Paul Cockshott  William Paul Cockshott (born 16 March 1952) is a Scottish computer scientist, Marxian economist and a reader at the University of Glasgow. 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 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. 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. Cockshott and several other B&ICO members resigned and formed a new party, the Communist Organisation in the British Isles. During the 1980s when studying for his PhD in Edinburgh, he was recruited to the CPGB along with fellow computer science student Muffy Calder.