Historical Roots of Contemporary Cooperatives

Abstract

This chapter explains three cooperative social philosophies developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to re-establish cooperative enterprises, social relationships, psychology, and morality. The three were the British social philosophy exemplified in Robert Owen and the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers, the Mondragon Cooperative Federation, and Marxist socialism. We see what these cooperative social philosophies advocated, what their similarities and differences were, and what their strengths and weaknesses were. We discover that Owenism, Rochdale, and Mondragon contained a mix of collective, communal cooperative elements—which challenged capitalist practices—along with elements that retained bourgeois features. Most of the 7 cooperative principles that emerged from Rochdale and the 10 principles that emerged from Mondragon, are shown to have retained bourgeois features. These features include an emphasis on commodity exchange, market social relations. These are theoretically analyzed to reveal how they unwittingly limit advances in cooperation. The Marxist theory of socialist cooperation is described. Cooperation was central to the theory of socialism. This social philosophy of cooperation is shown to dovetail with the collective, communal elements of cooperation in Owenism, Rochdale, and Mondragon. Marx contributed to cooperation by demonstrating theoretically that capitalism actually prepares an infrastructure of coordinated enterprises, such as transnational corporations, that are a potential basis of cooperativization. This infrastructure already contains a great deal of coordination and integration that could serve as the basis of collective ownership and management. This makes collective, communal cooperation a viable historical possibility rather than a utopian dream. Collective, communal cooperation and the more market-oriented cooperative principles form two cornerstones of the original cooperative movement.

End Notes

1. The labor union became equally conservative as it turned against socialism. The AFL, for example, conspired with the CIA to combat communism in Europe, the US, and Latin America. The AFL opposed labor movements in these regions that were sympathetic to socialism (Hughes 2011). The AFL-CIO established several bodies such as The American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) in 1962, and International Trade Secretariats that received funding from the CIA and the US Agency for International Development to oppose socialist labor unions and even free unions opposed to dictators such as Pinochet (http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/42a/126.html).

2. All calls for social justice, democracy (political or economic), equality, participation, respect, or dignity are abstract in that these terms are devoid of specific cultural-historical content. All fail to thoroughly analyze the principles and dynamics of capitalism and to formulate a concrete negation of each of them. These calls assume that if people are simply enfranchised to vote, democracy has been instituted. The content of what people vote for, and the content of the information that is available for people to vote intelligently, and the content of the electoral process are not addressed. The corrupted form of democracy that is practiced in the United States presidential elections testifies to the inadequacy of voting to achieve genuine democracy. Voting is thoroughly corrupted by capitalism, and unless/until capitalism is transformed, voting will never be democratic. The way to achieve democracy (dignity, equality, etc.) is through cooperativism, not through replacing the absence of voting with voting. Concrete social systems are the key to democracy and the eradication of exploitation and inequality. Abstract acts such as voting, tolerance, etc. are insufficient to achieve genuine democracy or cooperativism.

A clear example of this point is the issue of peace. Peace cannot be achieved by establishing institutions devoted to “promoting peace,” such as the United Nations. For the abstract, goal of peace will always be undermined by the concrete interests of countries. Countries that have imperialist ambitions will never be bound by declarations to work for peace. True peace requires changing concrete interests of nation states so that they are not imperialist. The concrete level is the only way to achieve “peace.”

3. Marx’s interest in the co-op movement led him to attend a public ceremony for Owen’s 80th birthday.

4. The cooperative movement was quite strong in Russia. It began in the Petrovski factory cooperative in Zabaikal’e (1864), and in a cooperative of the employees and workers of the Stroganov factory, in the province of Perm (1864), and in the consumers’ cooperative in Riga (1865), and in the Rural Credit cooperative in the village Rozhdestvenskii in the province of Kostroma (1865–1866). In the period from 1915 to 1916, there was a department at Shaniavskii University, in Moscow, which appears to have been the intellectual center of the cooperative movement. The All-Russian Central Cooperative Committee, founded in 1915, later became the All-Russian Soviet of Cooperative Conventions, the highest organ of the cooperative movement. The members of cooperatives aspired to become the ‘third’ force, a transcendent class of an independent political persuasion. They founded the Moscow People’s (Cooperative) Bank. Hundreds of special journals were published throughout Russia.

By 1917, there were more than 63,000 primary cooperatives in Russia, with a total of 24 million members. The structure of the movement is interesting: 35,000 of these primary cooperatives were consumers’ cooperatives, 16,300 were credit cooperatives, 11,000 were agricultural cooperatives and 1,200 were industrial and production cooperatives.

(http://www.idcpublishers.com/pdf/197_titlelist.pdf). Rhodes (1995, pp. 90–126) explores the Russian Co-op movement and the ICA's response to it.

5. In the US, reason and science have become subordinated to political-economic interests that are expressed in “popular beliefs.” Few people are convinced by reason and science when these conflict with their beliefs. A large number of Americans do not believe in evolution or global warming, despite scientific evidence.

A chilling example is the prohibiting of objective, scientific facts, and theories being taught in schools because they conflict with parents’ beliefs. Recently, a teacher in California showed her sixth-grade class the movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” This is a documentary made by former Vice-President Gore that issues dire warnings about climate change. These warnings are accepted by most climate experts as settled science. They are also endorsed by the National Center for Science Education. Nonetheless, a father filed a formal complaint accusing the teacher of brainwashing the students. He demanded that she apologize to her students or be fired. (Similar to the Catholic Church’s forcing Galileo to recant his astronomical findings.) Instead of defending science and reason, the school superintendent appeased the father by mandating that parents would have to approve their children viewing the movie in the future; and “prohibiting teachers from talking about ways to address climate change” (Wall St. Journal March 12, 2012, p. A6).