Why the fuck is this book not popular among current-day socialists? Am I missing something?

Why the fuck is this book not popular among current-day socialists? Am I missing something?

I'm in the middle of reading it right now and its an absolute banger. It somehow provides a rock solid critique of capitalism and a well-defined vision of socialism all in 200, easily understood pages. Yet, simply by virtue of its obscurity, I can't help but feel like there's something I'm missing, like as if the book has been embarrassingly debunked and I just haven't found out about it yet.

Of course, it's also shilled endlessly here, but that doesn't do much for its rep

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Cockshot is a meme.

Because most socialists are either normies that want more welfare or tanky LARPers that have yet to let go of the 20th century.

He's not a Marxist. He thinks USSR was socialist. He's an utopianist. You should read Marx.

Kill yourself

I mean it makes some interesting points about computers but really not much else

1. nobody actually reads (applies to everyone)
2. it's not feel-good stuff (applies to twitter)
3. nobody's made a memeable sparknotes version yet (for leftypol)
4. there was that TERF thing. (puts off radlibs, social-issue carers, and people who refuse to engage with those who engage with social issues.)
5. he's british - nay - scottish and USSR-lovers are in the minority of the British left which is largely dominated by trots and labourites. the scottish left is an even smaller circle which fits oddly within that matrix, bringing in other side-questions like scottish nationalism
6. being british also deprives him of the kind of mid-level publicity you can get in the US by giving talks
7. cybernetics isn't a field that interests everyone
8. maybe some people see being from computer science as an immediate warning sign about an author
9. Its just reheated Stalinism. Paul Cockshott is a weird maoist who is in essence a member of the bourgeoisie in that he's a business owner. He lives in what can be regarded as a gated community and he teaches computer science in the same place as ticktin. He also tries to interject bizarre tangents into his computer science class about Marx. I've met him and can confirm that he's a lunatic who has no contact with the working class or its movement, hence this bizarre utopianism that he is giving us of socialism as a problem of consumption not of class relations. To give you an example of utopianist delusions he said to me that Marx considered socialism and communism to be different things because he had used both weird in the manifesto, ignoring the fact that Marx had used those words ironically for him in the section on utopian communism
10. i stole that last one from reddit to get up to 10 but "he's not from my pre-selected faction" is always a good reason
10.5 'cock'

1. youtube.com/watch?v=eFRQwcJYZNc

also an 11'th reason: i just learned that "Towards a new socialism" was published in 1993, so it's also not new which leads to it being ignored for age, for falling into that weird 1990s wormhole of ideas (you should see how many reformed keynesian visions of the day got mulched by the memory hole.), and it lacks the PR of a launch announcement.

The main problem with this book is that it doesn't exactly give us a plan on how we should implement this kind of system.

In that regard it's Utopian, although saying it's simply Utopian misses the point. If you read it as a blueprint for socialism, then yes, it is a Utopian text. But this reading is incorrect. I don't think Cockshott means us to read it in this way. His project is to illustrate a way to make a socialist economy comply to the functions expected of a modern economy. He describes a single way computer science offers us to overcome structural contradictions faced by socialist economics. The method of working through this problem is what's important, not the specifics of the solution he comes up with, which can be said to exist as a single point within a larger "solution space" which will contain much more efficient and dynamic solutions. All Cockshott does in his book is indicate that this solution space exists. It's a first step in understanding the deeper structure of it from a modern computer-science perspective. Hence it is called "Towards a New Socialism," "towards" indicating that it is an attempt, and "New Socialism[s]" being the possibilities in this solution space. (This is all partially directed at )

Now, the problem is that this is all that it does. It gives us no understanding of the way a new socialism can grow out of a real movement. That is outside of the scope of the book. He has elsewhere described policy measures a capitalist state can take to implement this kind of system, but I find them unconvincing. Further, they assume a communist party to already be in charge of the country. What do we do until that point?

Next to that it falls into the Soviet trap of organizing socialism as a very rigid state-centered system. I want to see a new theory of socialism, one that somehow manages a synthesis between centralized and decentralized planning. Planning should dynamically emerge out of the mutual consent between workers in a society, not through (property based) commodity exchange or a (state authority based) central planning agency. In my vision planning agencies should exist all over society. They propose improvements to planning mechanisms and workers collectively decide if they want to implement them.

Jesus Christ that 9th one made me want to die