Eclipse and re-emergence of the cooperative movement

This post was originally published on the What If? blog in October 2016, as a contribution to a continuing debate about the future of cooperative development in the UK.

In his recently republished Cooperative Manifesto, Tim Huet explains why he came to the conclusion that ‘There Is No More Important Social Change Work You Can Do Than Cooperative Development’. Huet was one of the first organisers of the Arizmendi Assocation of Cooperatives, which Ed Mayo describes as a great example of coop replication.

For Huet, coops become relevant when they are part of a wider movement against capitalism. They provide answers to ‘the military question’: while closures, crises, strikes, protests and occupations can create the possibility and space for change, how do people self-organise to consolidate that space and expand it, by developing bases of economic and social power?

The difficult question of times

When cooperatives take a great leap forward, it’s usually in times of social crisis. This is when the relevance, necessity and potential of cooperation become clearest to people. In the ‘hungry 1840s’, the Rochdale cooperators’ fifth object was to ‘arrange the powers of production, distribution, education and government’. Providing decent food,  building houses, providing decent work and acquiring land were immediate tasks and also steps towards a hegemonic cooperative commonwealth, to be established ‘as soon as practicable’. Expressed in different language in different times, this is the invariant programme of cooperatives as a movement. So when is ‘practicable’, and what is practical now? These are strategic questions, throwing up yet more questions. What are the possibilities in these times? What resources, self-help and solidarity can we mobilise in this situation?



The political shell

Cooperatives seek to be self-reliant, therefore independent of lobbies and parties that seek to influence through private corporations or state action. The instinct of governments and sectional interests is to enrol, recuperate or suppress autonomous movements, including cooperatives. Coop organisations, therefore, have a strategic defence and propaganda role. In the present time of political turmoil, when parties make policy blandishments towards mutuals and coops, the principle of autonomy guides strategy and tactics. Cooperative movements exercise political ‘neutrality’ in order to maintain strategic freedom to resolve the real questions of social and economic power in favour of people.

Necessity, the mother of cooperation

We cooperate because there is no better or no other way. Meeting peoples’ self-defined needs and aspirations is the relevance test. We know that the movement is re-invented and grows fast in times of widespread social and economic conflict, if people have the means and opportunity to adapt the technology of cooperation. Lancashire in the 1840s, Ireland in the 1890s, post war Italy, Spain in the 1950s, Argentina in the present century.

Change was in the air in the 1970s. A wave of coop formations in the UK and US was inspired by a mix of libertarian socialism, anarchism, anti racism, the rising ecology movement, second wave feminism, community organising and other currents. Cooperatives gave people new infrastructure and tools in a period of social contestation. That wave fell back in the times of reaction which followed, particularly in the 1990s. In that phase, any strategy to rapidly expand coops had its work cut out. So, is now our time?

Of course, we don’t know yet. We know there is social conflict and political disintegration; we know people are in need; that people want change. But are they moving towards self-organised ways and means to get it? Do they have the time, social capital and savings to invest? Are they confident enough? Hindsight is easy, yet experience suggests that productive strategy won’t be a matter of helicoptering legacy coop models onto disparate people and situations, so much as directing solidarity to those expressing a desire to change their situation by acting together, and who feel that change is realistic, possible and necessary, even if they haven’t heard about coops. Where the human and material resources – cooperative capital – come from is another strategic challenge, especially in a country whose coops squandered their assets and failed to invest in the movement for decades.

Strategy has to aim at developing a framework in which cooperators can respond quickly and intelligently to what’s going on around them. Coop advocacy needs to work close to the heat, designing and disseminating relevant information about ‘why’ as well as proposals for ‘how’. Whatever language we use towards governments, policy makers and ‘influencers’, we need authentic language to speak to people. The effort to develop a real, uncompromised cooperative politics is especially urgent in times of cultural dissonance and rampant ideological cretinism.

Not all cooperation is good for you

Not all modes of cooperation are in themselves positive. We can understand the complex cooperation of workers that enables private firms to extract profit, the cooperation of prisoners with their captors, or the enthusiastic collaboration of consumers with extractive platforms, without justifying them as behaviours that meet peoples’ mutually defined needs and aspirations. Cooperative messages have to inspire, but they can’t just be feel good platitudes. They need to express what we cooperate against, as well as for. Our language should be sensitised to the fact that few would-be cooperators want to self-identify as ‘business’ people, for instance. Jargon words like ‘innovation’ and ‘entrepreneurialism’ mask mechanisms for increasing inequality and intensifying exploitation. The more we scramble our messages by trying to reclaim alienated vocabulary – perhaps to appear progressive, mainstream or unfrightening – the more we obscure the potential of cooperation as part of a movement for social change and the less relevant coops will seem to people. Good communication is strategic.

Show us the money

If the purpose of the coop movement is to create new cooperators, we can’t be defensive or patronising when they articulate a radical coop vision literally, even bluntly; or when they challenge the coop establishment. They’re correct, if not always polite. Years of work, negotiation and experience may yield useful knowledge and resources, but they don’t confer superior wisdom, ownership of the movement, or special insight into the goals and methods of coop strategy.

