“You can’t leave it all to the market”: An interview with Paul Cockshott
Diana Caudwell and D. L. Jacobs
Platypus Review 164 | March 2024
On February 4, 2023, Platypus Affiliated Society members Diana Caudwell and D. L. Jacobs interviewed Paul Cockshott, a computer scientist, communist, and a lecturer at the University of Glasgow. Cockshott was a member of the British and Irish Communist Organisation in the 1970s, but later resigned along with other members, forming the Communist Organisation in the British Isles. He has written several books, including Towards a New Socialism (1993)[1] and most recently How the World Works (2020). An edited transcript follows.
D. L. Jacobs: Can you tell us about how you became interested in socialism and Marxism?
Paul Cockshott: I’ve been a Leftist since I was about 17. I came from a social democratic household and my stepfather was a Labour politician. I was involved in canvassing and things like that for the Labour Party from the age of about 12. I considered myself a socialist from an early age. During 1968, I was radicalized somewhat by the events in France and China, and at school I tried to set up a pupils’ union. Then when I went to university in 69, in Canada, where I immediately joined the Leftist student movement and was involved in organizing a sit-in of the university administration in solidarity with the catering workers. It was at that stage that I started seriously studying Marxism. Prior to that I’d looked at bits of the Little Red Book (1964)[2] when I was at school, but I didn’t study it to any extent.
DLJ: What were the first things that stood out to you about Marxism? You mentioned that you were radicalized by the events in France and China?
PC: Well, you first tend to identify with a side. And then, you learn something about it. So, as a first-year student, I read Lenin, and that was what had the biggest influence on me at that point. All I read of him was State and Revolution (1917), The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918), and “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder (1920), but these influenced me enough to decide that I wasn’t going to keep doing a science degree. I wanted to study political economy. I went to Manchester University in England, which was supposed to be one of the best for political economy, and it had a fair number of Marxist economists teaching there. In my first year at Manchester, I read Capital (1867), Michał Kalecki, Paul Sweezy, Ernest Mandel, etc. I set out to learn to be a Marxist economist.
DLJ: Was this about the time you got involved with the British and Irish Communist Organisation (BICO)?[3]
PC: That was a few years later. I was initially involved with the local student socialist society. I helped organize Capital reading groups, and the schedules were set by the British Althusserian journal Theoretical Practice, who were organizing study groups at British universities on the classics of Marxism-Leninism. These were very good courses that were organized by Ben Brewster, who had translated Althusser into English. The BICO used to sell their pamphlets at the Socialist Society book stores, along with things like Theoretical Practice and the classical texts of Marxism, because they were one of the only groups in the early 70s doing a critique of market socialism. They had a series of pamphlets called Marxism and Market Socialism and An Introduction to Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. The only other people that would engage with political economy were Charles Bettelheim in France, and, to an extent, Sweezy in America. In the British Isles, the only people doing political economy were from Ireland. It was originally the Irish Communist Organisation (ICO) that used to publish this stuff, because of the nature of the Irish working class: a lot of its members were people who had to move around. Several of the workers who were active in the ICO moved to various places to work in Britain, and they started calling it the British and Irish Communist Organisation. These publications then became fairly available in London, and were printed in London in addition to Dublin.
I only joined the BICO for a month or so because I got to know the people in the Scottish branch of it. They pointed out that the organization was being taken over by what they took to be social democrats who were advocating that the Labour Party was a natural party of government, and who argued that socialist transition would go through the Labour Party. They were getting BICO to adopt what had been the line of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB)[4] on the British road to socialism. I joined it on the urging of some of the Scottish and Irish comrades to break away with the people who were not in favor of the social democratic path. So, we formed what was essentially a Bordigist split influenced by Gwyn Williams, a Marxist historian from Wales who was familiar with Bordiga. Prior to that, he and the Scottish comrades had been involved in publishing some of the first English translations of Gramsci. Williams pointed out that Bordiga was more interesting in many ways and that he should be studied. We got French and Italian editions of Bordiga and started studying that, deciding that you should take an abstentionist line in elections, rather than supporting the Labour Party as the BICO was advocating. We split off and formed a separate group called the Communist Organisation of British Isles and Ireland (COBI).[5]
DLJ: Can you talk about the debate behind market socialism? This would have been the Leonid Brezhnev era and there would have been a question of planning and market socialism. How did you see those debates?
