Economist and communist scientist.
Joined November 2013
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Paul Cockshott retweeted
Коммунисты так сильно гнобили народ, что при Сталине за 30 лет, несмотря на Мировую Войну, продолжительность жизни увеличилась с 32 до 68 лет.
Подобного не было, нет и не будет больше нигде а мире.
Paul Cockshott retweeted
Dear @gidonsaar With all due respect, having lived in apartheid South Africa & then served under Nelson Mandela in our first democratic Parliament, both Mandela & Archbishop Desmond Tutu, not only described Israel as an apartheid state but suggested it is a more brutal form of apartheid than they experienced in SA. Having visited Israel & the OPTs numerous times, I share their view. Israel was apartheid SA’s closest ally. Just as apartheid was ended in SA so too will it end in Israel/Palestine
Madam,
With all due respect, even in your remarks here you refrain from denying or condemning what has been attributed to you and published publicly. That speaks for itself.
To the best of my knowledge, the statements attributed to you regarding “apartheid” do not reflect the position of the European Union.
The matter is simple: if you did indeed make these vile and defamatory statements, stand behind them.
If you did not make them, deny it.
Until this matter is cleared up, my decision will remain unchanged.
Paul Cockshott retweeted
I disagree that we are in a "New Cold War".
Rather, we are in a continuation of what we might call the Long Cold War, or the Great Anti-Sovereignty War, which has been waged by the imperial core against liberation movements and sovereign-seeking states in the periphery that have sought to break from their subordination and exploitation within the imperialist world-system.
The Long Cold War encompasses Western attacks against the Russian revolution and the Chinese revolution, through the long series of invasions and regime-change operations that targeted Korea, Guatemala, the DRC, Brazil, Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam, Chile, Burkina Faso, etc, continuing well beyond the fall of the USSR with the invasions of Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc., all the way to the strangulation of Cuba and the invasions of Venezuela and Iran in 2026.
As I see it, the usual claim that the Cold War runs from 1945-1991 doesn't work, the periodisation is wrong. The core states sought to destroy the USSR as soon as it was founded, long before 1945, and in any case their violence was never only just against the USSR, or just against USSR-aligned states, nor even just against socialism; it was fought against any sovereign-seeking state in the periphery - including non-aligned states - that threatened to escape the imperial arrangement.
The Long Cold War is, in other words, an imperialist backlash against the long struggle for liberation in the periphery. This aggression didn't end in 1991, it continues today, and it will continue well into the 21st century until it is defeated. And defeated it will be.
Paul Cockshott retweeted
In the final years of apartheid, South Africa launched multiple wars against its neighbors
The West did nothing, until it was clear its days were numbered. All the sudden relations were cut and investment was pulled
We are now seeing that with Israel
Paul Cockshott retweeted
A very dangerous new nightmare we are living in Gaza City, and no one in the world is paying attention to it.
Days ago, the Israeli army installed huge military cranes, each about 30 meters tall, on the eastern areas it controls. These cranes are equipped with machine guns and cameras, and they fire randomly and almost continuously at tents, streets, and exposed neighborhoods.
Gaza City is extremely narrow, only 10 kilometers wide. A single crane at that height is enough to expose the entire city from east to west. Every street, every square, every tent, every house has become completely exposed. There is no place to hide, and not a single moment of safety.
In just the past two days, three people were killed by fire from these cranes. One of them was sitting quietly with his father in a small café, trying to breathe for a few minutes. Hours later, a 5year old girl was killed while playing near her home.
These cranes have turned the entire city into an open field. The latest military technologies are directed at civilians. We have become an open testing ground for their new weapons. The horror is not just in the sound… it is the constant feeling of being an exposed target at all times, where even children cannot run in the street without fear.
Paul Cockshott retweeted
Communists need far fewer professional academics, PMC's urbanites, service workers, institutional intellectuals, affluent students, economists, artists, activists, "knowledge workers", office workers, drug users, and lumpen with a chip on their shoulders.
Communists need more productive proles, tradesmen, engineers, family people, rural workers, auto-didactics, the physically fit, readers, conservatives, general physical workers, realitists, commercial transportation, people who don't do drugs, union rank & file, and people looking for practical solutions based on commonality.
Paul Cockshott retweeted
BREAKING NEWS: Tel Aviv insiders leak that US leaders must accept that Israel is an independent sovereign nation. Also, the US must continue to provide massive amounts of military & economic aid or their country will likely go broke and collapse.
