British Co-ops Forge Ahead
Cole, By G.D.H.
British Co-ops Forge Ahead By G.D.H.Cole l#-«U-*n*w» Brituk ewtAor •/ JWmf stawaard •* »e*n*m*ee; Vnivereity Reader in See-*tmi«t (0xf*r4); Director •/ Nufxeld Coliego Reconstruction Survey....
...it is a far cry from the little Toad Lane Store, started in part of a disused chapel, to the far-flung Cooperative Movement of today...
...QIlTAlN'S Cooperative Movement it this year cels-ew bra ting Ite centenary...
...It is usually assumed that the strength of public enterprise is in the fact that it costs less to do a job than under private enterprise where a profit is collected...
...The auto salesmen wanted good roads...
...Anyway it looks as if our highways are not only an enterprise but a sound business enterprise run by the state and counties...
...bat from the seed they sowed has sprung a movement which has today about nine million members in Britain, and serves many more than this number with a substantia...
...And right now we are listening to a subsidized rhorus chanting the sacred virtues of free enterprise...
...Horn in Kansas, he grew up with the West and knows his American history...
...Has it come to this—the surplus earnings of the state's highways being put under lock and key to prevent their being swiped by other departments of the state—banking, timber, fisheries, mining, agriculture...
...I had to read that news item two or three times...
...A "dividend" of one shilling and sixpence or two shillings in the pound is the most common...
...Anyone may join, on equal terms vith those who are already members, and with equal rights in the valuable properties—often running into millions—which the Societies possess...
...In the countries overrun by the Nazis, and in Germany itself, Consumers' Cooperation has been rutn-lessly suppressed...
...The share capital, unlike that of corporations, is withdrawable at any time, and thus the Cooperator has aa interest-yielding asset which is perfectly liquid and can he drawn upon to meet any emergency, such as illness or a spell of bad trade...
...In a series ef short, snappy articles he will tell about some of our great American enterprises—private and public—how they are run and why they have been successes or failures...
...When should there be unrestricted competition and when should there be cooperation...
...The People's Business By Elihu Bowles 1I/HKN is a business not a business...
...What enterprises should be socialized and when...
...and turnpike companies began to appear, and build Improved highways with toll gates to collect their profits from the travelers...
...But moat of the first group of Owenite Societies died ¦'•at...
...Another cardinal principle is "open membership...
...and Britain's Co-operators are already gathering together a fund to help to set the Cooperative Movements on the Continent back on then feet...
...And the combined good hard sense of everybody chose public enterprise as the means of getting good roads...
...So incredible...
...Then the gas tax will have to decline also, and the cost of travel will be greatly reduced...
...British Co-ops Forge Ahead By G.D.H.Cole l#-«U-*n*w» Brituk ewtAor •/ JWmf stawaard •* »e*n*m*ee...
...and they pay "dividends" to their member Societies on the purchases made from them...
...And so everybody wanted good roads...
...A 1,1, this consumers' movement traces its growth to the little store founded in Rochdale, Lancashire, a hundred years ago...
...We have all sorts of business run by all sorts of individuals, by small firms and big corporations...
...Names do not alter the facts...
...In 1917, however, it decided to enter politics, and formed the Cooperative Party...
...It will rise again...
...In 1943 the Washington state legislature passed a law prohibiting the use of state highway funds by other departments of the state government...
...and road building is most common...
...Each local Cooperative Society is an association of consumers, who join it by paying down a small deposit and thereupon become full voting members...
...But the growth has been steady and continuous now for a hundred years, and there is no sign that it is likely to cease...
...When Herbert Hoover was elected President, all the leading highways were owned and operated by districts, counties and states...
...The principle on which this movement rests is essentially aintple...
...That was how the movement was able not only to build more and more stores, but also to set uy ita own factories and its trading depots in every country from which it needed to draw supplies...
...Everybody who bought a car wanted good roads...
...The original Co-apsrators af Toad Lane numbered but twenty-eight...
...Even with millions of consumers away in the Services and therefore not receiving their supplied from tbe ¦hops, the Cooperative Societies have 11,628,000 registered sugar consumers under the wartime scheme of rationing, and have been steadily increasing their share af the total trade from year to year...
...Whea...
...It is everywhere mainly a working class movement, though it accepts members from any class, and some of the stores do a large trade with better-off consumers...
...But this private enterprise business didn't proceed far till something happened...
...A member may hold many shares in a Society...
...The settlement of wild America required such an endless number of roads that the traffic was sprpad out loo thin over nearly all of them to justify much improvement entirely too thin to justify improvement and an additional expense of collecting tolls...
...No, it invites in some form of public enterprise...
...part of their regular retail purchases...
...Side by side with it was the even larger movement of Agricultural Cooperation, with about 70,000,000 members scattered all over the world...
...Elihu Bowles is a State of Washington rancher, businessman, and teacher...
...and these "dividends" the members can either draw out in cash or leave to accumulate as share capital, on which ¦ they receive a fixed interest, but no share in the profits...
...Many Cooperative Societies were founded by the followers of Robert Owen, the great totton manufacturer who turned philanthropist and Cooperative Socialist, and made his mills at New Lanark a show place men came from all over the World to visit...