PC: It focused on the Kosygin reforms,[6] which were introducing more market measures. In a number of places, not just in Britain, these were being denounced as introducing a state-capitalist economy. Obviously, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was denouncing them at the start. Take the attack on Liu Shaoqi in the Cultural Revolution: they labeled him “China’s Khrushchev.” The line was that Khrushchev had started to restore state capitalism and that it was pushed further by Brezhnev and Kosygin. Looking back at it now, it seems that they attacked Khruschev first as a way to attack Liu Shaoqi. This tendency occurred throughout the Socialist Bloc, encouraging the spread of market reforms. BICO were the first group in the British Isles to produce a reasonable critique of that. Bettelheim was criticizing it, and he was obviously an economist of some standing. But the problem I felt while reading Bettelheim, who was available only in French at that time is that he didn’t get around to what he was advocating, i.e., instead of the measures of the Kosygin reforms. One felt that Bettelheim was going in the right direction but didn’t really give one the answers. I’m talking about the debate around 1974–75. You can look at the back issues of Monthly Review for the exchanges between Sweezy and Bettelheim about it.
Diana Caudwell: Concerning the split from the BICO, could you tell us any more Bordiga’s thought (versus Gramsci)?
PC: It was over parliamentarism, i.e., “should we participate in parliament?”
DC: Is that what you meant by the abstentionist politics you mentioned earlier?
PC: The point was that all the other Maoist parties in Britain, and the Bordigists, all took an abstentionist position. Participating in elections was pointless. It just gave credibility to the state. To that extent, there was a sort of confluence of views on practical politics between the Maoist parties like the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CPB-ML),[7] and the International Communist Party,[8] which was the Bordigist party.
DC: And so the other parties were supporting one of the other main parties?
PC: At that point, the Left in Britain was made up of one relatively medium-sized Trotskyist group, the International Socialists (IS),[9] and a number of very small Trotskyist groups. All the Trotskyist groups, including the IS, were totally in the Labour Party. Some of them said you should join the Labour Party. Others were actually saying you should vote for the Labour Party but not join it. The CPGB said you should vote for the Labour Party, but they had a history of putting their own candidates up—none of the other parties put their own candidates up. The CPB-ML actually managed occasionally to get members of Parliament elected, but by the early 70s, it hadn’t done that for a long time. The CPB-ML, which was the Left-wing split from the CPGB, made not participating in elections a key issue. This was because that had been the policy back in the 1920s, and also because that was what the CCP had said you should say — that there was no way you could get socialism through parliamentary means. The Bordigists, being a continuation of 1920s Communist International positions, also said that.
DLJ: Given your experience of what was happening in the 60s and 70s, we’re interested in what led you to write Towards a New Socialism.
PC: By that stage, COBI had broken up, and I was in the CPGB. Although I didn’t agree with its parliamentary strategy, I thought it was better to be in that as it was an active organization. But it was becoming evident that there was a crisis in the USSR, and that the issues being raised by the CCP, Bettelheim, and Sweezy were coming to a head: Soviet society could either go towards a more rationally planned economy, or towards introducing even more market measures. We were struck by the fact that there didn’t appear to be any coherent defense being advanced concerning the classical Marxist ideas of planning or the labor theory of value.
By this stage, I was working at the computer science department at the University of Edinburgh. I spent some time talking to the people at the supercomputer center, who dealt with large physics problems, asking them, “how would you solve large systems of linear equations? Is it practical?” They said, “yeah, we do it all the time. We use iterative methods.” And that was an eye-opener to me because, up to that point, I didn’t know how to provide a refutation to the strongest Left case for market socialism, which was being put forward by Alec Nove, a historian at the University of Glasgow — and who I actually knew, because the Scottish Left is small. Nove was having an influence, not just on the Communist Left, for whom he was a significant figure, but also on the Labour Party. Specifically, his influence was undermining the pro-nationalization, pro-planning wing of the Labour Party.
During the 50s and 60s, it had been taken as a given by Labour politicians that they wanted a planned economy. Harold Wilson and people like that in the early 60s were all talking about the necessity for a planned economy. And although Wilson was obviously a social democrat, he took seriously the idea that they had to progressively take the means of production into public ownership. By the time he resigned, over half the housing stock in Britain was owned by the state, or rather, over half the people in Britain lived in houses provided by the state. And most major industries were publicly owned. That produced the Thatcherite attack to try and restore capitalism, which was occurring at the same time as Gorbachev’s perestroika. And we felt that it was necessary to produce a refutation, both of Thatcher’s ideas and the ideas that were being put forward in the USSR. We were implicitly choosing Nove’s book as the expression of the pro-market socialist position, and we were posing our stuff against them. When I say “we,” I mean the people who had been in COBI, and who remained in informal contact — i.e., Allin Cottrell and Greg Michaelson among others, and who had all been active together in the 70s. We were having these discussions, and we decided to write a book on it to refute Nove, with the aim of getting it published in Russia. Allin got himself a place at one of the universities in Moscow, we wrote the book, and he went to try and get it published in Russia.