In a sense, any new wave of coops and cooperators begins to fail at the point it stops growing and starts consolidating. In movement terms, a coop that disappears is not necessarily a failure, and coops that go on forever are not all successes. Whether they go back 20 or 150 years, established coops tend to make their peace. They mutate from radical groups, to incorporated bodies, to businesses; move from meeting needs and aspirations, to hitting commercial targets; from self-help to charity. This is predictable. You can create coops, but you can’t make a commonwealth one coop at a time. Raising the game of intercooperation is strategic.

Strategy should to seek to update and adapt the coop development repertoire in response to times and situations. We should be open to the new, the unfamiliar, and the alarming. Strengthening established coops should be an object of strategy, where those coops are able to renew themselves and contribute to the renewal of the movement. In this wider renewal, younger generations often do the heavy lifting. They articulate new needs and aspirations, or old needs and aspirations in a new context. They put in the sweat equity. Many new coops are proposed or advised by old hands, and helping new cooperators make the right alliances and avoid old traps is vital. Yet we should not be in the business of judging whether there is a ‘market’ for their ideas and approaches. Coop renewal often means attempting things that are impossible, according to received wisdom. This is part of coop realism.

We will need to engage with many projects that don’t develop, to find the ones that could change everything. New cooperators are often our most passionate and connected advocates. In the recent uptick of formations in London and in the tech community, for instance, coop methods are being used by social activists contesting the use and ownership of new technologies; looking for new ways to combat exploitation; defending the commons; combatting fuel poverty; resisting landlords; radicalising food culture and politicising cultural work. Their views about the utility of what worked for people five, thirty or a hundred years ago are respectful and open, but critical. They look beyond the formal movement, and beyond the UK, for ideas and inspiration. The dimensions of the social crisis are global and local, rather than national. Deepening cooperative internationalism, and looking beyond the existing legal and national frameworks, are strategic for local development.

The places to look for the next wave of cooperators are all around us, if we’re willing to engage. The next game-changing coops may be on the verge of coming into existence.

This post was originally published on the What If? blog in October 2016, as a contribution to a continuing debate about the future of cooperative development in the UK.

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on Eclipse and re-emergence of the coop movement

The Commons at Work

A version of this post was originally published as an article in Stir to Action # 7, October 2014

How do commons principles apply in the production of goods and services?

Enclosures of natural and human resources like land or knowledge are the subject of resistance from movements for community land rights, anti copyright and defence of the open internet. But what about the commons at work?

Workers' co-operatives use principles like open membership, equality, democracy and autonomy. Even for someone working a lifetime in co-op enterprises, the meaning of common ownership - the third co-op principle, so contrary to the dominant law and ideology - can be hard to get. It may be most radical co-op principle of all.

Like the commons, the international workers' co-operative movement manifests in responses to present and historical local conditions. The empresas recuperadas, Mondragon's industrial co-ops, the Seikatsu Clubs and Women's' Worker Collectives of Tokyo, got their character from where they grew. Working class organisation to mitigate the impacts of bourgeois flight in Argentina, fascist repression in the Basque region, the crisis of economic isolation and dependency among Japanese women, created them. Ideology, history, law and politics shapes them - Peronism; cultural exceptionalism and radical catholicism; the primacy of traditional families; the social conservatism of the left. Yet everywhere co-operatives proclaim their alignment with seven global principles. This practical code is both an organisational toolkit and a manifesto.

Britain is where the modern co-op movement started, which is not surprising since Britain produced modern capitalism. As in Asia or South America, European workers' co-ops are the product of specific episodes of social conflict, influenced by the history and ideas of the places they occurred. The first co-op in England to invent a model which could be copied successfully - 1,000 times within 10 years - was founded by ex-Chartists in Rochdale, Lancashire in the 1840s. Its founders were veterans of a period of intense and violent class struggle in capitalism's early industrial heartland.

The Rochdalers' first objective was to obtain unadulterated food, and to supply it in fair weights and measures, by establishing "a store for the sale of provisions, clothing, etc." But it's wrong to think of them as an early version of the modern supermarket multiples, the 'consumer co-operatives'. Their ambition was all-encompassing and radical. Here's their fifth objective:

"As soon as practicable, the Society shall proceed to arrange the powers of production, distribution, education and government, or in other words, to establish a self-supporting home colony of united interests, or assist other societies in establishing such colonies."

That's a statement of intent to create the co-operative commonwealth. It's also remarkable in the way it moves seamlessly from the quotidian to the revolutionary, from practice to theory, and back - a hallmark of co-operativism.

The first great wave of worker co-op formations came on the back of the Rochdale experiment, as people inspired by the early successes expanded the co-operative commonwealth into housing, education and production. While less successful in the face of private capitalist competition than the retailing co-ops, worker co-operators made inroads in industries like clothing, footwear manufacture and printing - particularly in districts like the English Midlands - even as they were fought tooth and nail by private capitalists.

