| Birth Date: | 16 March 1952 |
| Birth Place: | Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom |
| William Paul Cockshott | |
| Nationality: | Scottish, British |
| Fields: | Computer science Marxian economics |
| Work Institution: | University of Glasgow |
| Alma Mater: | Manchester University (BaEcon) Heriot Watt University (MSc) Edinburgh University (PhD) |
| Party: | Communist Party of Britain |
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 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).[1]
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.[2]
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 the 1970s, Cockshott was a member of the British and Irish Communist Organisation, but he and several other members became unhappy with B&ICO's position on workers' control.[3] Cockshott and several other B&ICO members resigned and formed a new party, the Communist Organisation in the British Isles.[3]
Cockshott advocates for a system of a moneyless economy based on a computerized planned economy and direct democracy. He has criticized the economic calculation problem on the grounds that planning can be made feasible via computerization and allocation based on labor time.[4]