| Abstrakt: |
Luciano Vasapollo's Trattato di Economia Applicata is a masterful treatise on the importance of serious methodological and philosophical inquiry regarding the applied economics of planning on a national and global level. Vasapollo's book is notable not only for resurrecting the importance of planning and development economics, but also for its broad-minded approach to incorporating a variety of methods (from classical to Marxist). Sin Patron provides an overview of the reclaimed factories movement in Argentina. In particular, the book contains the stories of ten of these companies as told by their workers, while also providing information about the socioeconomic context in which the movement arose in the first place. At a time of capitalist crisis, when the affirmation that another world is possible is more relevant than ever, it is imperative that people start once again to imagine what this other world might look like and how it would operate on a day-to-day basis. The study of the worker-run factories in Argentina and of the experiences of the workers who operate them can make an invaluable contribution to such a project, hence the significance of this volume. For a short while after 1989, Francis Fukuyama was thought to be the leading academic Hegelian when he announced that, since the Soviet Union had collapsed, it was “liberal democracy” that was the end-of-history. Our Posthuman Future, published in 2002 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and reprinted in 2003 in Britain, is a work that sets out to correct his statement while introducing the case for his concern with the advances of biotechnology and their effects. My review presents the argument that not only did Fukuyama not get it correct in 1989, but he also failed to go far enough in his own refutation. I introduce the case that intervention in biotechnology is a necessary step to make, not because there is a human nature to save but precisely because there is no such nature. Further, the complete autonomy of, for example, pharmaceutical corporations is perilous to the real end-of-history and the freedom of mankind generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
