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Paul Cockshott is an ideological TERF, that is to say, he has Hitlerite tendencies. as such i would personally consider his work to be a deviation from Marxism and not really worthy of serious engagement.
There's something about computer science that takes an analysis too far and suddenly you are measuring skulls.
I have not read it. But I have had it on my reading list and skimmed some parts because it is considered an important text in socialist planning debates and some introductory econophysics and cybernetic socialism. But I also have been de-prioritizing it since Cockshott is weird, a transphobe and his takes on AI makes me think that he does not understand value theory at all. Also the main contribution that is usually cited from the text is that the classic input-output matrix method of planning is actually much easier than usually stated, since most commodities use a very small fraction of all available inputs in the economy, so mapping outputs to how much of what needs to be produced is actually easier for a real economy than the general case.
From a review a trans comrade I know that has read it, his transphobia doesn't come up or in the text, but his political economic analysis is really weird and confused. If I remember correctly he is something like a Trotskyist that is pro-Stalin and anti-Soviet Marxism-Leninism.
CW: Math Stuff
If you have the math background to understand this, his main contribution is that in the simple input-output matrix formulation understanding of planning, where you have a matrix that describes how much of each input you need to produce a commodity and you find what needs to be produced by inverting that matrix and multiplying it by the vector of desired outputs needed. He points out that since every commodity only needs a small number of inputs compared to all things in the economy, so it is a sparse matrix making it significantly easier and actually practical to invert. He also supposedly lays out the algorithm for inverting this sparse matrix step by step in a way that tries to make the reader think that he invented that algorithm rather than pulling it from a linear algebra textbook.
So, to sum up, it is probably worth reading mostly only if you are really interested in a very mathematical treatment of the socialist planning debate and some quantitative macroeconomic modelling. Otherwise you would be better served reading something else. Even then, you should start with other books like Farjoun and Machover's Laws of Chaos, rather than using this as your starting point.
I agree with him being a TERF. He's not vocal about it^[EDIT: I haven't checked lately, so this might have changed], but he gets there (and other places) through overanalysis.
Towards A New Socialism makes the case, in the 90s, for cybernetic socialism with then existing hardware. It's pretty dated at this point by his own admission and there is a far larger corpus on Cybernetics nowadays.
His and Cottrell’s attempts to empirically prove the law of value always seemed a little fishy to me, but I never put in the effort of figuring out what my problem is with it. I guess it’s incompatible with my understanding of Marx’s value theory. It’s likely to lean on a physicalist interpretation of value which is usually coming from a neo-Ricardian bad interpretation of Marx.
Hee hee hee.
Cockshott.
From what I read from the replies, he needs shooting towards his cock.