Paul Cockshott Review
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Book review of “How the World Works: The Story of Human Labor From Prehistory to the Modern Era”
“A book that intends nothing less than to reveal the workings of the world from the earliest prehistory to the present day and beyond has set itself a sweeping goal.”
Some very controversial claims in the article, especially on the nature of the former Soviet Union.
“How the World Works shoots down various theories of why the Soviet Union and the model it imposed on Central European countries wasn’t socialist, including that is used money, you can’t have socialism in a single country and there was scarcity rather than the plenty that socialism is supposed to provide… reiterating that there was a “common understanding” that those countries were socialist, the author offers his concept of what socialism actually is, based on what did exist…”
“…the author argues that Soviet workers should have been paid in labor hours rather than rubles. This would have been a fairer way of paying people and would have made any imbalances easier for all to see; money was necessary to disguise that, for example, that collective farmers were underpaid relative to their labor. In essense, the argument is that one hour of work should have been compensated by one hour of labor credit. Doing so would have immediate egalitarian effect…”
Sounds like a partial rehash of his 1993 book Towards a New Socialism….
Cockshott’s arguments in favour of labour time accounting, central planning and calling the Soviet Union “socialist” are very weak. Its a pity because he has done some useful work on the labour theory of value but this undermines his credibility in that area
I don’t waste my time with those innovators, for me, Karl Marx is more than enough, in the end, they can read and write hundreds of books and they always have wrong definitions and wrong conclusion. It is like Richard Wolf, he claimed that he had studied Marx capital but he had a wrong definition of socialism, he has stepped back to Robert Owen which was considered a utopian socialist by Engels. cooperatives are not a Marxist conception
These writers, they are like a Law professor told me: The conclusion ( Socratic method ) is not important, the important one is the analysis applied to the facts, and to the rules of law, they can make good analysis, but their conclusions are always wrong, they call themselves Marxists or socialists, but they are just a bunch of capitalist reformers. The beauty of the socialist party is that its analysis is always correct and its conclusion is always correct too, and in a few paragraphs they can express very complicated ideas, there is no need to make any rectifications like the leftwingers. Lenin who was a great theoretician and wrote more than 42 volumes ( and I spent a great deal of time reading him ) calls himself a Marxist, a socialist, and he distorted Marx and the concept of socialism and communism completely and we are still paying the consequences. Adam Buick pamphlet named The Alternative to Capitalism is more important and had better conclusions than the 42 volumes written by Lenin, and the 13 volumes written by Joseph Stalin, and all the books written by Enver Hoxha and Leon Trotsky
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