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A review by rotorguy64
Towards a New Socialism by Allin Cottrell, W. Paul Cockshott
1.0
Towards a New Socialism was to be my introduction to socialism, a counterbalance to my at the time new laissez-faire views. Not only did it fail to convince me of socialism, it failed to convince me of any merits of socialism. And not only that, it left me feeling like I haven't actually learned anything about this school of thought. It's surprisingly informative in hindsight, after I've read [b:The Road to Serfdom|299215|The Road to Serfdom|Friedrich A. Hayek|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327787673s/299215.jpg|217623] and [b:The Counter-Revolution of Science|1476342|The Counter-Revolution of Science|Friedrich A. Hayek|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328768270s/1476342.jpg|1467371], but that's not exactly a point in its favor.
One thing that stuck out was that there was virtually zero discussion of anything normative. Equality and democracy are apparently seen as so obviously good that no discussion of them is necessary (even though some people - like me - see both as a scam). The same treatment is given to social justice (another scam), but not to actual justice, and freedom is only used in the sense of positive freedom, whereas negative freedom is not even mentioned, despite these two having been conceived as two sides of the same coin. If you expect an ethical treatise, something to explain the socialist mindset to you, look somewhere else. This book fails completely in this regard. But democracy and equality are important, don't you agree? No, I don't. Towards a New Socialism stands firmly in the tradition of books that are extremely convincing if you already agree with them, and if you don't, then you're a shitlord or something.
Granted, this book is primarily one on economics. So, how does it fare here? Well, not good. The three-page bibliography contains Marx, Lenin, Stalin (because nothing says "economist" like exporting grain during a famine), Keynes, but not Hayek, Rothbard, Friedman, Sowell, or Mises. The latter is mentioned in passing when the calculation-problem is addressed, but his fucking first name is omitted. And mind you, this book spends a good amount of pages on the calculation-problem, yet apparently, the authors only read secondary literature on the topic. Their solution to this problem is mostly to emulate the market, by bringing in pseudo-prices among other things - cheap imitations of the real thing, the thing that actually works and doesn't rest on supercomputers and bureaucrats trying to figure out what you need. The knowledge-problem, formulated by Hayek in [b:The Road to Serfdom|299215|The Road to Serfdom|Friedrich A. Hayek|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327787673s/299215.jpg|217623], is something they haven't heard about at all. Notice a pattern yet?
What kills this book for me is the callousness with which the authors describe their plans on how to dissolve the traditional family and instead establish a society based on communes, which is really just their hatred of the individual taken to its logical extreme. Here is where Towards a New Socialism shows its true colors, as just another megalomaniac control-fantasy of talentless pseudo-intellectuals that have never left the confines of their Ivory Tower. Absolutely disgusting.
One thing that stuck out was that there was virtually zero discussion of anything normative. Equality and democracy are apparently seen as so obviously good that no discussion of them is necessary (even though some people - like me - see both as a scam). The same treatment is given to social justice (another scam), but not to actual justice, and freedom is only used in the sense of positive freedom, whereas negative freedom is not even mentioned, despite these two having been conceived as two sides of the same coin. If you expect an ethical treatise, something to explain the socialist mindset to you, look somewhere else. This book fails completely in this regard. But democracy and equality are important, don't you agree? No, I don't. Towards a New Socialism stands firmly in the tradition of books that are extremely convincing if you already agree with them, and if you don't, then you're a shitlord or something.
Granted, this book is primarily one on economics. So, how does it fare here? Well, not good. The three-page bibliography contains Marx, Lenin, Stalin (because nothing says "economist" like exporting grain during a famine), Keynes, but not Hayek, Rothbard, Friedman, Sowell, or Mises. The latter is mentioned in passing when the calculation-problem is addressed, but his fucking first name is omitted. And mind you, this book spends a good amount of pages on the calculation-problem, yet apparently, the authors only read secondary literature on the topic. Their solution to this problem is mostly to emulate the market, by bringing in pseudo-prices among other things - cheap imitations of the real thing, the thing that actually works and doesn't rest on supercomputers and bureaucrats trying to figure out what you need. The knowledge-problem, formulated by Hayek in [b:The Road to Serfdom|299215|The Road to Serfdom|Friedrich A. Hayek|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327787673s/299215.jpg|217623], is something they haven't heard about at all. Notice a pattern yet?
What kills this book for me is the callousness with which the authors describe their plans on how to dissolve the traditional family and instead establish a society based on communes, which is really just their hatred of the individual taken to its logical extreme. Here is where Towards a New Socialism shows its true colors, as just another megalomaniac control-fantasy of talentless pseudo-intellectuals that have never left the confines of their Ivory Tower. Absolutely disgusting.