Co-operative History Tour

Radio 4's Farming Today recently focused on the role co-operatives might play in supporting the incomes of farmers, especially dairy farmers, and increasing their ability to withstand the oppressive power of the supermarkets. In the Year of Co-operation this is to be welcomed, and the comparisons with the situation in other countries, where more than 90% of dairy farmers sell their milk through co-operatives, are particularly useful. However, it is not just a question of transferring a business model: we need to understand how our politial and economic history has left us with a different attitude towards co-operatives.

Rather than milk co-operatives, until 1994 UK farmers had the protection of the Milk Marketing Board, which set a national price for milk and thus supported production and farmers' livelihoods. Like defence and energy, milk was considered a strategic resource - too vital to national well-being to be left to the vagaries of the market. This was a typical example of the statist approach to constraining the power of the market that was favoured in Britain in the post-war period, and no doubt an interesting comment on our changing food culture to vegan readers of this blog.

The vision of socialism as being exercised through one party and at the state level was particularly strong in Britain, where the Fabian socialists fought and defeated the guild socialists during the early years of the 20th century. I have written a longer academic piece about the intellectual links between the guild socialists and the modern green movement. Take, for example, this quotation from William Morris's 1890 pamphlet News from Nowhere:

'that individual men cannot shuffle off the business of life on to the shoulders of an abstraction called the State, but must deal with it in conscious association with each other ... Variety of life is as much an aim of true Communism as equality of condition, and ... nothing but an union of these two will bring about real freedom.' (Morris, 1890).

As the centralised state bastions were challenged and defeated one after another through the Thatcher years, both consumers and producers were left up vulnerable to the chilly winds of untrammelled market capitalism. This has led to excessive market power by banks, supermarkets, developers, and energy companies. In other countries where the market had always been more powerful, citizens had already combined to defend themselves. We are now in a situation of having to catch up.

We also need to remember the political lesson from the Blair years: while unity is strength, uniformity is weakness. The centralisation of the model of state ownership and democratic control by one party left a whole range of organisations from the Milk Marketing Board to the Labour Party itself vulnerable to takeover by those who sought to neutralise rather than reform them. The co-operatives, for all the snide criticisms they faced from the Fabians for compromising with the market, have proved more resilient. It is now the Green movement rather than the socialists who maintain this tradition of mutualism and local control.
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It Depends What You Mean by Depends

Thanks to the Green-Left list, my post on the motion to conference called Living within our Means has attracted more comments than any other. The point of the motion was to stimulate a debate about the relationship between green economics and a policy response to the public-spending cuts so this seems to have been achieved. Those with stomach for more may enjoy reading the longer version of my reasons for proposing the motion, which were published in Green World.

An interesting question raised by some of the comments is whether the Green Party should identify itself as being of the left, and whether it should identify itself as a socialist party. I'm sorry to say that any response to this question leads me to ask what people mean by identifying themselves as socialists.

I am sure there are highly technical answers to this question that inhabitants of the Ukraine more than 30 years old probably know clearly, but which are a mystery to me as the beneficiary of a capitalist education during the Cold War. Being of a similar vintage I can remember in my student days the heated debates in the Labour Club about whether the Labour Party should abandon Clause IV, which dealt with the ownership of the means of production. That seems to me key to being a socialist party, and since it has gone, I fail to see how Labour can claim to be one.

My own sympathies lie with the guild socialists, who lost out in the struggle for power within British 'socialism'. Their vision of self-reliant communities where craftspeople were organised into co-operatives which sold the goods they produced without anybody extracting value seems close to the green vision of a sustainable and just economy. We might argue about which sectors of our national economy are sufficiently important as to need to be democratically managed outside the market - health is obvious agreed by consensus, but what about housing? energy? water? - but beginning with local and co-operative ownership seems closer to the green way than nationalisation.

More generally, my belief is that the struggle between capital and labour that characterised the 19th and early 20th centuries has been superseded. The most important form of emancipation we can undertake today is from what Bob Marley called 'mental slavery', in this case the mental slavery of accepting the capitalist definition of ourselves as 'wage slaves'. We should not march for the right to work or fight for full employment; rather we should understand and challenge the system of money creation and resource ownership that leaves us in the weak position to begin with. Tweet