> For one thing, we have absolutely no idea whatever of what will be the
> conditions (and the prior history) under which a socialist movement
> would achieve power, and those unknowable conditions, including the
> preceding years of struggle within a vulnerable capitalist regime, would
> totally determine the range of options open to the members of that
> embryonic society. To even guess at those conditions is to claim
> possession of a crystal ball.
>
By the way, this is just wrong on its own terms. No matter how unpredictable the future may be, there are lots of things we have some certainty about, if only because of simple logic and the laws of physics, biology, etc. If a socialist movement achieves power, maybe society will become "less atomized," but it will still be true that you can't make friends in a sensory deprivation tank. Maybe the workings of society will become "more transparent," but you still won't be able to know the population of a country just by living in it. Maybe there will be some attenuation in the division of labor, but it will still be true that an individual can't build a power plant all by himself. Et cetera.
In that sense, exercises like Cottrell/Cockshott's are useful, because by reasoning through the features a non-market economy *might* have, they can identify certain features that any non-market economy *must* have. For example, it becomes clear in reading their book that any non-market economy with a division of labor must maintain a centralized list of all products and the input-output matrices of each of those products. Logically, it is just impossible for such an economy to lack those things. (Unless the "unknowable conditions" of the socialist future include such things as the spontaneous emergence of universal human powers of telepathy. I sometimes get the feeling that Carrol really has faith that such things will magically evolve to save the socialist future.)
There's actually a lot their book can tell you about any non-market future, assuming such a future were to come to pass.
SA