I went over to Hungary because I had indirect contacts who I took to be Left intellectuals and who I thought would be sympathetic. When I met them, I found that no; no, they had completely changed sides! So, no chance of getting it published in Hungary. As it happens, it’s probably going to be published in Hungary this year, but 88 was probably when we’d written the book, and there was a prolonged delay in getting it published. Initially, we had thought of getting it published abroad. We then got support from New Left Books[10] to publish it, but from 89 onwards, the Eastern Bloc started to collapse. New Left Books took fright at the idea of publishing something advocating planned economy, and withdrew from their contract with us. For two years we hunted around to find someone who wouldtake a book advocating planning at a time when Francis Fukuyama was saying, “this is the end of History, everyone, now accept that the only way forward is the market economy,” etc. It was very difficult in 91 to find anyone who would even consider publishing it. In the end, we got it published through the Institute for Workers’ Control, which was a Left social democratic group who actually had ended up controlling the Bertrand Russell Press. They were the only people still willing to advocate a planned economy in Britain at that point.
DLJ: There’s been a kind of “orthodox ban” on images of the future. The line that Marx gives in 1873 is the “receipts for the cookshops of the future.”[11] How do you see this work in the tradition of Marx?
PC: He was writing that in the 1870s. We were writing 100 years later. There had been a century of history since then to study.
DLJ: There are critiques you have of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises, and you mentioned the advances in machine learning.[12] I just learned about this story from you about also talking to physicists.[13] Can you talk about that history that had developed from Marx?
PC: We didn’t bother dealing with Hayek and people like that, because we were addressing the Left. In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, Allin and I reckoned that, given the big shift to the Right in Bush and economic thought, the latter of which had moved from Keynesianism to Hayekianism, we needed to refute the ideological basis of their attack on planning at ground level. At a conference named after Vilfredo Pareto, hosted by the economics department at the University of Lausanne, ca. 94 or 95, there were three economists there that were still socialists. Nove was there, and John Roemer was there, and also me and Allin. It was evident that the bases on which we had written the book — i.e., the labor theory of value, and planning — weren’t going to cut any ice with the then economic orthodoxy, unless we were able to establish the objectivity of the labor theory of value and the falsity of the Hayekian arguments. We then spent the mid- to late 90s writing polemics, establishing the scientific status of the labor theory of value, and critiquing Hayek and Von Mises. We also did critiques of Paul Samuelson, which have never been published.
DLJ: You’ve done work on the empirical evidence of the labor theory of value, also comparing it to other things such as the price of production theory. You mentioned just now some of the stakes of demonstrating the objectivity of the labor theory of value. The subtitle to Capital is “A Critique of Political Economy.” Or, as he puts it, the “political economic categories,” by which labor was self-evident for Adam Smith and David Ricardo, did not mean labor as value. Wouldn’t one also say it’s anachronistic? Wouldn’t the whole question of socialism be about overcoming that form of mediation, that basis of labor as value?
PC: There are two issues here. One is whether it would be practical to have an economy based on labor value. That is, would economic calculation in labor values be at least as good as economic calculation in market prices? Our claim was that it would actually be better. In order to establish this, we had to first establish that, in fact, market prices were extremely closely correlated to labor values. That was contrary to what some anti-empiricist Left economists believed. You can directly apply the categories in Capital to the analysis of real capitalist economies. You can do concrete economic statistics, in terms of surplus value, organic composition, etc. It’s now uncontroversial that you can do this, but we had done a lot of that work in COBI, and published in self-published Left pamphlets. Once we started publishing it in academic articles, we got people saying, “no, you can’t actually measure surplus value! You can’t measure organic composition of capital because these are defined in terms of units of labor time.” If you were going to justify publishing stuff on the declining rate of profit, for example, you had to show that you had measurements of the organic composition of capital and rate of surplus value, and you had to be able to show that the monetary measurements correlated it extremely closely with the labor categories that Marx was using. The initial motivation for us was showing that labor values and prices correspond very closely. That was what we produced in our article “Testing Marx” (1995).[14] When we submitted the paper, they wouldn’t accept it because they said, “you don’t know that you’re really measuring Marx’s categories.” We had to do some literature searching, and we found the right technique for doing the measurements of how close prices are to values. We applied them to the British economy, and showed that they were extremely well-correlated: around 97%. Therefore, we had high accuracy figures for the various measurements we were taking.
