Bridges of Peace

...and European co-ops could assist their Afro-Asian affiliates...

...The cooperative movement, if the world gives it time, may yet build the bridges of peace for which author Voorhis hopes, and over which men of all nations might travel...

...The promise of the cooperative movement is the same for Americans as for the inhabitants of the underdeveloped lands...

...While not a blueprint for disarmament and peace, American Cooperatives does outline the economic possibilities by which men of all nations, the developed and the underdeveloped, may learn to exercise a vital measure of economic and political control over their lives and destinies...

...He observes that trust-busting cannot turn back the economic clock...

...He supports this thesis by citing Sweden's example, where cooperatives, while responsible for only about four per cent of manufacturing, one-third of all food sales, and seventeen per cent of total national business, have, by their mere economic presence and potential, kept the monopolies from administering prices, spurring inflation, retarding economic growth, and inducing unemployment as their counterparts in this nation have done...

...American cooperatives have only recently begun to make themselves felt as potent economic weapons...

...and that government regulation of these superbodies will, given the American worship of bigness, be no more effective in the future than the toils of the regulatory commissions have been in the past...

...Tracing the rise of cooperatives in America from Benjamin Franklin's mutual fire insurance company in Philadelphia in 1752 to the equally successful rural electric co-ops of the New Deal era, Voorhis charts the need for broadening the cooperative segment of the economy as the principal bulwark against the further concentration of wealth, power, and privilege in the hands of the few...

...It is to organize, nurture, and build— as free people and by our own efforts— enough consumer cooperatives to restore the economic balance in our economy and protect and assert the general public and national economic interest...

...of a world peopled by men and women who, however great their exertions, have few deep convictions about a world they never made, in which, removed from the centers of economic power, they go forward day after day nursing the bleak hope that their political leaders will somehow spare them the final humiliation of a nuclear war...

...Unlike the principal characters in today's cold war, the International Cooperative Alliance, which last year held its twentyfirst triennial congress in Switzerland, made no plans for distributing guns along with its butter...

...It is to adapt free enterprise to real democratic participation and control by the people as consumers...

...Their achievements in public power, insurance, supermarketing, credit, housing, and health plans provide an invaluable yardstick against which the actions of the for-profit industries can be measured...

...It is, simply, that economic democracy may someday be companion to political democracy, for the latter can have no real substance without the triumph of the former...

...When necessary, Sweden's Kooperative Forbundet, the national coop erative wholesale organization, has manufactured electric light bulbs, snow shoes, and other essentials in order to provide a realistically-priced alternative to the monopolists...

...A world-wide cooperative movement, seeking neither profit nor political commitment, and motivated by a sense of humanity, is far better suited to guide and inspire the underdeveloped peoples than the agencies of any sovereign power...

...Until then, we have no right to expect more of our age than the continued proliferation of the lonely crowd...

...cooperatives, increasing their share of the nation's business volume, Voorhis believes, "would be of very great value in making possible realization of an adequate rate of [economic] growth, maximum employment, and price stability...

...By nature, co-ops are consumer- rather than profit-oriented, and it is the consumers of the world, rather than its stockholders, whose desperate economic need must be met lest "the revolution of rising expectations" end in frustration, bitterness, hopelessness, and war...

...A threefold expansion of U.S...

...Reviewed by Sherwood Ross THIS BOOK by Jerry Voorhis, executive director of the Cooperative League of the U.S.A., is a highly readable account of the methods by which members of today's lonely crowd might yet preserve themselves from the shadow of atomic annihilation which daily lengthens over them...

...One wishes Voorhis had devoted more space to the fascinating accomplishments and goals of the co-ops in international affairs, where...

...The cooperative concept, Voorhis says, applies "two of the basic principles which we are supposed to believe— democracy and freedom of enterprise...

...The drubbing which the U.S.-financed international light bulb cartel received at Swedish hands is a historic test of the robustness and viability of the Swedish cooperative movement, one which could be emulated in the United States at great profit to consumers...

...The cooperative movement, Voorhis reasons, offers the republic its only viable and realistic alternative to the growth of monopoly power...

...World co-op leaders recognize the need of millions in the new nations to find the means of establishing their own economic and political power...

...cartels seem to be forging fresh economic chains for mankind...

...that massive banks, corporations, and insurance agencies cannot be reduced to their component parts...

...Its 150 million member families, who seek the overthrow of no government, nor any sweeping new alliance, mapped programs through which the U.S...