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Title: Towards a New Socialism by W. Paul Cockshott, Allin F. Cottrell ISBN: 0-85124-545-5 Publisher: Spokesman Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $37.50

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Average Customer Rating: 3 (4 reviews)

Rating: 1
Summary: contact mattias borjesson
Comment: Mattias - Ireland in New York wondering is it you? Lost contact. Still here, never forgot. Reply please. Question: where did we meet? I know the answer - please confirm. Looking for you.

Rating: 5
Summary: Socialism or barbarism
Comment: We are many who critizies capitalism, but what is the altewrnative? If socialism failed in the USSR why even try it? These are the questions answered by Cockshott/Cotrell. Their theory is not without flaws, but it certainly is something like this that we are all envision. Else, if capitalism rules another century we will all perish.

Rating: 1
Summary: New socialism, old problems
Comment: Cockshott and Cottrell's book is the sort of fantasy which could have been produced only inside a university department - or in this case, two universities, one in Scotland, the other in North Carolina. Are they perhaps C.I.A. operatives seeking to discredit Socialism? There may be workable planned Socialist economies, but the society described in this book isn't one of them.

What is new in this "New Socialism" are

i) the mathematical calculations for determing the cost of products in "labour hours" as opposed to dollars or euros

ii) the audacious proposal for a participative democracy via TV-linked voting boxes in each home

and

iii) some proposals for alleviating the environmental impact of economic developments.

They resurrect the old Socialist idea of abolishing money and replacing dollars, euros, etc by "labour vouchers" exchangeable only for products at state shops.

Sadly, any of the old restrictions and defects of existing Socialist societies are included, with more added, such as the very limited ability to accumulate even this Socialist currency and hence inciting even more extra-legal activity than the old Soviet Union saw.

The most startling novelty was C and C daring to contradict Marx on the issue of labour vouchers. Any heretical disagreement on the smallest point with Marx or Lenin in earlier decades would have been inconceivable. That is a measure of how much rethinking has been forced on Marxists by the visible failure of "actually existing Socialism", but the rethinking is still too limited and too hag-ridden by the patterns of earlier Socialisms.

One basic flaw is the obsession with EQUALITY. C and C go to extraordinary lengths to quantify every economic contribution in "hours of labour" because they regard that as a more natural method of measuring the value of goods and services, as opposed to visibly artificial money units such as dollars or francs. ALL workers should in principle receive one labour voucher for one hours work. Yet they are progressively forced into conceding unequal rewards to make the planned economy function at all. Though these rewards are less unequal than those in capitalist countries, the general impoverishment in Socialist countries might make any difference in wealth more visible and resented.

The forced and wholly phoney equality and the frustration of healthy entrepreneurial instincts will naturally encourage development of private economic activity and parallel trading systems, some overlapping with the planned economy, some separate. Some will be prosecuted by the state, some work in official or unofficial co-operation with state regulators who will doubtless take a slice of the action.

Also ignoring hugely unequal contributions which defy conventional measurement (such as innovating and leadership ability) and placing them on a par with mundane work forces more unreality onto this egalitarian reward until a "labour voucher" is as artificial as a pound or a euro.

A second basic flaw is permitting any interaction with external economies. If labour rewards and prices of goods are more favourable in countries to which the socialist country's citizens have access, you will immediately get flight of key workers and smuggling of imports, thus distorting economic planning out of recognition.

I suspect that few people will honestly understand C and C's mathematics (I certainly don't) and many will therefore hesitate to raise objections to their proposals. But in fact C and C's claim to have solved Hayek's "calculation objection", even if true, is largely irrelevant to supporting the plausibility or desirability of a planned economy. Their mathematical sophistication serves mainly to divert attention from the much more fundamental problems of their suggestions.

I suppose we should be grateful that C and C do not yet propose compulsory family planning - either one child per family, as per China, or the incentives for "Mother Heroines of the Soviet Union" to deliver 10 kids. In view of the long-standing Communist project of abolition of the family, they suggest only the official encouragement of communes, not their compulsory formation. But that sort of draconian coercion is not far away, however futile it might be. The very logic of planning production suggests the inevitability of planning the output of the most fundamental product, the human being and how the growing child is nurtured. The size and age distribution of the population directly affects all other planning from housing to clothes to hospitals to jobs. As with other aspects of their book (such as the references to "policing" of extra-legal economic activity and "direction of labour") you get the feeling that the Stalinist fist is just beneath the skin of the New Socialist glove.

This leads us to the most important flaw of all in any planned economy: YOU CAN PLAN ONLY WHAT YOU CONTROL and a planned society has, it seems, to be a strictly controlled society. No plausible model allowing a tolerable amount of freedom has ever been described and I will be surprised if C and C's book convinces anyone outside the surviving hard-core of Marxists.