Cooperation is Radical

By: Megan Minnick

Co-ops are everywhere in our lives: from the grocery store, to the electric company, to our healthcare, our dairy products, even the bank. They’re part of everyday life and often, they don’t seem much different than any other business.

For most of us, when we’re deciding where to shop and what to buy, the fact that a company is a cooperative doesn’t factor into our decision making at all. Instead, we judge co-ops like any other business—comparing products and services offered.

Does the grocery store have the things I want at the prices I can pay? Does the credit union offer competitive interest rates and fees? Is the milk high-quality and organic?

Of course, these are valid questions. But should a company’s structure factor into these everyday decisions? What exactly is the co-op difference, and is it really such a meaningful departure from all the other ways of doing business?

Are co-ops, in fact, radical?

To answer that question, we have to go back to the beginning, and in this case, that beginning is the dawn of human history.

A brief history of cooperatives

At its most basic, a cooperative is an organization of people that’s owned and controlled by the people who use it—and yes, that definition is broad. In fact, it encompasses much of the development of human civilization. For most of our past, co-ops (albeit informal ones) were the norm, not an outlier at all.

Agriculture, for example, would not have been possible without early farmers cooperating to share ideas, knowledge, and equipment, and pooling their resources to harvest crops and build storage facilities.

As trading networks between individuals, towns, and regions began to develop in ancient times, cooperatives flourished. Trade unions existed in Bronze Age Greece. By the time of the Ottoman Empire, Greek farmers and craftsmen had formed large, complex cooperative networks that allowed them to pool their resources and sell their goods into Europe.

In Nigeria, the Yoruba people developed a cooperative banking system, in which members could deposit their savings into a jointly held pool that was made available for credit and financing. This system, known as Esusu, spread throughout much of Africa, and is even thought to have been brought to the Americas by enslaved people, where it led to the development of mutual aid societies dedicated to helping newly-freed people as they began their new lives in nineteenth century America.

These are only a few examples. Researchers have found evidence of cooperation in nearly every prehistoric and early-historic civilization. Where there were people, there were cooperatives.

With the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, things started to change. Traditional cooperative models began to break down as, increasingly, organizations (businesses) were owned and controlled not by the people who used them, but by outside investors.

This shift to modern capitalism and mass production weakened trade unions. It funneled wealth away from working people—the people who grew and produced the necessities of life—and toward already wealthy capitalist investors. In response, there was a flurry of attempts (particularly in the industrial regions of Scotland and England), to adapt the traditional cooperative model to the new order—to pool resources and leverage working peoples’ power.

Initially, many of these efforts either stagnated or failed.

Then, in 1844, a group of twenty-eight men (yes, sorry, they were all men) from Rochdale, England, got together and formed what is known as the first modern cooperative: The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers.

These men were from the working class, primarily weavers, and they had a problem. Rochdale at that time was dominated by textile mills. The industrialists who owned the factories also controlled the workers’ food supply, and as their sole interest was in maximizing profits, the goods offered in the company stores were often the cheapest available. Almost all the staple foods—flour, sugar, tea, coffee, butter—were mixed with additives such as dirt, wood shavings, iron filings, or nut shells.

To meet the moment, the Rochdale Pioneers decided to pool their resources and open their own grocery store, in direct competition with the company store and committed to selling only whole, unadulterated foods, “fair dealing” and “honest weight.”

The Rochdale experiment started small. The owners acted as cashiers, and they were only able to open two nights a week. They offered four staple products: oatmeal, flour, butter, and sugar.

But the store itself isn’t the remarkable part of the story. There had been other, similar experiments in the early nineteenth century—one in Rochdale itself, where a cooperative store setup in 1833 failed due to high levels of debt. What set the Rochdale Pioneers apart were the seven foundational rules that one of their members, a socialist mill-worker named Charles Howarth, drafted to serve as guiding principals for their new society.

  • Open and Voluntary Membership
  • Democratic Member Control
  • Members’ Economic Participation
  • Autonomy and Independence
  • Education, Training, and Information
  • Cooperation Among Cooperatives
  • Concern for Community

(If these principles seem familiar, it’s because they’re the same rules that govern co-ops today—with some co-ops choosing to add an eighth principle: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. They’re even posted on the walls of each Willy Street Co-op store.)