Paul Cockshott retweeted
“The problem of light industry presents no special difficulties. We solved that problem several years ago. The problem of heavy industry is more difficult and more important.
It is more difficult because its solution demands colossal investments, and, as the history of industrially backward countries has shown, heavy industry cannot manage without huge long-term loans.
It is more important because, unless we develop heavy industry, we cannot build any industry at all, we cannot carry out any industrialisation.
And as we have not received, and are not receiving, either long-term loans or credits of any long-term character, the acuteness of the problem for us becomes more than obvious.
It is precisely for this reason that the capitalists of all countries refuse us loans and credits, for they assume that we cannot by our own efforts cope with the problem of accumulation, that we shall suffer shipwreck in the task of reconstructing our heavy industry, and be compelled to come to them cap in hand, for enslavement.
But what do the results of our work during the past year show in this connection? The significance of the results of the past year is that they shatter to bits the anticipations of Messieurs the capitalists.
The past year has shown that, in spite of the overt and covert financial blockade of the U.S.S.R., we did not sell ourselves into bondage to the capitalists, that by our own efforts we have successfully solved the problem of accumulation and laid the foundation for heavy industry. Even the most inveterate enemies of the working class cannot deny this now.”
-Joseph Stalin (1929)
Paul Cockshott retweeted
Olgin and Losurdo (among others) have both written well about why this disagreement remains relevant: Stalin and Trotsky are historical "avatars" for different constituencies.
I'd concede that centering their names confuses more than clarifies, but who's got a good alternative?
Paul Cockshott retweeted
Marx never denies that supply and demand affect market prices. But he is asking a fundamentally different question: once supply-demand fluctuations are abstracted away, what explains the social magnitude around which prices move?
Paul Cockshott retweeted
The BBC spins this story very dishonestly.
What does 'shadow fleet' actually mean? Well it means sanctioned by Western Governments. Such sanctions have no standing in international law, they are simply threats issued by Governments.
They use 'international sanctions' to make them sound legal
Under international law, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) all vessels - even foreign warships and submarines - have the right of unimpeded passage through the English Channel.
There is a real danger here in that the more contempt the British Government shows for international law, the more it trashes the rights of foreign civilians, the more international law simply disintegrates and the greater risk they expose British citizens overseas to.
UK has intercepted Russian shadow fleet oil tanker attempting to go through English Channel, says PM Keir Starmer bbc.in/4vsOgc5
Paul Cockshott retweeted
Carl Menger's barter story is one of the most successful myths in economics.
The problem is not that it is theoretically possible. The problem is that there is little historical or anthropological evidence that societies actually developed money this way.
As David Graeber pointed out, anthropologists spent more than a century searching for examples of economies organized around pure barter and repeatedly came up empty. What they found instead were systems of credit, debt, obligation, and social accounting. People kept track of who owed what long before coins or commodity money became widespread.
The familiar story of a blacksmith searching for a farmer who wants horseshoes is largely a thought experiment. Real communities were not collections of strangers conducting spot transactions. They were networks of ongoing social relationships where obligations could be recorded and settled over time.
Historically, money often emerged alongside institutions capable of measuring and enforcing debts. Temples, palaces, kingdoms, and states maintained accounts, levied taxes, and denominated obligations in units of account long before everyday markets were dominated by coinage.
Coinage itself was frequently linked to states paying soldiers and then demanding taxes in the same currency. This created demand for money not because markets spontaneously selected it, but because political authorities structured the monetary system around it.
The historical record suggests that credit came first, coinage came later, and barter usually appears at the margins when monetary systems break down, not at the beginning of economic history.
The real myth is not that states played a role in the development of money. The real myth is that money emerged from a world of isolated traders solving the double coincidence of wants problem through spontaneous market evolution alone.
Paul Cockshott retweeted
The Dover Strait is exactly that in international law. A strait.
The British Navy has just - absolutely illegally - pirated a Russian oil tanker engaged in free passage through the strait.
Total hypocrisy. And "shadow fleet" has no legal meaning, it is purely propaganda.
Paul Cockshott retweeted
Apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany needed compliant judges to provide a legal veneer to their darkest crimes.
Judge Johnson joins their wretched company. He overturned a jury's conviction of four anti-genocide activists for criminal damage and sentenced them as terrorists instead.
