Alternate History Challenge: Co-ops as the dominant business structure...

In countries that are primarily capitalist/free-market as opposed to socialistic.

Essentially, the challenge is to make cooperative structures beat corporate structures on the free market as a way of organizing business/industry/etc.
 
This might be garbage but I'd say removing Marx/the Marxist School, allowing Proudhonism and home brew socialist movements, like the Rochdale Pioneers to become dominant. I say that because I doubt corporations cannot rise as a business model. Best bet would be for 'progressive' politics to be focused on mutualism over state ownership. If you have social liberal, labour and socialist parties pushing the system, via state funding/tax breaks etc. you could see it become far more accessible. Added to coporate partial employee ownership I could see mutual economics not being dominant perhaps but very common.
 
This might be garbage but I'd say removing Marx/the Marxist School, allowing Proudhonism and home brew socialist movements, like the Rochdale Pioneers to become dominant. I say that because I doubt corporations cannot rise as a business model. Best bet would be for 'progressive' politics to be focused on mutualism over state ownership. If you have social liberal, labour and socialist parties pushing the system, via state funding/tax breaks etc. you could see it become far more accessible. Added to coporate partial employee ownership I could see mutual economics not being dominant perhaps but very common.

Somebody has been reading my notes I see ;)

But yes, if you want cooperations to overtake corporations as 'the' business model of the world then you'll need to first lay the ground work for co-ops, and that means a less state-centralized, top-down version of economics.

Guild socialism would be another way to go about it.
 
It's a stronger movement in Quebec and perhaps rest of all Canada, BTW, so...
Maybe some kind of local movement that spread to USA?
 
It's a stronger movement in Quebec and perhaps rest of all Canada, BTW, so...
Maybe some kind of local movement that spread to USA?

France, Spain and their successor states have quite strong coops systems, there's Mondragon coop company, the biggest in Basque, and in France I believe coops have different corporate law.
 
But co-operatives were a dominant economic mode of organisation in capitalism in retail prior to the 1960s… …and in rural areas producer co-ops of petits bourgeois (cane cutters, dairy farmers, etc.) were also highly successful.

The largest socialist economy prior to 1917 was a rural retail co-operative in the central north of the US, larger by far than the economic activity of the Paris Commune, and it was operational within capitalism.

After the failed strikes of the 1890s and prior to the early 1910s, co-ops were the largest organisational relationship of the working class to politics in Australia; larger by far than the defeated ALP or defeated unions.

* * *

Political criticisms of co-ops have centred on their "apolitical" nature; from largely a Social Democratic and Leninist perspective. Concrete criticisms relate to self-payment problems, standard "small organisation" failure rates, and after the 1960s failures to successfully modernise retail tactics. Additionally some co-ops failed as people took the dividend from membership, but didn't shop at the co-op.

I'm aware that there's a growing interest in co-ops, Nikki Balnave (UWS) and Greg Patmore (U Sydney) are doing work on Rochdale retail co-ops in rural Australia, including a number of successful ones which have transitioned post 1960 and remain active.

* * *

I suspect that instead of requiring political change in the Social Democratic and Anarchist movements, what is really needed is a far more successful and aggressive retail strategy. Perhaps if co-ops manage to take on many of the supermarkets tactics which emerged in the 1960s, but implement them in the 1920s; combine this with a credit system that doesn't expose co-ops to liability (some kind of credit brokering system?) and they can lock up the mass retail market before it fully comes into existence.

Then we might see Brecht's vehement condemnation of the co-operative's abuse of workers in the /Three penny credit novel/.

yours,
Sam R.
 
Coop banking is getting in rise back again also, as banks pull out of small countryside towns in some farther, less populated area of Canada (and probably USA), this is a market that would rise in a future history version of this I bet.
 
Coop banking is getting in rise back again also, as banks pull out of small countryside towns in some farther, less populated area of Canada (and probably USA), this is a market that would rise in a future history version of this I bet.

If that's the same as Credit Unions, they're popular enough in (at least some parts of) the U.S. now. They're nowhere near dominating, but they're not dying out either, and competing and coexisting well with corporate banks in the same cities.
 
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