Co-ops: The Post-Corporate Activism.

• Author: Wright, Keith

A cooperative is a business controlled by the people who use it. They come in a variety of forms. Seven hundred million people around the globe participate in cooperative enterprises, ranging from credit unions to taxicabs. While the benefits of cooperative businesses vary according to the type of cooperative, all are a potential force for serving community needs. The extent to which they do depends on how closely they adhere to the Rochdale Principles, a set of principles governed by the International Cooperative Alliance since 1895.

The principles include nondiscrimination and democratic member control. They say that capital is the servant of the cooperative, not the master. Cooperative activities are organized to serve the needs of its members in a way that doesn't harm the larger community in which it operates.

Cooperatives in their modem form began in 1844. A group of 29 weavers, seeking to gain control over their economic destiny, pooled their savings and opened the first successful consumer co-op in Rochdale, England. The Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society existed at a time when people were rioting in the streets over the high prices and poor quality of food. The activists protested against the merchants of their day, whose desire for profit meant others were starving. The Pioneers' first act was the purchase and equitable division of a large bag of meal. They were motivated by terrible living conditions, but also by a desire to support weavers, who were striking without pay in an attempt at better working conditions.

A comparison of cooperative principles with the inherent rules of corporations (as described in Jerry Mander's In the Absence of the Sacred) reveals that cooperatives offer a life-affirming alternative to the corporation. Corporations place the value of profit over all other concerns. When the choice is between world peace and profit, corporations choose profit.

They also choose growth. Corporations have to continuously grow in order to maintain good relationships with investors. This imperative fuels the corporate goal of exploiting increasingly scarce resources and markets around the globe, regardless of the environmental or cultural consequences. To accomplish these imperatives corporations must be mean, aggressive, competitive, and amoral, with strong, centralized leadership. Their byproducts include dehumanization and exploitation.

Some cooperatives operate more like a corporation than like descendants of the...