As one their barristers pointed out, the four defendants were initially arrested by police on suspicion of involvement in an act of terrorism. But the prosecution decided not to charge them with terrorism offences because it knew no jury would ever convict them based on the evidence.
Instead the Crown held two trials: a sham one for the jury, and the real one conducted in secret by the judge. That is not justice. It is a show trial worthy of the worst tyrannical regimes.
Paul Cockshott retweeted
Y si fascismo y comunismo eran lo mismo, ¿Por qué con la derrota del fascismo en la Segunda Guerra Mundial los fascistas no huyeron en masa al campo comunista y, sin embargo, se quedaron en sus países o se fueron a otros países capitalistas?
Paul Cockshott retweeted
BREAKING: Justice Jeremy Johnson has ruled that the Filton 4 will be sentenced as terrorists – even though two juries refused to convict them of violence charges over their efforts to disable an Israeli factory in the UK making killer drones for use in Gaza. They were found guilty of a minor charge of criminal damage.
Judge Johnson kept the jury in the dark of his plans to sentence the four as terrorists. This is the first time in British legal history that anyone has been sentenced as a terrorist for damaging property. It's a very dark moment in an increasingly authoritarian Britain.
Thousands of legal professionals complained about Johnson's clear abuses of legal procedures to help the government's case for proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist group.
Johnson has now proved this was always a show trial.
I explain how he rigged the two trials here: jonathancook.substack.com/p/…
Paul Cockshott retweeted
One half of the Labour Party defends mass impoverishment of our people to feed the gullets of the military industrial complex and war after war. The other half is demanding even more!
Paul Cockshott retweeted
This is a really fascinating paper that everyone interested in China's industrial policy should read.
It destroys so many myths (see below), and is written by deeply credible people who conducted over three years of fieldwork in China and interviewed 60+ Chinese officials, entrepreneurs, and engineers. When it comes to China studies, it literally doesn't get more rigorous than this.
First myth it destroys: contrary to popular belief, Beijing's industrial policy didn't build the companies that became China's EV champions. They rose largely **despite** it, through its cracks.
For sure, Beijing did favor EVs as an industry and pushed hard for it but their big bet was SOEs (State Owned Enterprises): research grants, pilot programs, licenses, cheap credit - virtually all of it flowed to state firms.
The result? China's actual EV champions - BYD, Geely, NIO, XPeng, Li Auto, etc. - are overwhelmingly private firms that succeeded despite Beijing favoring their SOE competitors.
How so? Because, when favoring SOEs, the central government didn't just pick winning companies, it picked winning cities, each SOE being anchored in a specific city: Shanghai (SAIC), Changchun (FAW), Wuhan-Shiyan (Dongfeng), etc.
Which means that every city not on the list, that wanted a piece of the auto boom, had only one option left: team up with private entrepreneurs who were equally excluded from central government favor.
That's what truly fueled China's EV miracle: an alliance of the excluded, between local private entrepreneurs and local mayors.
This is the biggest misconception this paper destroys: the reality is that the "Chinese state capitalism" that many in the West think powered the EV boom actually tried to block many of these companies from existing. In effect, it was closer to an obstacle course that local actors (mayors and provinces) learned to game.
Geely - now the third largest automaker in China - is a fantastic example of this.
First of all, it started off illegal since, to build passenger cars, you had to have a central government license and they couldn't get one. Zhejiang Province told them to go ahead regardless because the province had hundreds of auto parts suppliers but no carmaker of its own.
It's only a couple of years later, recognizing the fait-accompli that Geely was producing cars and was competitive, that the central government admitted them to the National Sedan Catalog - effectively legalizing them retroactively because there were facts on the ground.
Then there was the Volvo acquisition in 2010, which is fair to say - looking back - proved to be the most strategically valuable acquisition in Chinese automotive history. Despite it being presented at the time (and still described this way today) as "China buying Volvo", all 3 major state-backed banks in China (Export-Import Bank, China Development Bank, Bank of China) refused to finance the deal. The only state-bank money Geely managed to get was a $200 million loan from a provincial branch of China Construction Bank - a tiny fraction of what the deal required.
Geely actually did the deal with Goldman Sachs money via Hong Kong plus loans and equity from four local governments (Chengdu, Zhangjiakou, Daqing, Shanghai's Jiading district), each of which bought in by securing a Volvo plant or headquarters for itself.
