''Towards a New Socialism'' is a 1993 non-fiction book written by Scottish computer scientist
Paul Cockshott
William Paul Cockshott (born 16 March 1952) is a Scottish computer scientist, Marxian economist and a reader at the University of Glasgow. Since 1993 he has authored multiple works in the tradition of scientific socialism, most notably ''Toward ...
, co-authored by Scottish economics professor Allin F. Cottrell. The book outlines in detail a proposal for a complex planned socialist economy, taking inspiration from
cybernetics
Cybernetics is a wide-ranging field concerned with circular causality, such as feedback, in regulatory and purposive systems. Cybernetics is named after an example of circular causal feedback, that of steering a ship, where the helmsperson m ...
, the works of
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
, and British
operations research
Operations research ( en-GB, operational research) (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often shortened to the initialism OR, is a discipline that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve deci ...
scientist
Stafford Beer
Anthony Stafford Beer (25 September 1926 – 23 August 2002) was a British theorist, consultant and professor at the Manchester Business School. He is best known for his work in the fields of operational research and management cybernetics.
Bi ...
's 1973 model of a distributed
decision support system
A decision support system (DSS) is an information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations and planning levels of an organization (usually mid and higher management) and h ...
dubbed
Project Cybersyn
Project Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971 to 1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy. The project consisted of four modul ...
. Aspects of a socialist society such as
direct democracy
Direct democracy or pure democracy is a form of democracy in which the Election#Electorate, electorate decides on policy initiatives without legislator, elected representatives as proxies. This differs from the majority of currently establishe ...
,
foreign trade
International trade is the exchange of capital, goods, and services across international borders or territories because there is a need or want of goods or services. (see: World economy)
In most countries, such trade represents a significant s ...
and
property relations
Property is a system of rights that gives people legal control of valuable things, and also refers to the valuable things themselves. Depending on the nature of the property, an owner of property may have the right to consume, alter, share, r ...
are also explored. The book is, in the authors' words, "our attempt to answer the idea that socialism is dead and buried after the demise of the Soviet Union."
The book was covered in an article in ''
Süddeutsche Zeitung
The ''Süddeutsche Zeitung'' (; ), published in Munich, Bavaria, is one of the largest daily newspapers in Germany. The tone of SZ is mainly described as centre-left, liberal, social-liberal, progressive-liberal, and social-democrat.
History ...
'' in 2017, as well as reviewed by Leonard Brewster in the Spring 2004 issue of the ''
Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics
The ''Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering heterodox economics published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.Lee, Frederic S., and Cronin, Bruce C. (2010)"Research Quality Rankings of Hetero ...
.''
Contents
The book is divided into 15 chapters, excluding the introduction:
# Inequality
# Eliminating Inequalities
# Work, Time and Computers
# Basic Concepts of Planning
# Strategic Planning
# Detailed Planning
# Macroeconomic Planning
# The Marketing of Consumer Goods
# Planning and Information
# Foreign Trade
# Trade Between Socialist Countries
# The Commune
# On Democracy
# Property Relations
# Some Contrary Views Considered
Ideas presented
The main features distinguishing Cottrell and Cockshott's ideas from other socialist tendencies are:
# A rigorous theoretical defense of
economic planning
Economic planning is a resource allocation mechanism based on a computational procedure for solving a constrained maximization problem with an iterative process for obtaining its solution. Planning is a mechanism for the allocation of resources b ...
# The use of non-circulating labor money to replace circulating currency
# Athenian-style participatory democracy, specifically the use of
sortition
In governance, sortition (also known as selection by lottery, selection by lot, allotment, demarchy, stochocracy, aleatoric democracy, democratic lottery, and lottocracy) is the selection of political officials as a random sample from a larger ...
rather than election to fill as many political offices as possible
Each of these represented major divergences from what was then the main currents of socialist opinion. The fall of the Soviet Union had convinced many socialists that economic planning was to be abandoned. Cottrell and Cockshott in contrast argued that new computer technology plus participatory democracy was actually making economic planning possible to greater extent than ever, a fact that would be noted in other books on economic planning in Japan and private industry. Marx considered non-circulated labor credits as crucial for socialism in his work
Critique of the Gotha Program
The ''Critique of the Gotha Programme'' (german: Kritik des Gothaer Programms) is a document based on a letter by Karl Marx written in early May 1875 to the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany (SDAP), with whom Marx and Friedrich Engels wer ...
(while critiquing incompetent attempts to implement them), and an earlier generation of socialists (notably
Edward Bellamy
Edward Bellamy (March 26, 1850 – May 22, 1898) was an American author, journalist, and political activist most famous for his utopian novel ''Looking Backward''. Bellamy's vision of a harmonious future world inspired the formation of numerou ...
in his popular 19th century book
Looking Backwards
''Looking Backward: 2000–1887'' is a utopian science fiction novel by Edward Bellamy, a journalist and writer from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts; it was first published in 1888.
The book was translated into several languages, and in short or ...
), had advocated for them. But after
Frederick Engel's death,
Karl Kautsky
Karl Johann Kautsky (; ; 16 October 1854 – 17 October 1938) was a Czech-Austrian philosopher, journalist, and Marxist theorist. Kautsky was one of the most authoritative promulgators of orthodox Marxism after the death of Friedrich Engels in ...
moved the socialist movement away the idea in the early 1900s, leading (among other things) to labor money never being implemented in the USSR (given Kautsky's substantial influence on
Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 19 ...
's socialist organizing). Under Cottrell and Cockshott's labor credits idea, someone working 8 hours a day would receive 8 hours credit, goods and services would be priced in terms of the labor required to make them, prices would be adjusted upward/downward in accordance with supply and demand, and labor money would cancel out rather than circulate when used for a purchase. The idea incorporated the work from the growing field of
econophysics
Econophysics is a Heterodox economics, heterodox interdisciplinary research field, applying theories and methods originally developed by physicists in order to solve problems in economics, usually those including uncertainty or stochastic processes ...
