Co-operative Movement
협동조합 운동
The movement that spread co-operatives, shops, factories and banks owned and run in common by the workers and consumers who put up their capital. It grew out of the ideas of Robert Owen, and the principles laid down by the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in 1844 became the basis of the modern movement. In the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men's Association in 1864 Marx praised the co-operative factories as a victory of the political economy of labour, but concluded that, kept within the casual efforts of private workmen, co-operation could never arrest the growth of monopoly; it had to be developed to national dimensions, and for that the working class had to conquer political power.
In depth
The first documented consumer co-operative was the Fenwick Weavers' Society, founded in 1769 when weavers in Fenwick, Ayrshire, began selling a sack of oatmeal at a discount. By 1830 there were several hundred co-operatives, but most had failed by 1840. Robert Owen, regarded as the father of the movement, opened the first co-operative store at his cotton mills in New Lanark and planned "villages of co-operation" in which workers would grow their own food, make their own clothes and govern themselves, but his communities at Orbiston and New Harmony failed. William King spread a more practical approach, beginning with a shop, through his monthly The Co-operator from 1828.
On 21 December 1844 the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers opened a store in Toad Lane with butter, sugar, flour and oatmeal for sale. It was one of the first co-operatives to pay a patronage dividend, and the Rochdale Principles it designed became the foundation of co-operative principles worldwide. "Law the First" of its rules aimed beyond the store, at houses for members, manufacture to employ members out of work or suffering wage cuts, cultivation of land and eventually a self-supporting home colony arranging production, distribution, education and government. In 1863 three hundred societies in Yorkshire and Lancashire launched the North of England Co-operative Society, known from 1872 as the Co-operative Wholesale Society, and by 1900 the British movement counted 1,439 co-operatives. In Germany Schulze-Delitzsch (1852, urban) and Raiffeisen (1864, rural) founded co-operative banks.
In the Inaugural Address Marx called the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold "hands", a still greater victory than the Ten Hours Act: by deed instead of by argument they had shown that production on a large scale could be carried on without a class of masters employing a class of hands, and that hired labour, like slave and serf labour, was a transitory and inferior form. Yet the experience of 1848 to 1864 had proved that co-operative labour kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen could never arrest the geometrical growth of monopoly, which was perhaps why noblemen and political economists had suddenly turned complimentary about it. Co-operative labour had to be developed to national dimensions and fostered by national means; since the lords of land and capital would use their political privileges to block it, to conquer political power had become the great duty of the working classes.
The Paris Commune of 1871 set out to have workshops abandoned by their owners run by workers' co-operatives and to combine these into one great union. In The Civil War in France Marx noted that the intelligent members of the ruling classes had become apostles of co-operative production, and wrote that if united co-operative societies were to regulate national production upon a common plan, ending the anarchy and periodical convulsions of capitalist production, that would be communism, "possible" communism. In his 1891 introduction Engels judged that this decree, the direct antithesis of the doctrine of Proudhon, who hated association, made the Commune the grave of the Proudhon school.