Workers' self-management

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_self-management

Workers' self-management, also referred to as labor management and organizational self-management, is a form of organizational management based on self-directed work processes on the part of an organization's workforce. Self-management is a defining characteristic of socialism, with proposals for self-management having appeared many times throughout the history of the socialist movement, advocated variously by democratic, libertarian and market socialists as well as anarchists and communists.

There are many variations of self-management. In some variants, all the worker-members manage the enterprise directly through assemblies while in other forms workers exercise management functions indirectly through the election of specialist managers. Self-management may include worker supervision and oversight of an organization by elected bodies, the election of specialized managers, or self-directed management without any specialized managers as such. The goals of self-management are to improve performance by granting workers greater autonomy in their day-to-day operations, boosting morale, reducing alienation and eliminating exploitation when paired with employee ownership.

An enterprise that is self-managed is referred to as a labour-managed firm. Self-management refers to control rights within a productive organization, being distinct from the questions of ownership and what economic system the organization operates under. Self-management of an organization may coincide with employee ownership of that organization, but self-management can also exist in the context of organizations under public ownership and to a limited extent within private companies in the form of co-determination and worker representation on the board of directors.

Economic theory

An economic system consisting of self-managed enterprises is sometimes referred to as a participatory economy, self-managed economy, or cooperative economy. This economic model is a major version of market socialism and decentralized planned economy, stemming from the notion that people should be able to participate in making the decisions that affect their well-being. The major proponents of self-managed market socialism in the 20th century include the economists Benjamin N. Ward, Jaroslav Vanek and Branko Horvat. Horvat says that participation is not simply more desirable, but also more economically viable than traditional hierarchical and authoritarian management as demonstrated by econometric measurements which indicate an increase in efficiency with greater participation in decision-making. Writing from the perspective of socialist Yugoslavia in the early 1980s, Horvat suggested that the larger world was moving toward a self-governing socialistic mode of organization as well.

Labor managed firm

The theory of the labor managed firm explains the behavior, performance and nature of self-managed organizational forms. Although self-managed (or labor-managed) firms can coincide with worker ownership (employee ownership), the two are distinct concepts and one need not imply the other.

Neoclassical economics

According to traditional neoclassical economic theory, in a competitive market economy ownership of capital assets by labor (the workforce of a given firm) should have no significant impact on firm performance.

Much of the research on labor-managed firms in the neoclassical tradition revolved around the question of the presumed maximand (objective function) of such firms (i.e. the answer to the question "what do labor-managed firms maximize?", e.g. income per worker or profits) and its implications. The first model of a labor-managed firm in this tradition has been suggested by American economist Benjamin Ward in 1958 who was interested in the analysis of Yugoslav firms. According to Ward, the labor-managed firm strives to maximize income per worker as contrasted with the traditional capitalist firms' objective function of maximizing profit for external owners. Based on this assumption, Ward presented an analysis that was critical of labor-managed firms. In particular, he argued that a supply curve of a labor-managed firm has a negative slope: an increase in the market price of the product produced by a labor-managed firm will not make it increase production and hire new members. It followed that an economy consisting of labor-managed firms would have a tendency to underutilize labor and tend toward higher rates of unemployment. Ward's model was developed further by Evsey Domar and generalized by Jaroslav Vaněk.

These purely theoretical analyses were criticized by Yugoslav economist Branko Horvat in 1971 who argued for empirical analysis of actually existing labor-managed Yugoslav firms and practices utilized by their members. In particular, he noted that workers fix wages at the beginning of a year and then adjust them based on the earnings of the enterprise. He noted that this behavioral rule, if made a part of the theoretical model, implies that the market behavior of a labor-managed firm is, contrary to theses by Ward and his followers, much more similar to the hypothetical behavior of a "traditional", profit-maximizing firm.

Building on a larger body of empirical studies, contemporary Canadian economist Gregory Dow has carried out extensive theoretical research on labor-managed firms from the neoclassical perspective, focussing on explaining the rarity of labor-managed firms relative to capital-managed ones.

Classical economics

In the 19th century, the idea of a self-managed economy was first fully articulated by the anarchist philosopher and economist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. This economic model was called mutualism to highlight the mutual relationship among individuals in this system and involved cooperatives operating in a free-market economy.

The classical liberal philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill believed that worker-run and owned cooperatives would eventually displace traditional capitalist (capital-managed) firms in the competitive market economy due to their superior efficiency and stronger incentive structure. While both Mill and Karl Marx thought that democratic worker management would be more efficient in the long run compared with hierarchical management, Marx was not hopeful about the prospects of labor-managed and owned firms as a means to displace traditional capitalist firms in the market economy. Despite their advantages in efficiency, in Western market economies the labor-managed firm is comparatively rare.

Karl Marx championed the idea of a free association of producers as a characteristic of communist society, where self-management processes replaced the traditional notion of the centralized state. This concept is related to the Marxist idea of transcending alienation.

Soviet-type economic planning

The Soviet-type economic model as practiced in the former USSR and Eastern Bloc is criticized by socialists for its lack of widespread self-management and management input on the part of workers in enterprises.

