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.

"[1] The book was covered in an article in Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2017,[2] as well as reviewed by Leonard Brewster in the Spring 2004 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

Years later, University of Maryland econophysicist Victor Yakovenko would demonstrate that circulating money inherently creates an unequal Gibbs-Boltzmann distribution within an economy, even when beginning from conditions of perfect equality.

Leonard Brewster, Ph.D., reviewed the book in the Spring 2004 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, positing that "Cockshott and Cottrell have come as close to developing a serious, up-to-date version of a neo-Marxist political economy as we are likely to see."

Furthermore, Brewster argues that C&C's allowance of a market for consumer goods, in effect, makes their model a "capitalistic, commodity producing society.

Furthermore, Cockshott argues that maintaining these distinctions in his model does not "[prevent] labour values from being usable for economic calculation when dealing with intermediate goods."