The initial justification was to show that you could apply the categories in Capital to the concrete analysis of the British economy. And that’s what we did in COBI . We took the Althusserian and Leninist claim that you had to do the complete analysis of concrete conditions seriously. We thought you had to do what Lenin did in the The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), i.e., identify the hierarchy of contradictions in the British economy, how they interacted, and how they could be resolved. We had done all that in the 70s. It wasn’t until the 90s that we published it in an academic journal rather than in Left-wing pamphlets. To get it into a journal, we had to prove that it was justifiable to use the Marxist categories, which we’d never doubted because we'd all been trained on and studied Capital as students. We just went out and applied it. As for the argument with the Hayekians or with Samuelson: Samuelson was saying that a socialist economy should apply prices of production.
We were arguing against that — and this is a chapter which was deleted from Towards a New Socialism — on two grounds: one, the percentage error is very small compared to prices of production and labor values. And two, the justification Samuelson gave for using prices of production—in a provocative title, “The Use of Bourgeois Prices for Socialist Economy,” or something like that — is a rather complicated one. It’s based on John von Neumann’s growth theory, saying that if you re-feed all the surplus into accumulation, the increase in productivity is such that the rational price you should charge for the commodity is approximately that of the prices of production. This is because you’ve got to allow for the depreciation in the real cost of producing things at the same time that labor productivity goes up. Samuelson arrives at using prices of production as the rational thing to do. But of course, he had been involved in a long polemic against Marxist economics. For example, there was his famous “eraser” comment: that the only thing that you needed to do to solve the transformation problem was erase all reference to labor. If you assumed an equal rate of profit across the economy, Samuelson was right, and the labor theory of value was redundant. It didn’t add anything to your prediction prices. But actually, he never did any empirical work. He never tested to see how close they were. It was all purely theoretical. It wasn’t until Anwar Shaikh got his PhD students to start doing empirical work that it became evident that labor values were just as good at predicting prices as prices of production are. How was that compatible? Samuelson’s whole neo-Ricardian polemic against Marxism and against the labor theory of value had been based on the redundancy of labor values if you had profit-equalization conditions. If you were confronted with the reality that in fact, prices of production were no better than labor values at accounting for real prices, you might have asked, “how can that be?” We said, “let’s see. Is the basic justification for prices of production there?” The basic justification in Marx was that if goods were sold at their labor values, industries with a high organic composition would have a lower rate of profit and this was held to be contrary to what competition would result in.
But we said, “we’re seeing that labor values are no better and no worse than prices of production at predicting actual prices. Is there any evidence that industries with a high organic composition of capital have a lower rate of profit than those with low organic composition, who should also have a higher rate of profit?” This was probably 1996, maybe 97. We checked it for Britain, the U.S., and Mexico, and found that in all those cases, yes, it was the case that if you had a high organic composition of capital, the rate of profit was low in industry. Or, not exactly, but there was a strong negative correlation between them. From that point, we said, “the basic assumption on which the entire Samuelson attack on Marx is based is empirically unfounded. As an explanation of how capitalism works, the labor theory of values is clearly superior because it doesn’t require any odd assumptions like that.” A motivating factor here was that Allin Cottrell and I had read Emmanuel Farjoun and Moshé Machover’s book. Which had, back in the 80s, essentially predicted that this would be the case.
DLJ: Laws of Chaos (1983)?
PC: Yes, they produced it as a refutation of Ian Steedman and Samuelson, the former of whom had been my tutor at Manchester. It’s an effective refutation, because it says that Steedman and Samuelson were applying the wrong branch of mathematics! You have to treat these things as stochastic systems, and if you do that, you need to construct probabilistic arguments from deterministic arguments, and if you have a probabilistic argument, you derive the law of value from, essentially, something analogous to the law of large numbers, or to thermodynamic arguments.
It didn’t come as a surprise to us to discover how good the labor theory of value was, because we’d both taken it as a given from our initial reading of Capital, which was then reinforced by reading Farjoun and Machover.