, specifically the work of Israeli mathematicians
Emmanuel Farjoun
Immanuel ( he, עִמָּנוּאֵל, 'Īmmānū'ēl, meaning, "God is with us"; also romanized: , ; and or in Koine Greek of the New Testament) is a Hebrew name that appears in the Book of Isaiah (7:14) as a sign that God will protect the ...
and
Moshe Machover
Moses ( el, Μωϋσῆς),from Latin and Greek Moishe ( yi, משה),from Yiddish Moshe ( he, מֹשֶׁה),from Modern Hebrew or Movses (Armenian: Մովսես) from Armenian is a male given name, after the biblical figure Moses.
According to ...
, whose book Laws of Chaos empirically demonstrated that labor content was responsible for around 95% of a good's price. Years later, University of Maryland econophysicist Victor Yakovenko would demonstrate that circulating money inherently creates an unequal Gibbs-Boltzmann distribution within an economy, even when beginning from conditions of perfect equality.
The emphasis on Athenian democracy stemmed from a desire to avoid the
Iron Law of Oligarchy
The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory first developed by the German-born Italian sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book ''Political Parties''.James L. Hyland. ''Democratic theory: the philosophical foundations''. Manchester, Engl ...
, a tendency noted by
Robert Michels
Robert Michels (; 9 January 1876 – 3 May 1936) was a German-born Italian sociologist who contributed to elite theory by describing the political behavior of intellectual elites.
He belonged to the Italian school of elitism. He is best know ...
for the leadership of an organization to turn even democratic organizations into a dictatorship if given the chance. According to Cottrell and Cockshott, Lenin's failure to account for this tendency in ''
State and Revolution'' (published in 1917) meant the Soviet Union was never able to find a stable democratic form of government, thus degenerating by Stalin's time into a stable but authoritarian one-party state. This dictatorship further distorted the Soviet economy, as major economic decisions were made by a political elite with little input or consideration of the larger population's needs, resulting in the classic hallmarks of the Soviet economy: Rapid advancement in areas like space exploration and weaponry favored by the political establishment, widespread shortages of consumer goods, and the failure of the Soviet government to develop an early Internet after the main proponents of the project fell out of favor with Communist Party leadership in the Brezhnev era. Athenian Democracy avoids this outcome by choosing political leaders on the basis of lot rather than election. Quoting Aristotle, Cottrell and Cockshott note that elections have an aristocratic tendency that has been recognized since Ancient Athens: voting for whoever one thinks is the best usually means voting for whoever has the most money, status, or education to convince voters that they're "the best." For this reason, Democratic Athens selected their legislature, judiciary, and executive branch officials entirely by lot, reserving elections only for military generals where specific skills in the military arts were required. Cottrell and Cockshott call for a restoration of this democratic practice, arguing that it is the only way to eliminate the barrier between ruler and ruled, and prevent the rulers from forming a caste increasingly separate from the rest of the population.
Reception
Leonard Brewster, Ph.D., reviewed the book in the Spring 2004 issue of the ''
Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics
The ''Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering heterodox economics published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.Lee, Frederic S., and Cronin, Bruce C. (2010)"Research Quality Rankings of Hetero ...
,'' positing that "Cockshott and Cottrell have come as close to developing a serious, up-to-date version of a
neo-Marxist
Neo-Marxism is a Marxist school of thought encompassing 20th-century approaches that amend or extend Marxism and Marxist theory, typically by incorporating elements from other intellectual traditions such as critical theory, psychoanalysis, or exi ...
political economy as we are likely to see." Brewster concedes that C&C have "succeeded in countering a version of the
calculation argument" but writes that this "ironically clarif
esand strengthen
the reasons for considering socialist calculation not just as troublesome, but impossible, and valuation in terms of labor an illusion." Furthermore, Brewster argues that C&C's allowance of a market for consumer goods, in effect, makes their model a "capitalistic, commodity producing society."
In 2009, Cockshott published an article entitled "Notes for a critique of Brewster" in which he responded to Brewster's arguments against the book's model. Cockshott asserts that Brewster is "wrong in saying that our labour values are no longer labour values since they are now influenced by market prices", arguing that the distortion of labour value ratios, manifesting through exchange value ratios in capitalist economies, is a short-term artefact of supply and demand imbalances. Furthermore, Cockshott argues that maintaining these distinctions in his model does not "
revent
Emily Sophie Hastings Brooke (born November 1985) is a British inventor, industrial designer and entrepreneur known for having developed the Beryl (formerly Blaze) Laserlights used for Santander Cycles (the London bike rental scheme).
Beryl ...
labour values from being usable for economic calculation when dealing with intermediate goods." Summarising, Cockshott asserts that "we argue that the market has a place, but only a limited place. It should be restricted to consumer goods, and even here, market indicators are not the ''ultima ratio''. They are just one among many constraints that society has to recognise."
References
External links
Towards a New Socialism(Book website)
Towards a New Socialism(PDF download)
Sozialismus ist machbar German translation (PDF download)
走向新社会主义 Mandarin translation (PDF download)
"Paul Cockshott - Towards a new Socialism (1/3)" video (recorded in Glasgow, GB, 25 min., 2006) produced by Oliver Ressler on Paul Cockshott and his planned economy-model
Transcription of video{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180226132600/http://www.ressler.at/towardsa_new_socialism/ , date=2018-02-26
* Paul Cockshott
"Notes for a critique of Brewster"(June 20, 2009)
Books about socialism
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