Management science

In his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel H. Pink argues on the basis of empirical evidence that self-management/self-directed processes, mastery, worker autonomy and purpose (defined as intrinsic rewards) are much more effective incentives than monetary gain (extrinsic rewards). According to Pink, for the vast majority of work in the 21st century self-management and related intrinsic incentives are far more crucial than outdated notions of hierarchical management and an overreliance on monetary compensation as reward.

More recent research suggests that incentives and bonuses can have positive effects on performance and autonomous motivation. According to this research, the key is aligning bonuses and incentives to reinforce, rather than hamper, a sense of autonomy, competence and relatedness (the three needs that self determination theory identifies for autonomous motivation).

Political movements

Europe

Guild socialism is a political movement advocating workers' control of industry through the medium of trade-related guilds "in an implied contractual relationship with the public". It originated in the United Kingdom and was at its most influential in the first quarter of the 20th century. It was strongly associated with G. D. H. Cole and influenced by the ideas of William Morris. One significant experiment with workers' self-management took place during the Spanish Revolution (1936–1939). In his book Anarcho-Syndicalism (1938), Rudolf Rocker stated:

But by taking the land and the industrial plants under their own management they have taken the first and most important step on the road to Socialism. Above all, they (the Workers' and peasants self-management) have proved that the workers, even without the capitalists, are able to carry on production and to do it better than a lot of profit-hungry entrepreneurs.

After May 1968 in France, LIP factory, a clockwork factory based in Besançon, became self-managed starting in 1973 after the management's decision to liquidate it. The LIP experience was an emblematic social conflict of post-1968 in France. CFDT (the CCT as it was referred to in Northern Spain), trade-unionist Charles Piaget led the strike in which workers claimed the means of production. The Unified Socialist Party (PSU) which included former Radical Pierre Mendès-France was in favour of autogestión or self-management.

In the Basque Country of Spain, the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation represents perhaps the longest lasting and most successful example of workers' self-management in the world. It has been touted by a diverse group of people such as the Marxian economist Richard D. Wolff and the research book Capital and the Debt Trap by Claudia Sanchez Bajo and Bruno Roelants as an example of how the economy can be organized on an alternative to the capitalist mode of production.

Following the 2007–2008 financial crisis, a number of factories were occupied and became self-managed in Greece, France, Italy, Germany and Turkey.

In Greece, solidarity-based distribution is partially the result of austerity policies' privatization of public services, which exacerbates on-the-ground solidarity activities. These have mostly emerged as a consequence of ambitious politicized thinking and mobilization, as well as a practical formulation that ensures degrees of living by transforming informal solidarity networks into remunerative distribution cooperatives. This dialectic, echoes the idea of formally managing the crisis, which reproduces itself not in spite of, but because of, official policy initiatives to combat it. Workers' collectives and cooperatives, Self-Help Groups, Local Exchange Trade Systems (LETS), Freecycle networks and Timebanks, and the first worker-occupied factory are examples of non-capitalist social experiments and innovations that have emerged in Greece since 2012.

Yugoslavia

At the height of the Cold War, Yugoslavia, as a consequence of the Tito-Stalin split, pursued and advocated for, what was officially called, socialist self-management in distinction from the Eastern Bloc countries, all of which practiced central planning and centralized management of their economies. It replaced central planning with planning basic proportions that was supposed to stop "the chaos of social production and distribution that is innate to capitalism". It was organized according to the theories of Josip Broz Tito and more directly Edvard Kardelj. Yugoslav economist Branko Horvat also made a significant contribution to the theory of workers' self-management (radničko samoupravljanje) as practiced in Yugoslavia. Due to Yugoslavia's neutrality and its leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement, Yugoslav companies exported to both Western and Eastern markets. Yugoslav companies carried out construction of numerous major infrastructural and industrial projects in Africa, Europe and Asia.

In 1950, the Law on self-management introduced worker's councils. The "beginning of the end of bureaucracy" was declared along the pretenses of the Marxist concept of withering away of the state under the "Factories to the workers'!" parole. According to Boris Kanzleiter, the inspiration for workers' councils came from the People's councils - the revolutionary governing bodies of the People's Liberation Army and the Paris Commune. The 1953 Yugoslav Constitutional Law, introduced self-management in the constitutional matter and transformed state property into social property. The 1963 Yugoslav Constitution, also called the Charter of Self-management, defined self-management and social property as supreme values and it defined Yugoslavia as a "socialist self-managed democratic community".

The Law of Associated Labor of 1976 represented the last stage of the development of Yugoslav self-management. On the grounds of the 1974 Yugoslav constitution, it created a completely autonomous system grounded in direct sovereignty of the worker and citizen. It foresaw the formation of Basic Organizations of Associated Labor (BOAL) as the basic economic units that every worker had to be a part of based on the precise role played by that worker in the production process. It associated with other BOALs to form an Organization of Associated Labour (OAL) that could, with other OALs form Complex Organizations of Associated Labor. The assembly that consisted of all the workers' of a BOAL elected a delegate, which was bound with an imperative mandate, into the workers' council of the OAL that decided on all matters: from electing the director, to decisions on salaries, investments, association, development and specific production goals. Another feature of Yugoslav self-management were Self-management agreements and Social compacts, these replaced classical contracts. The goal of OALs was not for-profit but a social goal - it was supposed to facilitate education, healthcare, employment and resolving the housing issue.

