, Oxford University Press.
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Cockshott, W. P., Nieto, M. (2017). Ciber-Comunismo Planificación Económica, Computadoras Y Democracia, Editorial Trotta.
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Cockshott, W. P. (2019). How the World Works: The Story of Human Labor from Prehistory to the Modern Day, Monthly Review Press.
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Cockshott, W. P., Dapprich J. P., Cottrell A. (2022). Economic Planning in an Age of Climate Crisis, self-published.
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Cockshott, W. P., Kolozova K., Michaelson G. (2024). Defending Materialism: The Uneasy History of the Atom in Science and Philosophy, Bloomsbury Publishing.
External links
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Paul Cockshott's YouTube channel
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Paul Cockshott's blog
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"Paul Cockshott - Towards a new Socialism (1/3)". Video produced by Oliver Ressler on Paul Cockshott and his planned economy-model. Transcription of a video by O. Ressler, recorded in Glasgow, GB, 25 min., 2006
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Towards a new socialism, complete book download.
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target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> 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).
