William Paul Cockshott (born 16 March 1952) is a Scottish academic in the fields of computer science and Marxist economics.

[1] He has made contributions in the fields of image compression, 3D television, parallel compilers and medical imaging, but became known to a wider audience for his proposals in the multi-disciplinary area of economic computability, most notably as co-author, along the economist Allin F. Cottrell [de], of the book Towards a New Socialism, in which they strongly advocate the use of cybernetics for efficient and democratic planning of a complex socialist economy.

[2] He proposes a moneyless socialist economy, akin to Karl Marx's description of a socialist society in Critique of the Gotha Programme, realized by today's computer technology: In our proposal people would be paid not in money but with nontransferable electronic work accounts.

[4][clarification needed] Cockshott and several other B&ICO members resigned and formed a new party, the Communist Organisation in the British Isles, until its dissolution in 1980.

[2] He has criticized the economic calculation problem on the grounds that planning can be made feasible via computerization and allocation based on labor time.