I remember checking out that Towards a New Socialism book when people were recommending it; the guy sounds like a lunatic, not least of which because he conceives of communist society as a technological problem rather than a class one. I don’t know why utopians waste their time writing these schemes instead of self-insert harem fanfic; both have the same pretension to reality but the latter, at least, provides pleasure, unless Cockshott always writes with his other hand. I’ve also heard he’s a Scottish nationalist – who knows if that’s true.

That being said, the original article itself is quite bad and liberal. I have no clue what the constant invoking of “the abstraction of the labor theory of value” is supposed to get at, nor of their “Left Wing Anarchist Think Tank” (which is a hilarious phrase, at least).

All of his horrible politics seem to flow quite smoothly from his idea of what I have called, here, ‘the abstraction’ — a sort of organism composed out of all of us, that owns all of us — and, flowing out of the abstraction’s perspective, the idea of any sort of objective theory of value. After all, an objective theory of value of any sort implies some sort of objective observer.

What is the point of inquiring about society if one is going to declare all of their results subjective regardless? A wise man once said “You can either work towards appropriating the truth or get the fuck out.”