Muck and Magic or Change and Progress: Vitalism versus Hamiltonian Matter-of-Fact Knowledge

Gregori, Thomas R. De

doi:10.1080/00213624.2003.11506551

Cited by 25 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…In other words, he holds that distributive inequalities are less pronounced in cooperative firms because the members have equal decision powers (see op. cit., p. 95) and notes that this explanation supports the argument that democratic firms will gain ground only in sectors where the members have roughly the same qualifications and preferences 24 .…”

Section: The Costs Of Democracymentioning

confidence: 58%

“…In an essay dated 1998, Hart and Moore provide evidence that cooperatives with homogeneous member preferences may reach first-best equilibrium, whereas business enterprises managed by capitalists may prove inefficient 24. Kollock (1998 [75]) andHuberman-Glance (1998 [76]) have remarked that peer monitoring among members, far from being a simple practice, may give rise to paradoxical situations.…”

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confidence: 99%

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A Few Reflections on the Reasons Why Cooperative Firms Have Failed to Gain a Firm Foothold

Jossa

2015

OJBM

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After the inception of the cooperative movement in the mid-19 th century, it was widely held that capitalistic businesses would soon be replaced by a system of worker-controlled firms and a wealth of policy proposals called for a major impulse to cooperation in later years also. But cooperation has not met with the hoped-for success. How do we account for this? To our day, employee management specialists have been unable to provide a satisfactory explanation for the fact that the policy proposal to introduce democratic firm control still carries little consensus despite the collapse of the Soviet model of communism. In this paper, we give some answers to the question and emphasise the idea that progress in the direction of a generalised system of cooperative firms would amount to a considerable improvement over capitalism, but will hardly be made without the effective contribution of intellectuals and political parties.

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Section: The Costs Of Democracymentioning

confidence: 58%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Few Reflections on the Reasons Why Cooperative Firms Have Failed to Gain a Firm Foothold

Jossa

2015

OJBM

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“…The discovery of the DNA undermined the metaphysical premises of biological vitalism, and even histories of biology and agronomy began to expunge from their origin stories the ambiguous traces of vitalist thought. 7 Vitalism was relegated to the spiritual and environmental fringes of European agriculture where it created the early models of organic and biodynamic farming (De Gregori, 2003). Meanwhile, vitalist critical thought was also sanitized.…”

Section: Paraguay’s Vitalist Synthesis (1886–1943)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Agribiopolitics: The health of plants and humans in the age of monocrops

Hetherington

2020

Environ Plan D

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The well-known story of biopolitics tells us that as Europe urbanized, security was increasingly linked to human well-being. What the story tends to leave out is the way that biopolitics also depended on the expansion of monocrop agriculture: the thriving of human populations was enabled by the thriving of non-human food crops, especially grains. As a result, new human diseases were also shadowed by new plant diseases, and a whole other, parallel governmental apparatus built to manage the crop health in rural Europe. During the great postwar development initiative known as the Green Revolution, plant health techniques would be expanded to the Global South in a massive realignment of biopolitical relations. Though the core tradition of biopolitical thought rarely made it explicit, biopolitics was always, in other words, agribiopolitics, a political technique that made certain populations of humans thrive alongside companion crops. Using Paraguay as a site of genealogical engagement, this paper explores agribiopolitical relations through three phases of the Green Revolution, culminating in the current age of monocrops.

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“…teleological, component they perceive in Marxist writings, but wrongly extend it from individual Marxists to Marxism overall. In point of fact, both Engels and Marx made it absolutely clear that theirs was a non-teleological approach (see Engels 1859b: 372 7 ; Marx 1860: 131, 1861: 578, 1867: 114; De Gregory 2003: 19-20).…”

Section: Does Marxism Assume That History Is Heading In a Given DImentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Historical Materialism a Deterministic Approach? The Democratic Firm and the Transition to Socialism

Jossa

2016

Review of Radical Political Economics

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Determinism is considered to be the doctrine teaching that a particular aspect or part of the social whole has a predominating influence on all the others. Several authors hold that economic determinism reflects the idea of a linear causality, i.e. of direct relations between a paramount economic cause and the effects that passively flow from it. Due to this linear notion of causality—they argue—the economic base is the necessary and, in itself, sufficient cause, whereas the super-structure is stripped of its autonomous role and production relations are the direct offshoot of the prevailing state of technology. In fact, this conception is typical of mechanistic, rather than Marxian, materialism, and as it tends to obliterate the role of super-structural factors, it is unable to account for the rise of existing forms of society and their different characteristics. The author’s arguments against the characterization of historical materialism as a deterministic approach are linked to his claim that socialism can be implemented by creating a system of democratically managed firms. JEL classification: P2, P5, D4, B14

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Muck and Magic or Change and Progress: Vitalism versus Hamiltonian Matter-of-Fact Knowledge

Cited by 25 publications

References 12 publications

A Few Reflections on the Reasons Why Cooperative Firms Have Failed to Gain a Firm Foothold

A Few Reflections on the Reasons Why Cooperative Firms Have Failed to Gain a Firm Foothold

Agribiopolitics: The health of plants and humans in the age of monocrops

Is Historical Materialism a Deterministic Approach? The Democratic Firm and the Transition to Socialism

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