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Title:
'Co-operative Movement or Co-operative Sector?
- Our Aims and Objectives as Co-operators,
- Contemporary Contradictions and Coherences
- Through an historical appraisal.'
Abstract:
In my UKSCS 2020 Conference Paper, I highlighted the fact that the apparently first example of Economic Co-operation to supply human material needs (and, perhaps human social needs), occurred one hundred, or so, years before the better known examples at Rochdale, Ralaheine, New Lanark, Fenwick, etc, etc.
That earliest network, on the southern shore of the Thames Estuary, centred on the Royal Dockyard at Woolwich, might be seen as a proto-typical example of a 'Co-operative Sector' within a largely Monarchical/Feudalist/Capitalist Society and Associated Economy.
By contrast, by the late Nineteenth Century, the Co-operative Socialist Alternative to that Monarchist, etc, hegemony was seen, not as a sector within that hegemony, or a niche alternative to it, but as a replacement for it: a whole system replacement of that hegemon.
That alternative, which its proponents termed, variously, 'A Co-operative Commonweath' and/or 'The Co-operative Commonweal', has urgent implications for human society, today.
This paper points to the contemporary relationship between this 'Sector/Movement' distinction: especially in relation to Post-Covid 'Pandemic' life and to the present process of the 'ICA Statement' iteration.
John Courtneidge
Littlehampton, West Sussex, BN17 5NJ
16 June 2021
courtj@myphone.coop
0795 099 6418
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