Questions About Cooperative ...... preface

PREFACE

The start of the 19th century in the UK was an age of child labour, exploitation and poverty. Persons who failed to find work in the new factories were forced to rely on meager parish relief for the poor or to remain in hunger. By the early 1800's, food prices became very high and workers that were privileged to find employment, discover that their wages were reduced. Much of the population suffered extreme poverty and deprivation.

The prevailing economic philosophy of the time was the capitalist free-market philosophy of Adam Smith, who claimed that through the impersonal mechanism of the free market, self-interest would automatically lead to public good. Adam Smith took for granted in his book "The Wealth of Nations" that this market economy was one in which human relations were reduced to the buying and selling of labour and that workers could never improve their lot through industrial or political action.

Labour, and the poverty including the starvation that goes with unemployment, was simply a market commodity subject to the free market rules of supply and demand. Added to this were the population theories of the Reverend Thomas Malthus, which suggested that any attempt to help the poor would simply increase the population and make matters worse. These individualist theories removed any incentive from those with wealth and power to seek to improve the conditions of the majority who were poor.

There were however, a small number of enlightened individuals appalled by the poverty and ill health of the poor who had an alternative vision. Two of these enlightened individuals are now seen as the founders of the co-operative philosophy that eventually underpinned the development of the international co-operative movement. These two enlightened individuals were a wealthy industrialist, Robert Owen, and a Brighton medical practitioner, Dr William King.

            Their thought was, how can the worker break out of this trap? ”act of inhumanity done to them” fact for exoneration we the grass-root farmers must recognize is that without labour, capital is nothing; it only helps to stored labour and cannot begin to work until the worker makes use of it. Why then cannot the worker take all the value of the product? Because while he or she is working to make the goods, the worker must live, and so the capitalist advances capital in order to keep the worker alive. But supposing the worker had enough capital to do this, then the product would all go to the worker. The key is to store up enough capital to get control over our own labour, and then, possessing both labour and capital, we will be able to do without the capitalist altogether. But individual workers cannot do this on their own; there is too much risk, the process of accumulating enough capital takes too long, and if we become ill or grow old there is nothing to fall back on. But together, if we learn to co-operate, we can do it. This was the basis that the cooperative society was founded on. “A ROCK BASE”