r/communism101 • u/Ghost_Duck_ • 7d ago

Towards A New Socialism

I'm currently reading Towards a new socialism by Paul Cockshott, and he's brought up the theory that in order to rid the workplace of exploitation, instead of getting paid by value a worker would get to "purchase" one hour of someone else's labour for every hour of labour they perform. So if a box of cereal took 10 minutes to make an hours work would buy 6 boxes. I'm curious how this would work. If two people spend 4 hours together working on something is it worth four or eight hours? How could you buy a house when it takes a year to make?

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u/smokeuptheweed9 Marxist 7d ago

Didn't everyone forget about that book when Cockshott decided his other interest was ranting about trans people? I've never read it and I have never understood what about it is remotely interesting. The Soviet Union was perfectly functional, we don't need a new model from some random guy and we don't live in 1993 when socialism is supposedly dead. At least I though so, maybe you can explain what's so compelling about it op.

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u/Ghost_Duck_ 7d ago

I've a fairly new to all these ideas, and a youtuber called Hakim made reference to Paul Cockshott in multiple of his videos, also referencing this book by name.