Macro-economic reforms and structural adjustment programs that were imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank brought an end to workers' self-management in Yugoslavia.

Empresas recuperadas movement

The Hotel Bauen in Buenos Aires, occupied and self-managed since 2003

English-language discussions of this phenomenon may employ several different translations of the original Spanish expression other than recovered factory. For example, worker-recuperated enterprise, recuperated/recovered factory/business/company, worker-recovered factory/business, worker-recuperated/recovered company, worker-reclaimed factory, and worker-run factory have been noted. The phenomenon is also known as autogestión.

Argentina's empresas recuperadas movement emerged in response to the run up and aftershocks of Argentina's 2001 economic crisis. Empresas recuperadas means "reclaimed/recovered/recuperated enterprises/factories/companies". The Spanish verb recuperar means not only "to get back", "to take back" or "to reclaim", but also "to put back into good condition".

The movement emerged as a response to the years of crisis leading up to and including Argentina's 2001 economic crisis. By 2001–2002, around 200 Argentine companies were recuperated by their workers and turned into worker co-operatives. Prominent examples include the Brukman factory, the Hotel Bauen and FaSinPat (formerly known as Zanon). As of 2020, around 16,000 Argentine workers run close to 400 recuperated factories.

The phenomenon of empresas recuperadas ("recovered enterprises") is not new in Argentina. Rather, such social movements were completely dismantled during the so-called Dirty War in the 1970s. Thus, during Héctor Cámpora's first months of government (May–July 1973), a rather moderate and left-wing Peronist, approximately 600 social conflicts, strikes and factory occupations had taken place.

The proliferation of these "recuperations" has led to the formation of a recuperated factory movement which has ties to a diverse political network including socialists, Peronists, anarchists and communists. Organizationally, this includes two major federations of recovered factories, the larger Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas (National Movement of Recuperated Businesses, or MNER) on the left and the smaller National Movement of Recuperated Factories (MNFR) on the right.

The movement led in 2011 to a new bankruptcy law that facilitates take over by the workers. The legislation was signed into law by President Cristina Kirchner on June 29, 2011.

 

Planned economy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy 

A planned economy is a type of economic system where the distribution of goods and services or the investment, production and the allocation of capital goods takes place according to economic plans that are either economy-wide or limited to a category of goods and services. A planned economy may use centralized, decentralized, participatory or Soviet-type forms of economic planning. The level of centralization or decentralization in decision-making and participation depends on the specific type of planning mechanism employed.

Socialist states based on the Soviet model have used central planning, although a minority such as the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia have adopted some degree of market socialism. Market abolitionist socialism replaces factor markets with direct calculation as the means to coordinate the activities of the various socially owned economic enterprises that make up the economy. More recent approaches to socialist planning and allocation have come from some economists and computer scientists proposing planning mechanisms based on advances in computer science and information technology.

Planned economies contrast with unplanned economies, specifically market economies, where autonomous firms operating in markets make decisions about production, distribution, pricing and investment. Market economies that use indicative planning are variously referred to as planned market economies, mixed economies and mixed market economies. A command economy follows an administrative-command system and uses Soviet-type economic planning which was characteristic of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc before most of these countries converted to market economies. This highlights the central role of hierarchical administration and public ownership of production in guiding the allocation of resources in these economic systems.

Overview

In the Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic world, "compulsory state planning was the most characteristic trade condition for the Egyptian countryside, for Hellenistic India, and to a lesser degree the more barbaric regions of the Seleucid, the Pergamenian, the southern Arabian, and the Parthian empires". Scholars have argued that the Incan economy was a flexible type of command economy, centered around the movement and utilization of labor instead of goods. One view of mercantilism sees it as involving planned economies.

The Soviet-style planned economy in Soviet Russia evolved in the wake of a continuing existing World War I war-economy as well as other policies, known as war communism (1918–1921), shaped to the requirements of the Russian Civil War of 1917–1923. These policies began their formal consolidation under an official organ of government in 1921, when the Soviet government founded Gosplan. However, the period of the New Economic Policy (c. 1921 to c. 1928 intervened before the planned system of regular five-year plans started in 1928.

Nazi Germany's Four Year Plan of 1936 onwards involved elements of state planning in the Reich economy.

After World War II (1939–1945) France and Great Britain practised dirigisme - government direction of the economy through non-coercive means. The Swedish government planned public-housing models in a similar fashion as urban planning in a project called Million Programme, implemented from 1965 to 1974. Some decentralized participation in economic planning occurred across Revolutionary Spain, most notably in Catalonia, during the Spanish Revolution of 1936.

Relationship with socialism

While socialism is not equivalent to economic planning or to the concept of a planned economy, an influential conception of socialism involves the replacement of capital markets with some form of economic planning in order to achieve ex-ante coordination of the economy. The goal of such an economic system would be to achieve conscious control over the economy by the population, specifically so that the use of the surplus product is controlled by the producers. The specific forms of planning proposed for socialism and their feasibility are subjects of the socialist calculation debate.

Computational economic planning

Further information: Government by algorithm

In 1959 Anatoly Kitov proposed a distributed computing system (Project "Red Book", Russian: Красная книга) with a focus on the management of the Soviet economy. Opposition from the Defence Ministry killed Kitov's plan.

