Paul Cockshott is a British academic, computer scientist, and Marxist economist based for much of his career at the University of Glasgow. He is best known within left political thought for reviving and modernizing the case for comprehensive economic planning, arguing that the traditional objection to socialism—that no central authority could gather and process enough information to allocate resources efficiently—has been overtaken by advances in computing power and data processing. In this he positions himself against the conclusions of the socialist calculation debate associated with figures such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, contending that what was once a genuine computational obstacle is now tractable.
Cockshott's most influential contribution is his collaboration with the economist Allin Cottrell, most notably in their book "Towards a New Socialism," which sets out a detailed blueprint for a planned economy organized around labor time. Drawing directly on Marx's labor theory of value, they propose that goods be accounted for and priced in terms of the socially necessary labor embodied in them, that citizens be remunerated in labor tokens, and that large-scale computation be used to solve the allocation problems of a whole economy. The scheme is combined with proposals for radical democratic control, including mechanisms of direct democracy and sortition, reflecting an insistence that planning be politically accountable rather than technocratic.
His wider body of work extends these themes across economics, the analysis of value and probability in markets, the history of computation, and critiques of capitalist distribution. He has become a notable reference point for a strand of contemporary left thinking sometimes described as "cybernetic socialism" or associated with debates over the digital feasibility of planning, influencing discussions among proponents of what is loosely termed left-accelerationism and among activists rethinking socialist institutions after the collapse of the Soviet-type economies. Cockshott is a polarizing figure even on the left, and some of his social and cultural commentary has drawn sharp criticism.
Politically, Cockshott matters because he refuses to treat the planned economy as a settled historical failure, instead reframing it as an engineering and democratic problem to be solved with modern tools. Whether or not one accepts his conclusions, his work has helped keep questions of economic calculation, value, and the technical architecture of a post-capitalist society alive as serious subjects of debate rather than closed ones.