Paul Cockshott

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's 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. 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.

Published works Cockshott, W. P. (1990). Ps-Algol Implementations: Applications in Persistent Object Oriented Programming, Ellis Horwood Ltd. Cockshott, W. P. (1990). A Compiler Writer's Toolbox: Interactive Compilers for PCs With Turbo Pascal, Ellis Horwood Ltd. Cockshott, W. P., Cottrell, A. (1993). Towards a New Socialism, Spokesman. Cockshott, W. P., Renfrew K. (2004). SIMD Programming Manual for Linux and Windows, Springer. Cockshott, W. P. (2010). Transition to 21st Century Socialism in the European Union, Lulu. Cockshott, W. P. (2011). Glasgow Pascal Compiler with vector extensions, Lulu. Cockshott, W. P., Zachariah, D. (2012). Arguments for Socialism, Lulu. Cockshott, W. P., Cottrell, A., Michaelson, G., Wright, I., Yakovenko, V. (2012). Classical Econophysics, Routledge. Cockshott, W. P., Mackenzie, L., Michaelson, G. (2015). Computation and its Limits, Oxford University Press. Cockshott, W. P., Nieto, M. (2017). Ciber-Comunismo Planificación Económica, Computadoras Y Democracia, Editorial Trotta. Cockshott, W. P. (2019). How the World Works: The Story of Human Labor from Prehistory to the Modern Day, Monthly Review Press. Cockshott, W. P., Dapprich J. P., Cottrell A. (2022). Economic Planning in an Age of Climate Crisis, self-published. Cockshott, W. P., Kolozova K., Michaelson G. (2024). Defending Materialism: The Uneasy History of the Atom in Science and Philosophy, Bloomsbury Publishing.