In 1971 the socialist Allende administration of Chile launched Project Cybersyn to install a telex machine in every corporation and organisation in the economy for the communication of economic data between firms and the government. The data was also fed into a computer-simulated economy for forecasting. A control room was built for real-time observation and management of the overall economy. The prototype-stage of the project showed promise when it was used to redirect supplies around a trucker's strike, but after CIA-backed Augusto Pinochet led a coup in 1973 that established a military dictatorship under his rule the program was abolished and Pinochet moved Chile towards a more liberalized market economy.

In their book Towards a New Socialism (1993), the computer scientist Paul Cockshott from the University of Glasgow and the economist Allin Cottrell from the Wake Forest University claim to demonstrate how a democratically planned economy built on modern computer technology is possible and drives the thesis that it would be both economically more stable than the free-market economies and also morally desirable.

Cybernetics

The use of computers to coordinate production in an optimal fashion has been variously proposed for socialist economies. The Polish economist Oskar Lange (1904–1965) argued that the computer is more efficient than the market process at solving the multitude of simultaneous equations required for allocating economic inputs efficiently (either in terms of physical quantities or monetary prices).

Salvador Allende's socialist government pioneered the 1970 Chilean distributed decision support system Project Cybersyn in an attempt to move towards a decentralized planned economy with the experimental viable system model of computed organisational structure of autonomous operative units through an algedonic feedback setting and bottom-up participative decision-making in the form of participative democracy by the Cyberfolk component.

Fictional portrayals

The 1888 novel Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy depicts a fictional planned economy in a United States around the year 2000 which has become a socialist utopia.

The World State in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and Airstrip One in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) provide fictional depictions of command economies, albeit with diametrically opposed aims. The former is a consumer economy designed to engender productivity while the latter is a shortage economy designed as an agent of totalitarian social control. Airstrip One is organized by the euphemistically named Ministry of Plenty.

Other literary portrayals of planned economies include Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1924), which influenced Orwell's work. Like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ayn Rand's dystopian 1938 story Anthem offered an artistic portrayal of a command economy that was influenced by We. The difference is that it was a primitivist planned economy as opposed to the advanced technology of We or Brave New World.

Central planning

Advantages

The government can harness land, labor, and capital to serve the economic objectives of the state. Consumer demand can be restrained in favor of greater capital investment for economic development in a desired pattern. In international comparisons, state-socialist nations compared favorably with capitalist nations in health indicators such as infant mortality and life expectancy. However, the reality of this, at least regarding infant mortality, varied depending on whether official Soviet statistics or WHO definitions were used.

The state can begin building massive heavy industries at once in an underdeveloped economy without waiting years for capital to accumulate through the expansion of light industry and without reliance on external financing. This is what happened in the Soviet Union during the 1930s when the government forced the share of gross national income dedicated to private consumption down from 80% to 50%. As a result of this development, the Soviet Union experienced massive growth in heavy industry, with a concurrent massive contraction of its agricultural sector due to the labor shortage.

Disadvantages

Economic instability

Studies of command economies of the Eastern Bloc in the 1950s and 1960s by both American and Eastern European economists found that contrary to the expectations of both groups they showed greater fluctuations in output than market economies during the same period.

Inefficient resource distribution

Critics of planned economies argue that planners cannot detect consumer preferences, shortages and surpluses with sufficient accuracy and therefore cannot efficiently co-ordinate production (in a market economy, a free price system is intended to serve this purpose). This difficulty was notably written about by economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, who referred to subtly distinct aspects of the problem as the economic calculation problem and local knowledge problem, respectively. These distinct aspects were also present in the economic thought of Michael Polanyi.

Whereas the former stressed the theoretical underpinnings of a market economy to subjective value theory while attacking the labor theory of value, the latter argued that the only way to satisfy individuals who have a constantly changing hierarchy of needs and are the only ones to possess their particular individual's circumstances is by allowing those with the most knowledge of their needs to have it in their power to use their resources in a competing marketplace to meet the needs of the most consumers most efficiently. This phenomenon is recognized as spontaneous order. Additionally, misallocation of resources would naturally ensue by redirecting capital away from individuals with direct knowledge and circumventing it into markets where a coercive monopoly influences behavior, ignoring market signals. According to Tibor Machan, "[w]ithout a market in which allocations can be made in obedience to the law of supply and demand, it is difficult or impossible to funnel resources with respect to actual human preferences and goals".

Suppression of economic democracy and self-management

Economist Robin Hahnel, who supports participatory economics, a form of socialist decentralized planned economy, notes that even if central planning overcame its inherent inhibitions of incentives and innovation, it would nevertheless be unable to maximize economic democracy and self-management, which he believes are concepts that are more intellectually coherent, consistent and just than mainstream notions of economic freedom. Furthermore, Hahnel states:

Combined with a more democratic political system, and redone to closer approximate a best case version, centrally planned economies no doubt would have performed better. But they could never have delivered economic self-management, they would always have been slow to innovate as apathy and frustration took their inevitable toll, and they would always have been susceptible to growing inequities and inefficiencies as the effects of differential economic power grew. Under central planning neither planners, managers, nor workers had incentives to promote the social economic interest. Nor did impeding markets for final goods to the planning system enfranchise consumers in meaningful ways. But central planning would have been incompatible with economic democracy even if it had overcome its information and incentive liabilities. And the truth is that it survived as long as it did only because it was propped up by unprecedented totalitarian political power.