My account so far has left out one stage. During the early 80s, I was approached by a Chinese student. At that time, the Chinese students who came over to the West were very Left-wing, as they’d been influenced by the Cultural Revolution. He proposed that I go to the ministry of planning in China, to help get various Western, technical experts over to China. In the end, it turned out that no, they weren’t going to let any foreigners into the ministry of planning, but it was at this stage, prior to writing Towards a New Socialism, that I started to think about the technical requirements for planning. By that stage I was a computer engineer, having left economics and started working in the computer industry, my first thoughts were, what kind of hardware do we need? How much information is that? How can we address it all? I managed to persuade the main British mainframe company (ICL)[15] to allow us to do research into developing 128-bit machines, because I reckoned you would need 128-bit address space to handle all the information. My assumption was that then, in the early 80s, you would need as many computers as there were people in the world. I continued this work in the research lab of Memex Technology Limited, which had been founded as a spinoff by Professor Fred Heath, the chief designer of ICL. We’d largely got it designed, but then Memex went belly-up in the stock market crash of 87. In the research labs we were all given 15 minutes to clear our desks and leave the building. So that came to an end, but until the crisis in the Soviet Union, I didn’t think it was an urgent issue. I was thinking it’s a computer engineering issue. How do you build the computer network that's going to do this? Whereas I had been approaching it the same way Glushkov was — as a hardware problem — it wasn’t till the crisis of 89 that it became clear that it was an ideological problem, which had to be responded to at the level of political economy.
DLJ: You wouldn’t simply say that socialism has become more possible today because we have higher computing power big data machine learning?
PC: The planning method that we proposed in Towards a New Socialism and “Application of Artificial Intelligence Techniques” uses what in the 80s were called “artificial intelligence techniques,” but you wouldn’t call them that now; they’ve become standard computing techniques. These deep neural networks are all based on large linear algebra systems. In a sense, they’re analogous mathematics, but we were thinking of it at a considerably smaller scale — smaller than that which is being solved now by artificial intelligence techniques. You don't need such huge computational resources for planning as you do for a lot of AI.
DC: I did a project on deep learning and stuff like principal components analysis and support vector machines (SVMs). Are those the kind of methods you mean?
PC: Well, in the sense that SVMs are the closest to our proposed planning method, yes. But if you take the examples of Leonid Kantorovich in the 1950s, the formalizations of Marxist value theory by Michio Morishima in the 60s, or Oscar Langer in the 50s and early 60s — all of these are large-scale linear algebra models. But, try and look at this whole thing abstractly: why do you need matrices, and what are they about?
Matrices are means of representation in mathematics, the way something is influenced by a large number of different factors. A matrix-to-vector multiplication, it’s about taking a state, which is relatively complex, and mapping it to a new state — a whole series of partial interactions. It’s the same thing when you are considering what people in the 1920s or what Werner Heisenberg was considering: transitions between energy levels of atoms. At all points, you’ve got a complex system, a whole set of energy levels which may exist. At time one, a set of energy levels, at time two, another set which may exist. How do you represent the interactions between them? You have to represent it as a matrix. You’re representing some matrix multiplication, and this is a recurring theme whenever you’re trying to solve that kind of problem. Planning is a problem like that because you have a vector of resources available to you — things which have been produced already, and you’re trying to map it to things that will be produced next year.
The formal way of describing that is matrix multiplication. In practice, that’s an expensive way of doing it, and there are cheaper ways of doing it. Part of what we say in Towards a New Socialism is that there are much tighter computational representations of the interconnections that can be encoded via a matrix, and that a lot of Nove’s claims about the computational feasibility of planning via computation were based on overestimating the degree of the economy’s interconnection. It’s not the case that to make a loaf of bread, you need a million different inputs. You need flour, water, a bit of salt, some yeast, and heat. The economy is a lot more loosely connected; it’s a remarkably sparse matrix. It’s a small world network. Once you start doing analysis of decomposing, for example, the U.S. input-output table, you see that it becomes increasingly sparse the more industries you have, which makes the planning problem more and more easy. The other point is, if it were a dense matrix, the capitalist economy wouldn’t work, because it would be computationally intractable.
DLJ: Of course, planning exists not just for technocratic reasons, but to bring in the masses of people. You write about democracy in Toward a New Socialism. How can these techniques bring people democratically into the planning process?
PC: There are two key institutions of democracy, according to the classical political theorists. One of them is decision-making by the whole population, which could be done, in those days, by everyone gathering in the assembly and voting. Nowadays, everybody can vote by mobile phone. The whole country can be in the assembly.