...For American readers, a shilling is roughly a quarter, sixpence ia twelve rents and a pound, five dollars...
...So much for a great publie enterprise—the American highway...
...and other relief agencies their movement shall receive its due, as by far the greatest organized representative of the consumers...
...and it waa left for the "Rochdale Pioneers," who Ware followers of Owen, to re-found the movement on sounder lines, so that it established itself firmly and spread first throughout the industrial districts of Marthern England and Scotland, then over the rest of Britain, and presently round the world...
...7IIKN Andrew Jackson was elected president, the main highways leading into the cities were largely owned and operated by private turnpike companies...
...The piiin.li> advantage of public enterprise is that it can expand and keep on expanding, even while banks have to curtail credit, merchants dismiss employes, and farmers cut down production— that it can keep going and can turn back into circulation all the money it takes in...
...In what fields ran private capitalism function more efficiently than public uwnership and democratic control...
...But whst of the future of the American highway...
...Some "free" enterprises ace monopolies controlled by trusts and cartels, national and international, often in restraint of free competition, restricting production for high profits...
...And it is here of interest to note some of the reasons why private enterprise has had so little part in the development of our great American highway system of today, probably the biggest institution in America—if we had any way of measuring its size relative to other of our great institutions of different naturs...
...These local Societies are joined together in two great wholesale societies, one for England and Wales and aae for Scotland...
...Cooperation could not take firm roots until, the bad «*y» of tha Industrial Revolution being over, wages far the more skilled workers rose enough to allow soma ¦argin for saving, and thus enabled the Societies to gat from their members tha capital needed for expansion...
...Through most of its history the Cooperative Move-meat remained officially neutral in politics, though it had in fact close personal links in the nineteenth century with Uladstoman Liberals...
...Actually, there had been Cooperative stores before 1844, and a few of these are still in existence...
...After the railroads had taken the cream of the traffic away from the turnpike companies, leaving them nearly all stranded, then we had three quarters of a century more of bad toads- muddy roads, hilly roads, rocky roads, gullied roads, icy roads, dusty roads, till something else happened— the automobile...
...In lesj than a half century the American highways evolved from nothing but wagon tracks over the raw earth, to the finest system of hard-surfaced highways in world history...
...IT is one of the cardinal principles of these Cooperative Societies that the members shall control them democratically, on the principle of "One Member, One Vote...
...but he geta only a single vote...
...The movement was Strongest in Britain, Scandinavia, the rural areas of the U.S.S.R., and, before the war, in Belgium and France...
...Other enterprises are carried on by city, slate, and Federal governments, others by cooperatives...
...I say "member," not "man," because women have from . the first been equally eligible with men for membership...
...When is an enterprise not an enterprise...
...When is an enterprise private and when is it public...
...As members they receive "dividends," not on aapital invested in the Societies, but in proportion to the amount of their purchases -at so much in the pound...
...They produce, as well as distribute, goods, and have their own factories and mills for a wide range of products...
...As cities grew the traffic over main highways between them grew...
...Even if this were always true, it would be only a secondary matter...
...This now vast consumers' movement has been a hundred years growing, and has been imitated in nearly every country in the world—including the United States...
...Hail there never been new methods introduced, such as railroads and the auto, it seems quite likely that our main trunk highways today would be owned and operated by private enterprise...
...And the turnpike business blew up except in a few remote regions...
...A. V. Alexander,«"npw First I>>rd/of the Admiralty in the British Government, is the beaj-known of the Cooperative M.P.'s, who usually work in close alliance with the Labor Party, and are now members, together with it and the Trades Union Congress, of the British National Council of Labor...
...for the famous Toad Lane glare af ta4 Rochdale Pioneers opened its doors for the ftrst lime a hundred years ago...
...Consumers' Cooperation has been, wherever it was spread, a great agency of working-class thrift...
...The auto manufacturers wanted good roads...
...and these "Wholesales" are managed in much the aame way, with the local Societies, instead af individuals, as their voting and share-holding members...
...The railroads...
...They are also demanding that in the work of IJ.N.R R.A...
...damAing all public enterprise as regimentation and akin to fascism or communism...
...And it matters not what they are called...
...Even today when people meet to discuss post-war employment—men who are loudest in praise of private enterprise—the concensus usually is thst it must be some form of public enterprise...
...slack business and unemployment hits a community, the chamber of commerce doesn't go to the merchant, the banker or the farmer for relief...
...and there waa a growing tendency for the two movements to develop mutual trading relations...
...In some of the most advanced highway states the saturation point is not far off, when road building will decline and when other forms of public enterprise must take up the slack...
...The American way" and "democracy" are made synonomous with free private capitalism by this hallelujah band of private profiteers and super-patriots—with the Communists adding their squraky voices to the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce...
...It was a case of one private enterprise method competing another out of existence...
...Cooperation has served its members well - above all, the working-class housewives whom it has provided with a means of saving up both for purchases which are not made regularly from week to week and also against a "rainy day...
...Whpn were these highways business enterprises, and when were they not business enterprises...
...When is enterprise "free...
...There were in 1939, in the world as a whole, Well over 60,000,000 members of Consumers' Cooperative Societies, but only about half a million of them Were on the American Continent...
Vol. 27 • May 1944 • No. 19
