W. Paul Cockshott

A comprehensive attempt at writing out how a socialist economy could look in the 20th century. Being now in the 21st century, where we feel the pains of capitalism on people and the environment as strongly as ever, this book would need few updates. You should go into this book recognizing that this framework is not a set of minor revisions, but a complete overhaul of how a government would operate and how people would live within it. It is, in some ways, ideological and may feel impossible show more to implement in a country like the United States (the author is British and focuses on England). But idealism has always been at the heart of socialism, along with the belief that such widespread change is possible.

I do have questions and criticisms, mostly pertaining to the implementation details:

1. I believe the author is too confident in algorithms as the great mediators and managers of the economy. Algorithms are incredible in theory, but as with all software, are left to human hands to implement and therefore subject to human error.

2. The book does little to outright address the existence of people who cannot perform labor due to disability, limiting such provisioning to the elderly and children. That said, their framework can easily be adapted to accommodate them, and perhaps this is one area where the book could be updated for today.

3. How do we accurately report labor performed? In theory, we can adapt time cards and other methods used currently but all of those are subject to "fudging". I suppose there would be some oversight over this, but we don't get a good idea of what this looks like.

I imagine a more economically-minded person reading this may not share the same questions I do, and may see more wrong with its proposals. Overall, the book is a refreshing attempt to go beyond the theory where so much Leftist ideology exists and into the realm of possible implementations. show less