The question is, what kind of things can you vote on? And what do you have in a capitalist economy? Capitalist society is not actually a decision-making process, or, only to a very limited extent. When people vote, it acts more as a legitimating process for the people who will make the decisions, and that’s because you’re able to supply maybe one or two bits of information every five years. Many more decisions are being made than that. You have to be able to allow people to make actual quantitative decisions on whether more or less should be spent on housing, hospitals, or transport. You have to put that in a form by which there is more broad participatory voting. I and other academics at Glasgow got students to prototype this within the last 10 years in a system called Handy Vote. We proved that you can do this kind of thing; you can actually have votes on quantitative issues involving large numbers of people.
DLJ: In the “Critique of the Gotha Program” (1875), Marx offers an early stage of planning, saying that one’s labor value and their democratic interest would potentially be in contradiction. He says that equal rights applied to different people is unequal. What are the goals of planning? Is it just a matter of making things more equal, and one by which we could always have a more progressive candidate in a capitalist nation who could redistribute things?
PC: The important thing about planning is that you deal with decisions about how society is going to be in the future — what kind of lives people are going to lead and what kind of environment one wants. Do you want a society based on car transport, or do you want public transport? Do you want people living in dense cities, or do you want people spread out in smaller communities across the available lands? It’s that kind of decision that the market doesn’t make. A cybernetic system can do the feedback that the market does just as well. But what the market can’t do is allow those kinds of political decisions to be made. As the necessity for such political decisions increases, even capitalist states are finding that they are having to haphazardly introduce increasing levels of planning. We’re returning to the situation which existed in the 1950s and 60s, when even the bourgeoisie recognized that planning is necessary. That is an advantageous shift in the language of politics. It is much easier to promote socialist politics when it is generally recognized that you can’t leave it all to the market. |P
[1] Coauthored with Allin F. Cottrell.
[2] Also known as Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.
[3] BICO was founded in 1965 and dissolved in the 1980s.
[4] The CPGB was founded in 1920 and dissolved in 1991. Not to be confused with the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee), which was founded in the early 1990s, and publishes the Weekly Worker.
[5] COBI was founded in 1974 and dissolved in 1980.
[6] Also known as the 1965 Soviet economic reform, or the Liberman reform.
[7] The CPB-ML was founded in 1968.
[8] The ICP was founded in 1952.
[9] The former name of what is now the Socialist Workers Party (UK), founded in 1950.
[10] Later, Verso Books.
[11] Karl Marx, “Afterward to the Second German Edition” (1873), in Capital, vol. 1, available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm>.
[12] See Allin F. Cottrell and W. Paul Cockshott, “Information and Economics: A Critique of Hayek,” Research in Political Economy 16 (1997): 177–201, available online at <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2410756_Information_and_Economics_A_Critique_of_Hayek>; Paul Cockshott, Application of Artificial Intelligence Techniques to Economic Planning (Glasgow: Department of Computer Science, University of Strathclyde, 1988), available online at <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245441108_Application_of_Artificial_Intelligence_Techniques_to_Economic_Planning>; W. Paul Cockshott, “Application of Artificial Intelligence Techniques to Economic Planning,” Future Computing Systems 2, no. 4 (1990): 429–43, available online at <https://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/plan_with_AIT.pdf>; Allin Cottrell and W. Paul Cockshott, “Socialist Planning after the Collapse of the Soviet Union,” Revue européenne des sciences sociales XXXI, no. 96 (1993): 167–85, available online at <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23739824_Socialist_Planning_after_the_Collapse_of_the_Soviet_Union>; Allin Cottrell and W. Paul Cockshott, “Calculation, Complexity and Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Once Again,” Review of Political Economy 5, no. 1 (July 1993): 73–112, available online at <https://users.wfu.edu/cottrell/socialism_book/calculation_debate.pdf>; Paul Cockshott, “Von Mises, Kantorovich and in-natura calculation,” European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies Intervention 7, no. 1 (May 2010): 167–99, available online at <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46547387_Von_Mises_Kantorovich_and_in-natura_calculation>.
[13] Cockshott, Nove, and John Roemer were invited to a conference hosted by neoclassicals and the Austrian School.
[14] Paul Cockshott, Allin Cottrell, Greg Michaelson, “Testing Marx: Some new results from UK data,” Capital & Class 19, no. 1 (March 1995): 103–30, available online at <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247788259_Testing_Marx_Some_new_results_from_UK_data>.
[15] International Computers Limited.