The relative decline of workers' co-ops in Britain in the late 19th and 20th centuries is a complicated story, which can partly be told through the story of mainstream English working class ideology, with its loss of faith in the commonwealth and infatuation with state socialism. Commonwealth socialism had deep roots; in the early anti-enclosure movement, milleniarian currents in the English revolution, and further back in the Peasants' Revolt, which fought ecclesiastical enrichment and the power of rulers. The socialism of the co-op pioneers was also informed by religious nonconformism, whose values of self-help and self-responsibility are echoed in the fourth co-op principle of autonomy - from the state or any other external power. As early as 1891, the influential Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb - later Baroness Passfield, an enthusiastic Stalinist - was dismissing workers' co-ops as an impossible experiment, on the grounds that workers are too lazy and venal to be in control of enterprises. That argument had contemporary echoes in the insistence of the great and good that ordinary members were too stupid and greedy to be in charge of the Co-operative Group, and that we must instead give more power to the class of professional executives and moneymen who practically bankrupted it over recent years.

Fabianism had more or less secured its baleful ideological hegemony over British labour and trade union thinking by 1930. Our second wave of worker co- ops arose between the 1960s and 1980s. This wave was led by political and social activists - not Fabians or Leninists, but autonomist, anarchist and libertarian communist workers, internationalists, feminists, anti-racism campaigners, community organisers, housing activists and people from the growing ecological movement. Many of today's workers' co-ops were founded in those years including Suma, Infinity, Essential and Green City (whole foods); New Internationalist and Calverts (publishing and communications); Delta-T Devices (agronomy) and Dulas (green energy).

In English law, you can be an employee, an employer, unemployed or self-employed - but the law doesn't recognise groups of autonomous, self-organised workers. English law protects and advances private and state ownership, but not the commons. Legalities and definitions are important. The very word 'commonwealth' has become conflated with 'nation state' - almost the opposite of our concept; indeed 'The Commonwealth' is what they decided to call the rump of the British Empire.

The co-operative commonwealth, common ownership, the commons of the commons, indivisible reserves; these are overlapping and often poorly understood concepts. They need claiming and clarifying, to be of greater use to the movement. Does that mean the state should define them for us? No. The battles are  about language and praxis; the movement itself needs to find the favourable ground on which to fight those battles.

Common ownership workers' co-ops take different legal forms, but they are not the same as Community Interest Companies, where an asset lock - set by law and controlled by a state regulator - is used to decide what ultimately happens to the wealth of an enterprise.  Co-ops are also different from employee-owned businesses controlled through trusts, transferrable shares or a mixture of the two, like the John Lewis Partnership.

Using the 'Overton window' analogy, in the frame of UK polite bourgeois and political discourse, workers' co-ops are regarded with alarm and horror. Share-based, tax-avoiding models, on the other hand, are incubated and promoted. The goal is to raise workers' productivity and compliance by 'involving' them, giving them 'a voice'- whereas the goal of workers' co-ops could be summed up as mitigating the horror of wage labour, by enabling workers to develop confidence and skills in a culture of respect and equality, and giving them a degree of autonomy. The wealth of workers' co-operatives was created by the members who went before; it will be passed on to those to come.

Meanwhile the ghost of Baroness Passfield stalks the land. She whispers in the ears of her followers, the priests of 'caring capitalism', 'corporate responsibility', 'social enterprise' and its ghastly offspring, the 'Big Society'.

So, what does a contemporary version of the Rochdale co-op look like? A shiny, retail-modern Co-operative convenience store, with its depressed workers and bright pink rows of shrink-wrapped pigmeat? No. It looks like Unicorn Grocery in Chorlton, Manchester - a workers co-op selling healthy, unadulterated, whole and organic products and produce, much of it locally sourced. Unicorn serves all demographics in a mixed income neighbourhood. It often beats the multiples on price, as well as quality. Staff pay, engagement and conditions add up to jobs as decent as you'll find in that line of work. Unicorn's Business ethics flow from its co-op identity, rather than being bolted on - for instance, it's relationships with suppliers are also based on equality and equity. All permanent staff - more than forty - are members. Many customers have invested loan stock in the co-op, to help it grow. It generates zero food waste. Its constitution and policies are public, and like Rochdale it publishes a guide on how to replicate the model. It's in common ownership, meaning that if one day the members collectively decide to quit while they're ahead, Unicorn's residual assets - its common wealth - will be passed on to the movement.

Co-operatives are reckoned to provide more jobs than all the world's multinational companies put together, and to secure the livelihoods of half the world's population. The most recently agreed written version the third co-operative principle says that members contribute equitably to, and democratically control, the capital of their co-operative - and at least part of that capital is "usually the common property of the co-operative".

That may be a timid-sounding statement, but it makes co-operatives the only actually existing, large scale business model with the commons at its heart.