Command economy

Planned economies contrast with command economies in that a planned economy is "an economic system in which the government controls and regulates production, distribution, prices, etc." whereas a command economy necessarily has substantial public ownership of industry while also having this type of regulation. In command economies, important allocation decisions are made by government authorities and are imposed by law.

This is contested by some Marxists. Decentralized planning has been proposed as a basis for socialism and has been variously advocated by anarchists, council communists, libertarian Marxists and other democratic and libertarian socialists who advocate a non-market form of socialism, in total rejection of the type of planning adopted in the economy of the Soviet Union.

Most of a command economy is organized in a top-down administrative model by a central authority, where decisions regarding investment and production output requirements are decided upon at the top in the chain of command, with little input from lower levels. Advocates of economic planning have sometimes been staunch critics of these command economies. Leon Trotsky believed that those at the top of the chain of command, regardless of their intellectual capacity, operated without the input and participation of the millions of people who participate in the economy and who understand/respond to local conditions and changes in the economy. Therefore, they would be unable to effectively coordinate all economic activity.

Historians have associated planned economies with Marxist–Leninist states and the Soviet economic model. Since the 1980s, it has been contested that the Soviet economic model did not actually constitute a planned economy in that a comprehensive and binding plan did not guide production and investment. The further distinction of an administrative-command system emerged as a new designation in some academic circles for the economic system that existed in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, highlighting the role of centralized hierarchical decision-making in the absence of popular control over the economy. The possibility of a digital planned economy was explored in Chile between 1971 and 1973 with the development of Project Cybersyn and by Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Kharkevich, head of the Department of Technical Physics in Kiev in 1962.

While both economic planning and a planned economy can be either authoritarian or democratic and participatory, democratic socialist critics argue that command economies are necessarily authoritarian or undemocratic in practice. Indicative planning is a form of economic planning in market economies that directs the economy through incentive-based methods. Economic planning can be practiced in a decentralized manner through different government authorities. In some predominantly market-oriented and Western mixed economies, the state utilizes economic planning in strategic industries such as the aerospace industry. Mixed economies usually employ macroeconomic planning while micro-economic affairs are left to the market and price system.

Decentralized planning

A decentralized-planned economy, occasionally called horizontally planned economy due to its horizontalism, is a type of planned economy in which the investment and allocation of consumer and capital goods is explicated accordingly to an economy-wide plan built and operatively coordinated through a distributed network of disparate economic agents or even production units itself. Decentralized planning is usually held in contrast to centralized planning, in particular the Soviet-type economic planning of the Soviet Union's command economy, where economic information is aggregated and used to formulate a plan for production, investment and resource allocation by a single central authority. Decentralized planning can take shape both in the context of a mixed economy as well as in a post-capitalist economic system. This form of economic planning implies some process of democratic and participatory decision-making within the economy and within firms itself in the form of industrial democracy. Computer-based forms of democratic economic planning and coordination between economic enterprises have also been proposed by various computer scientists and radical economists. Proponents present decentralized and participatory economic planning as an alternative to market socialism for a post-capitalist society.

Decentralized planning has been a feature of anarchist and socialist economics. Variations of decentralized planning such as economic democracy, industrial democracy and participatory economics have been promoted by various political groups, most notably anarchists, democratic socialists, guild socialists, libertarian Marxists, libertarian socialists, revolutionary syndicalists and Trotskyists. During the Spanish Revolution, some areas where anarchist and libertarian socialist influence through the CNT and UGT was extensive, particularly rural regions, were run on the basis of decentralized planning resembling the principles laid out by anarcho-syndicalist Diego Abad de Santillan in the book After the Revolution.

Models

Negotiated coordination

Economist Pat Devine has created a model of decentralized economic planning called "negotiated coordination" which is based upon social ownership of the means of production by those affected by the use of the assets involved, with the allocation of consumer and capital goods made through a participatory form of decision-making by those at the most localized level of production. Moreover, organizations that utilize modularity in their production processes may distribute problem solving and decision making.

Participatory planning

See also: Participatory economics

The planning structure of a decentralized planned economy is generally based on a consumers council and producer council (or jointly, a distributive cooperative) which is sometimes called a consumers' cooperative. Producers and consumers, or their representatives, negotiate the quality and quantity of what is to be produced. This structure is central to guild socialism, participatory economics and the economic theories related to anarchism.

Practice

Kerala

Main article: People's Planning in Kerala

See also: District planning in India

Some decentralized participation in economic planning has been implemented in various regions and states in India, most notably in Kerala. Local level planning agencies assess the needs of people who are able to give their direct input through the Gram Sabhas (village-based institutions) and the planners subsequently seek to plan accordingly.

Revolutionary Catalonia

Main article: Collectivist anarchism

See also: Revolutionary Catalonia

Some decentralized participation in economic planning has been implemented across Revolutionary Spain, most notably in Catalonia, during the Spanish Revolution of 1936.

