Towards a New Socialism is a 1993 non-fiction book written by Scottish computer scientist Paul Cockshott, co-authored by Scottish economics professor Allin F. Cottrell. The book outlines in detail a proposal for a complex planned socialist economy, taking inspiration from cybernetics, the works of Karl Marx, and British operations research scientist Stafford Beer's 1973 model of a distributed decision support system dubbed Project Cybersyn. Aspects of a socialist society such as direct democracy, foreign trade and property relations are also explored. The book is, in the authors' words, "our attempt to answer the idea that socialism is dead and buried after the demise of the Soviet Union." The book was covered in an article in Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2017, as well as reviewed by Leonard Brewster in the Spring 2004 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. Contents The book is divided into 15 chapters, excluding the introduction: Inequality Eliminating Inequalities Work, Time and Computers Basic Concepts of Planning Strategic Planning Detailed Planning Macroeconomic Planning The Marketing of Consumer Goods Planning and Information Foreign Trade Trade Between Socialist Countries The Commune On Democracy Property Relations Some Contrary Views Considered Ideas presented The main features distinguishing Cottrell and Cockshott's ideas from other socialist tendencies are: A rigorous theoretical defense of economic planning The use of non-circulating labor money to replace circulating currency Athenian-style participatory democracy, specifically the use of sortition rather than election to fill as many political offices as possible Each of these represented major divergences from what was then the main currents of socialist opinion. The fall of the Soviet Union had convinced many socialists that economic planning was to be abandoned. Cottrell and Cockshott in contrast argued that new computer technology plus participatory democracy was actually making economic planning possible to greater extent than ever, a fact that would be noted in other books on economic planning in Japan and private industry. Marx considered non-circulated labor credits as crucial for socialism in his work Critique of the Gotha Program (while critiquing incompetent attempts to implement them), and an earlier generation of socialists (notably Edward Bellamy in his popular 19th century book Looking Backwards), had advocated for them. But after Frederick Engel's death, Karl Kautsky moved the socialist movement away the idea in the early 1900s, leading (among other things) to labor money never being implemented in the USSR (given Kautsky's substantial influence on Lenin's socialist organizing). Under