Scottish computer scientist and economist
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".
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 Allin F. Cottrell, 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&amp;ICO), but he and several other members became unhappy with B&amp;ICO's position on workers' control. Cockshott and several other B&amp;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. He has criticized the economic calculation problem on the grounds that planning can be made feasible via computerization and allocation based on labor time.
References.
 ;templatestyles src="Reflist/styles.css" / ;