Similar concepts in practice

Community participatory planning

Main article: Participatory planning

The United Nations has developed local projects that promote participatory planning on a community level. Members of communities take decisions regarding community development directly.

Organic compound

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_compound 

 

Methane, CH₄; is among the simplest organic compounds.

In chemistry, many authors consider an organic compound to be any chemical compound that contains carbon-hydrogen or carbon-carbon bonds, although the definition of "organic" versus "inorganic" varies from author to author, and is a topic of debate. For example, methane (CH₄) is considered organic, but whether some other carbon-containing compounds are organic or inorganic varies from author to author, like halides of carbon without carbon-hydrogen bonds (e.g. carbon tetrachloride CCl₄), as well as certain compounds of carbon with nitrogen and oxygen (e.g. cyanide ion CN⁻ and carbonate ion CO2−3, which are generally considered inorganic).

Due to carbon's ability to catenate (form chains with other carbon atoms), millions of organic compounds are known. The study of the properties, reactions, and syntheses of organic compounds comprise the discipline known as organic chemistry. For historical reasons, a few classes of carbon-containing compounds (e.g., carbonate salts and cyanide salts), along with a few other exceptions (e.g., carbon dioxide, and even hydrogen cyanide despite the fact it contains a carbon-hydrogen bond), are generally not classified as organic compounds and are generally considered inorganic. Other than those just named, little consensus exists among chemists on precisely which carbon-containing compounds are excluded, making any rigorous definition of an organic compound elusive.

Although organic compounds make up only a small percentage of Earth's crust, they are of central importance because all known life is based on organic compounds. Living things incorporate inorganic carbon compounds into organic compounds through a network of processes (the carbon cycle) that begins with the conversion of carbon dioxide and a hydrogen source like water into simple sugars and other organic molecules by autotrophic organisms using light (photosynthesis) or other sources of energy. Most synthetically-produced organic compounds are ultimately derived from petrochemicals consisting mainly of hydrocarbons, which are themselves formed from the high pressure and temperature degradation of organic matter underground over geological timescales. This ultimate derivation notwithstanding, organic compounds are no longer defined as compounds originating in living things, as they were historically.

In chemical nomenclature, an organyl group, frequently represented by the letter R, refers to any monovalent substituent whose open valence is on a carbon atom.

Definitions of organic vs inorganic

For historical reasons discussed below, a few types of carbon-containing compounds, such as carbides, carbonates (excluding carbonate esters), simple oxides of carbon (for example, CO and CO₂), and cyanides are considered inorganic. Different forms (allotropes) of pure carbon, such as diamond, graphite, fullerenes, and carbon nanotubes are also excluded because they are simple substances composed of only a single element and therefore are not generally considered to be chemical compounds.

It is also important to note that the word "organic" in this context does not mean "natural."

History

Vitalism

Main article: Vitalism

Vitalism was a widespread conception that substances found in organic nature are formed from the chemical elements by the action of a "vital force" or "life-force" (vis vitalis) that only living organisms possess.

In the 1810s, Jöns Jacob Berzelius argued that a regulative force must exist within living bodies. Berzelius also contended that compounds could be distinguished by whether they required any organisms in their synthesis (organic compounds) or whether they did not (inorganic compounds).^[6] Vitalism taught that formation of these "organic" compounds were fundamentally different from the "inorganic" compounds that could be obtained from the elements by chemical manipulations in laboratories.

Vitalism survived for a short period after the formulation of modern ideas about the atomic theory and chemical elements. It first came under question in 1824, when Friedrich Wöhler synthesized oxalic acid, a compound known to occur only in living organisms, from cyanogen. A further experiment was Wöhler's 1828 synthesis of urea from the inorganic salts potassium cyanate and ammonium sulfate. Urea had long been considered an "organic" compound, as it was known to occur only in the urine of living organisms. Wöhler's experiments were followed by many others, in which increasingly complex "organic" substances were produced from "inorganic" ones without the involvement of any living organism, thus disproving vitalism.

Modern classification and ambiguities

The L-isoleucine molecule, C₆H₁₃NO₂, showing features typical of organic compounds. Carbon atoms are in black, hydrogens gray, oxygens red, and nitrogen blue.

Although vitalism has been discredited, scientific nomenclature retains the distinction between organic and inorganic compounds. The modern meaning of organic compound is any compound that contains a significant amount of carbon—even though many of the organic compounds known today have no connection to any substance found in living organisms. The term carbogenic has been proposed by E. J. Corey as a modern alternative to organic, but this neologism remains relatively obscure.

The organic compound L-isoleucine molecule presents some features typical of organic compounds: carbon–carbon bonds, carbon–hydrogen bonds, as well as covalent bonds from carbon to oxygen and to nitrogen.

