Paul Cockshott
William Paul Cockshott (born 16 March 1952) is a Scottish computer scientist, Marxian economist and a reader at the University of Glasgow.

Education
Cockshott earned a BA in Economics (1974) from Manchester University, an MSc (1976) in Computer Science from Heriot Watt University and a PhD in Computer Science from Edinburgh University (1982).

Career
He has made contributions in the fields of image compression, 3D television, parallel compilers and medical imaging, but became known to a wider audience for his proposals in the multi-disciplinary area of economic computability, most notably as co-author, along the economist Allin Cottrell, of the book Towards a New Socialism, in which they strongly advocate the use of cybernetics for efficient and democratic planning of a complex socialist economy.

Political views
In the 1970s, Cockshott was a member of the British and Irish Communist Organisation, but he and several other members became unhappy with B&ICO's position on workers' control. Cockshott and several other B&ICO members resigned and formed a new party, the Communist Organisation in the British Isles. During the 1980s when studying for his PhD in Edinburgh, he was recruited to the CPGB along with fellow computer science student Muffy Calder.

Published works
Cockshott, P. (1990). Ps-Algol Implementations: Applications in Persistent Object Oriented Programming, Ellis Horwood Ltd. 
Cockshott, P. (1990). A Compiler Writer's Toolbox: Interactive Compilers for PCs With Turbo Pascal, Ellis Horwood Ltd. 
Cockshott, P., Cottrell, A. (1993). Towards a New Socialism, Spokesman. 
Cockshott, P., Renfrew K. (2004). SIMD Programming Manual for Linux and Windows, Springer. 
Cockshott, P. (2010). Transition to 21st Century Socialism in the European Union, Lulu. 
Cockshott, P. (2011). Glasgow Pascal Compiler with vector extensions, Lulu. 
Cockshott, P., Zachriah, D. (2012). Arguments for Socialism, Lulu. 
Cockshott, P., Cottrell, A., Michaelson, G., Wright, I., Yakovenko, V. (2012). Classical Econophysics, Routledge. 
Cockshott, P., Mackenzie, L., Michaelson, G. (2015). Computation and its Limits, Oxford University Press. 
Cockshott, P. (2020). How the World Works: The Story of Human Labor from Prehistory to the Modern Day, Monthly Review Press.