The seven principals proved to be the key to a successful, modern cooperative—not just for the Rochdale Pioneers, but worldwide.

The Rochdale store flourished, then expanded. By the 1860s, the town had become a destination for people from around the world who were interested in duplicating this new form of cooperative business—a model that promised democratic control and agency to the working class, and at the same time had the potential to grow, and even thrive alongside capitalistic enterprise.

The Rochdale model spread into new regions and new economies. Electric co-ops brought power to sparsely populated rural areas that didn’t offer enough profit for the investor-owned utilities to bother with. Credit unions sprouted up to counter predatory banks. Farmer co-ops helped farmers reach new markets and demand better pricing.

In the 1970s, the co-op movement returned to its roots when people all over the United States (including a group in Madison, Wisconsin), got fed up with the processed foods available at their grocery stores, and decided to pool their time and money and create their own store—one that offered unadulterated, minimally processed whole foods, at reasonable prices.

And here we are.

The future of co-ops

I asked Courtney Berner, the Executive Director of the UW Center for Cooperatives, what she sees as the future of co-ops. Here’s what she said:

“It’s not what’s going to happen with cooperatives, it’s what’s going to happen with our society. How are we going to use cooperatives to meet the moment, whatever the moment is?”

And that makes sense. Because throughout history—from the farmers who invented agriculture, to the original owners of Willy Street Co-op—people have formed cooperatives in order to solve problems they shared that weren’t being adequately addressed in any other way.

If you want to know the future of co-ops, you simply have to look for those problems—the pain points in society.

Pain points like the dramatic increase in housing prices over the last ten years. “When I started at The Center fourteen years ago,” Courtney told me, “almost no one was talking about housing co-ops, but now we’re getting a lot of inquiries.”

Child care and home care cooperatives are also on the rise.

Additionally, as the Baby Boomer generation ages and many struggle with the problem of how to equitably pass their businesses to the next generation, Courtney has seen an increase in the formation of worker cooperatives—as a means for retiring owners to sell to their employees.

Who knows what the future holds… but whatever it is, co-ops will be there.

The Co-op Difference

Getting back to our original question: are cooperatives radical, or are they just one more way of doing business?

It turns out the answer is… both.

In one way, modern co-ops are just businesses. They fulfill the same basic needs, use the same methods, and encounter the same obstacles as any other capitalistic enterprise.

Willy Street Co-op is a grocery store. Just like their investor-owned competitors, co-op staff have to run a profitable business—hire employees, purchase and sell products, maintain storefronts—with enough cash left at the end of the day to keep the lights on.

In the same way, a credit union is a bank. A dairy cooperative is a food manufacturer. An electric co-op is a utility.

But there’s a fundamental difference.

Unlike other businesses, co-ops operate specifically for the benefit of the people who use them, and they look to the seven cooperative principles as their guide for how to do this. Co-ops exist, not simply to enrich investors, but to enrich the lives, and meet the needs (financial and otherwise) of their members. It’s not just about profits, but about quality of life, and about the welfare of the community.

Because of this, in many cases, the products and services co-ops offer are just… better. Better for members, better for the community, and in many cases better for the planet.

And if, for whatever reason, they’re not better—if co-ops today aren’t meeting the evolving needs of their membership, then (because democratic member control is a founding principle) the owners have the means to facilitate change, to make the cooperative relevant and useful.

The word radical comes from the Latin radicalis: of the root. In modern usage, it’s come to be associated with change—fundamental change, or change from the root.

In this way, co-ops are absolutely radical. The stems and leaves, the above-ground, visible trappings of the business—of selling groceries, or running a bank, or delivering electricity—are intact. But underneath, at the root level, at the place where the plant is nourished and connected to the ground, there’s a huge change.

Because co-ops are businesses that aren’t beholden to shareholders or investors or capitalists—they exist only for the betterment of the people and communities who create them. Yes, there are still leaves and stems, but this radical change at the roots creates a more vibrant, more vigorous, more resilient plant. A different kind of business—now and into the future.

And that is the co-op difference.

 

Learn more

SIGN UP FOR OUR DIGITAL READER

Digital Reader Sign Up

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Shop Online
Careers
Contact Us