As described in detail below, any definition of organic compound that uses simple, broadly-applicable criteria turns out to be unsatisfactory, to varying degrees. The modern, commonly accepted definition of organic compound essentially amounts to any carbon-containing compound, excluding several classes of substances traditionally considered 'inorganic'. However, the list of substances so excluded varies from author to author. Still, it is generally agreed upon that there are (at least) a few carbon-containing compounds that should not be considered organic. For instance, almost all authorities would require the exclusion of alloys that contain carbon, including steel (which contains cementite, Fe₃C), as well as other metal and semimetal carbides (including "ionic" carbides, e.g, Al₄C₃ and CaC₂ and "covalent" carbides, e.g. B₄C and SiC, and graphite intercalation compounds, e.g. KC₈). Other compounds and materials that are considered 'inorganic' by most authorities include: metal carbonates, simple oxides (CO, CO₂, and arguably, C₃O₂), the allotropes of carbon, cyanide derivatives not containing an organic residue (e.g., KCN, (CN)₂, BrCN, CNO⁻, etc.), and heavier analogs thereof (e.g., CP⁻ 'cyaphide anion', CSe₂, COS; although CS₂ 'carbon disulfide' is often classed as an organic solvent). Halides of carbon without hydrogen (e.g., CF₄ and CClF₃), phosgene (COCl₂), carboranes, metal carbonyls (e.g., nickel carbonyl), mellitic anhydride (C₁₂O₉), and other exotic oxocarbons are also considered inorganic by some authorities.

Nickel carbonyl (Ni(CO)₄) and other metal carbonyls are often volatile liquids, like many organic compounds, yet they contain only carbon bonded to a transition metal and to oxygen, and are often prepared directly from metal and carbon monoxide. Nickel carbonyl is typically classified as an organometallic compound as it satisfies the broad definition that organometallic chemistry covers all compounds that contain at least one carbon to metal covalent bond; it is debatable whether organometallic compounds form a subset of organic compounds, however. For example, the evidence of covalent Fe-C bonding in cementite, a major component of steel, places it within this broad definition of organometallic, yet steel and other carbon-containing alloys are seldom regarded as organic compounds. Thus, it is unclear whether the definition of organometallic should be narrowed, whether these considerations imply that organometallic compounds are not necessarily organic, or both.

Metal complexes with organic ligands but no carbon-metal bonds (e.g., Cu(OAc)₂) are not considered organometallic; instead, they are classed as metalorganic. Likewise, it is also unclear whether metalorganic compounds should automatically be considered organic.

The relatively narrow definition of organic compounds as those containing C-H bonds excludes compounds that are (historically and practically) considered organic. Neither urea nor oxalic acid are organic by this definition, yet they were two key compounds in the vitalism debate. The IUPAC Blue Book on organic nomenclature specifically mentions urea and oxalic acid. Other compounds lacking C-H bonds but traditionally considered organic include benzenehexol, mesoxalic acid, and carbon tetrachloride. Mellitic acid, which contains no C-H bonds, is considered a possible organic substance in Martian soil. Terrestrially, it, and its anhydride, mellitic anhydride, are associated with the mineral mellite (Al₂C₆(COO)₆·16H₂O).

A slightly broader definition of the organic compound includes all compounds bearing C-H or C-C bonds. This would still exclude urea. Moreover, this definition still leads to somewhat arbitrary divisions in sets of carbon-halogen compounds. For example, CF₄ and CCl₄ would be considered by this rule to be "inorganic", whereas CF₃H, CHCl₃, and C₂Cl₆ would be organic, though these compounds share many physical and chemical properties.

Classification

Main article: Organic chemistry §  compounds

Organic compounds may be classified in a variety of ways. One major distinction is between natural and synthetic compounds. Organic compounds can also be classified or subdivided by the presence of heteroatoms, e.g., organometallic compounds, which feature bonds between carbon and a metal, and organophosphorus compounds, which feature bonds between carbon and a phosphorus.

Another distinction, based on the size of organic compounds, distinguishes between small molecules and polymers.

Natural compounds

Natural compounds refer to those that are produced by plants or animals. Many of these are still extracted from natural sources because they would be more expensive to produce artificially. Examples include most sugars, some alkaloids and terpenoids, certain nutrients such as vitamin B₁₂, and, in general, those natural products with large or stereoisometrically complicated molecules present in reasonable concentrations in living organisms.

Further compounds of prime importance in biochemistry are antigens, carbohydrates, enzymes, hormones, lipids and fatty acids, neurotransmitters, nucleic acids, proteins, peptides and amino acids, lectins, vitamins, and fats and oils.

Synthetic compounds

Compounds that are prepared by reaction of other compounds are known as "synthetic". They may be either compounds that are already found in plants/animals or those artificial compounds that do not occur naturally.

Most polymers (a category that includes all plastics and rubbers) are organic synthetic or semi-synthetic compounds.

Biotechnology

Many organic compounds—two examples are ethanol and insulin—are manufactured industrially using organisms such as bacteria and yeast. Typically, the DNA of an organism is altered to express compounds not ordinarily produced by the organism. Many such biotechnology-engineered compounds did not previously exist in nature.

Databases

• The CAS database is the most comprehensive repository for data on organic compounds. The search tool SciFinder is offered.
• The Beilstein database contains information on 9.8 million substances, covers the scientific literature from 1771 to the present, and is today accessible via Reaxys. Structures and a large diversity of physical and chemical properties are available for each substance, with reference to original literature.
• PubChem contains 18.4 million entries on compounds and especially covers the field of medicinal chemistry.

A great number of more specialized databases exist for diverse branches of organic chemistry.

