Socialist calculation: the computer engineering problem. In the same year that Allin Cottrell and I published Towards a New Socialism(TNS), I also brought out a couple of computer science books. The two CS books might seem to have little to do with the book on socialism but they are linked by an intellectual history of […]
Socialist calculation: the computer engineering problem Read More »
Date: May 14, 2019Author: Paul Cockshott In corresponding with readers it has become clear that in TNS we did not perhaps do a good enough job of explaining the relative roles of input-output techniques and the Harmony planning technique which we proposed. The input-output method is defined in terms of flows. If you look at
Input-output or Harmony planning Read More »
Date: July 28, 2017Author: Paul Cockshott In my last post I repeated Marx’s phrase the the hand mill gave you the feudal lord the steam mill the industrial capitalist. One reader objected that this overstated the role of technology and that steam power was already known to the Romans. I concede that Marx over simplified.
Why no Roman industrial revolution? Read More »
Date: September 1, 2016Author: Paul Cockshott Were fossil fuels necessary? Did capitalism itself generate its own technical advances? Why was energy so vital to the development of capitalism? Fundamentally it is because by substituting inanimate energy for human muscle, the amount of human time and effort required to make things was reduced. A powered machine
Energy, Science and Capitalism Read More »
Date: April 18, 2017Author: Paul Cockshott n the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
Fossil fuel and the ebbing of globalisation Read More »
Date: July 25, 2018Author: Paul Cockshott I have been producing a series of videos explaining materialism. Most of these have been accepted without controversy, but predictably enough, the last one, which was on quantum phenomena and materialism raised a number of critical comments. The gist of my argument had been that the dominant Copenhagen interpretation
Materialism and delayed choice quantum eraser experiments Read More »
Date: July 24, 2017 Author: Paul Cockshott I shall be elaborating on the following theses: The inability of 20th century socialism to progress to communism led to the crisis of the USSR. Communism requires a definite stage of development of technology. This stage was only reached at the very end of the 20th century. But this problem
Big Data and Super-Computers: foundations of Cyber Communism Read More »
Date: May 6, 2019Author: Paul Cockshott I have produced a couple of videos recently on the danger posed by global warming. This is something that I have been concerned with since about 1977 when I wrote a report for the shop stewards committee at GEC Trafford Park, called Workers’ Power. It was for the shop
No to carbon taxes! Read More »
Date: September 9, 2019Author: Paul Cockshott Last week I discussed the issue of slave reparations in the USA in the abstract. I now want to look at it more concretely, to put figures to it. I will be analysing just how much surplus labour was plausibly extracted from slaves in the USA from shortly after
Calculating Slave Reparations in Dollars Read More »
Date: December 1, 2017 Author: Paul Cockshott Marxian socialists have long been opponents of prostitution aiming to eliminate it once they came to power. Kollontai[1]speaking well before the cant about sex work had been invented, and in an early socialist, rather than capitalist, economy understood very clearly why it exists in capitalist countries and why
Socialists can never support prostitution Read More »