In effect, the doors that Beijing controlled were largely closed to Geely, but it made it because the doors subnational actors controlled were opened.
Which all means this paper destroys another very common myth: the big merit of the central government in all this was to be relatively chill about it, to NOT be dictatorial.
I just imagine if that had happened in France and you had - say - the mayor of Lyon or Marseilles open, fund and promote an unlicensed carmaker against Renault: the préfet would shut it down within weeks, and the mayor would be lucky to escape prosecution.
That's the irony: on industrial policy, the supposedly "totalitarian" Chinese state proved more tolerant of local defiance than most Western liberal democracies would be. Beijing's greatest contribution to the EV miracle wasn't the plan - it was looking the other way while the plan was being violated.
To be sure, the paper doesn't hide the costs of this system: ferocious local competition also produced what's known today in China as "involution" (内卷-Neijuan, basically a hypercompetitive price war), as well as some spectacular failures. For instance one county lost 6.6 billion yuan on a carmaker that never really made cars.
But that's precisely the point: this is a high-risk, high-reward model of decentralized experimentation, the very opposite of the careful central planning Westerners imagine.
I've repeated this countless times but it bears repeating again: the single greatest misconception people have about China is - probably because we wrongly associate communism with centralized control - that it is a monolith run from Beijing. Some even say it's run by "one man."
The reality is the exact opposite: China is, in practice, one of the most decentralized countries on earth. Roughly 85% of government spending in China happens at the subnational level - against about 30% in the average OECD country (and even less in France, which is actually one of the most centrally controlled countries on earth). A Chinese mayor commands fiscal resources, land, investment funds and policy latitude that virtually no Western mayor could dream of.
Last but not least, I'd be remiss not to mention what the paper has to say on the positive legacy of Mao and its role in the rise of EVs (given I myself wrote an article titled "Mao's economic record wasn't bad, actually": arnaudbertrand.substack.com/…).
When it comes to China myths, none is more entrenched than the idea that Mao left behind nothing but ruins.
This paper confirms a key argument of my article: Mao's deliberate dispersal of industry across China (during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution decentralizations) left dozens of cities with their own small auto works. Inefficient, yes - but these scattered factories survived into the 1990s and became the seed stock of everything that followed: the industrial base, the engineers, and the production licenses that EV startups would use to enter the market.
The paper even says it outright: the fragmentation that industrial policy "sought to eradicate" is "precisely" what "ironically enabled" the EV sector's rapid rise.
This is exactly the mechanism I described in my Mao article: structures built in the Mao era - communes becoming township governments, commune enterprises becoming TVEs, Third Front factories seeding interior industrialization - became load-bearing foundations of the reform miracle.
Fittingly, the spark for China's first municipal carmaker adventure was literally a TVE (Township and Village Enterprise), the institutional descendants of Mao's commune enterprises: Tongbao, a kit-car maker in Wuhu whose success stunned local officials into building what became Chery (one of China's biggest carmakers today). You can't tell the story of China's EV miracle without crediting the legacy of Mao.
What's the biggest lesson in all this for Western policymakers?
The obvious one is that the part of industrial policy that most people assume China does and that they sometimes want to copy - i.e. the state picking winners - is actually the part that failed.
The part that did succeed is the China nobody in the West believes exists: a radically decentralized system with a high degree of tolerance for disobedience and experimentation.
We imagine China as a country where nothing happens without Beijing's approval when the reality is closer to the opposite: China's EV miracle happened precisely because localities asked for forgiveness rather than permission.
All in all, and this is the lesson I often come back to, this is yet another illustration of the importance of understanding China for what it is as opposed to the caricature we've built of it. This matters whichever "camp" you're in. If you see China as a rival, you can't compete with someone you don't understand. If you see them as a source of lessons, you can't emulate what you've misunderstood. Whatever you want from China - to compete with it or learn from it - the entry fee is the same: genuinely understanding it.
Why did private firms, not state-owned enterprises (SOEs), come to dominate China’s EV sector?
My new @ChinaJournal article (co-authored with Xiao Ma @maxiaoalex) challenge the "top-down industrial policy" narrative.
The real engine? Strategic alliances between local governments and private capital. 🧵
Based on 3+ years of fieldwork, 60+ interviews (with officials, entrepreneurs, and engineers), and rich first-hand accounts, we show how strict central regulations inadvertently drove local states to bet big on private EV players.
Here is the story: (1/15)