Structure determination

Main article: Structure determination

The main tools are proton and carbon-13 NMR spectroscopy, IR Spectroscopy, Mass spectrometry, UV/Vis Spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography.

Total synthesis

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_synthesis 

Total synthesis is the complete chemical synthesis of a complex molecule, often a natural product, from simple, commercially-available precursors. It usually refers to a process not involving the aid of biological processes, which distinguishes it from semisynthesis. Syntheses may sometimes conclude at a precursor with further known synthetic pathways to a target molecule, in which case it is known as a formal synthesis. Total synthesis target molecules can be natural products, medicinally-important active ingredients, known intermediates, or molecules of theoretical interest. Total synthesis targets can also be organometallic or inorganic, though these are rarely encountered. Total synthesis projects often require a wide diversity of reactions and reagents, and subsequently requires broad chemical knowledge and training to be successful.

Often, the aim is to discover a new route of synthesis for a target molecule for which there already exist known routes. Sometimes, however, no route exists, and chemists wish to find a viable route for the first time. Total synthesis is particularly important for the discovery of new chemical reactions and new chemical reagents, as well as establishing synthetic routes for medicinally important compounds.

Scope and definitions

There are numerous classes of natural products for which total synthesis is applied to. These include (but are not limited to): terpenes, alkaloids, polyketides and polyethers. Total synthesis targets are sometimes referred to by their organismal origin such as plant, marine, and fungal. The term total synthesis is less frequently but still accurately applied to the synthesis of natural polypeptides and polynucleotides. The peptide hormones oxytocin and vasopressin were isolated and their total syntheses first reported in 1954. It is not uncommon for natural product targets to feature multiple structural components of several natural product classes.

Aims

Although untrue from a historical perspective (see the history of the steroid, cortisone), total synthesis in the modern age has largely been an academic endeavor (in terms of manpower applied to problems). Industrial chemical needs often differ from academic focuses. Typically, commercial entities may pick up particular avenues of total synthesis efforts and expend considerable resources on particular natural product targets, especially if semi-synthesis can be applied to complex, natural product-derived drugs. Even so, for decades there has been a continuing discussion regarding the value of total synthesis as an academic enterprise. While there are some outliers, the general opinions are that total synthesis has changed in recent decades, will continue to change, and will remain an integral part of chemical research. Within these changes, there has been increasing focus on improving the practicality and marketability of total synthesis methods. The Phil S. Baran group at Scripps, a notable pioneer of practical synthesis have endeavored to create scalable and high efficiency syntheses that would have more immediate uses outside of academia.

History

Vitamin B₁₂ total synthesis: Retrosynthetic analysis of the Woodward–Eschenmoser total synthesis that was reported in two variants by these groups in 1972. The work involved more than 100 PhD trainees and postdoctoral fellows from 19 different countries. The retrosynthesis presents the disassembly of the target vitamin in a manner that makes chemical sense for its eventual forward construction. The target, Vitamin B₁₂ (I), is envisioned being prepared by the simple addition of its tail, which had earlier been shown to be feasible. The needed precursor, cobyric acid (II), then becomes the target and constitutes the "corrin core" of the vitamin, and its preparation was envisaged to be possible via two pieces, a "western" part composed of the A and D rings (III) and an "eastern" part composed of the B and C rings (IV). The restrosynthetic analysis then envisions the starting materials required to make these two complex parts, the yet complex molecules V–VIII.

Friedrich Wöhler discovered that an organic substance, urea, could be produced from inorganic starting materials in 1828. That was an important conceptual milestone in chemistry by being the first example of a synthesis of a substance that had been known only as a byproduct of living processes. Wöhler obtained urea by treating silver cyanate with ammonium chloride, a simple, one-step synthesis:

AgNCO + NH₄Cl → (NH₂)₂CO + AgCl

Camphor was a scarce and expensive natural product with a worldwide demand. Haller and Blanc synthesized it from camphor acid; however, the precursor, camphoric acid, had an unknown structure. When Finnish chemist Gustav Komppa synthesized camphoric acid from diethyl oxalate and 3,3-dimethylpentanoic acid in 1904, the structure of the precursors allowed contemporary chemists to infer the complicated ring structure of camphor. Shortly thereafter, William Perkin published another synthesis of camphor. The work on the total chemical synthesis of camphor allowed Komppa to begin industrial production of the compound, in Tainionkoski, Finland, in 1907.

The American chemist Robert Burns Woodward was a pre-eminent figure in developing total syntheses of complex organic molecules, some of his targets being cholesterol, cortisone, strychnine, lysergic acid, reserpine, chlorophyll, colchicine, vitamin B₁₂, and prostaglandin F-2a.

Vincent du Vigneaud was awarded the 1955 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the total synthesis of the natural polypeptide oxytocin and vasopressin, which reported in 1954 with the citation "for his work on biochemically important sulphur compounds, especially for the first synthesis of a polypeptide hormone."

Another gifted chemist is Elias James Corey, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1990 for lifetime achievement in total synthesis and for the development of retrosynthetic analysis.

List of notable total syntheses

• Quinine total synthesis
• Vitamin B₁₂ total synthesis
• Strychnine total synthesis
• Paclitaxel (Taxol) total synthesis