Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Associations of people working together for the production and distribution of goods, cooperatives have taken a variety of forms in different national contexts. The International Co-operative Alliance, representing almost 600 million individual members worldwide, has singled out six essential principles: voluntary and open membership, democratic control, limited return on capital, surplus earnings belong to members, education and cooperation among cooperatives (ICA Commission, 1967). Democratic control is the key difference between capitalist and cooperative forms of property. Unlike the joint-stock company each member has the same voting rights regardless of the number of shares held; P articipation is power, rather than individual ownership of other people's ossified abstract labour. An ethical, idealist impulse has been a common feature. From its inception, cooperation was seen as a way of building an alternative to capitalism from the bottom up, replacing bourgeois I ndividualism with a society based on mutuality and social solidarity. An English cooperator defined the ideal thus in 1907: ‘By means of mutual association to eliminate the present industrial system, and to sub-stitute mutual Co-operation for the common good as the basis of all human society’ (Webb, 1904, p. 2). The movement originated in Britain during the development of industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth ... log in or subscribe to read full text