But, after all, it might be objected, that does not really matter.For, if the worker in a cooperative mill or store is also a cooperative consumer, he will, as such, enjoy a collective gain as great as he could hope to gain if he were assigned a special lien upon the surplus that emerged from the successful conduct of the particular business in which he worked.It will be his intelligent interest, as consumer, to help to elect and to maintain an effective administration in all the various productive and distributive businesses from which are derived the half-yearly dividend on purchases which he receives.
Now if the working-classes of the nation made all their purchases through cooperative stores, and if these stores, in their turn, bought what they sell exclusively from cooperative productive businesses, and if all working-class consumers were employed in these cooperative businesses, a solution of the social problem on cooperative lines might be plausible.For any surplus made at any stage would flow in the ordinary course of events into consumers'
dividends, forming an addition to the real wages which they earned as producers.
Nor need it matter that the cooperative consumers were not full owners of all the capital they needed to employ, provided they could borrow it in a free market.If the agricultural and mining lands, whose produce they required, did not belong to them, there would indeed remain a large leakage in the shape of economic rent.But the nature of the so-called land monopoly is not such as to prevent the cooperative consumers from taking in real wages the great bulk of the surplus which otherwise would have gone to capitalists and entrepreneurs in unearned income.
Unfortunately, large and important as is this Cooperative Movement, it falls far short of the full conditions here laid down.The majority of the wage-earners are not members of Cooperative Stores: those who are members only purchase certain sorts of goods at the store: owing to the slighter development of productive cooperation, a large proportion of the goods sold in the stores are bought in the ordinary markets: comparatively few of the cooperative consumers are employed in cooperative businesses.
There are large tracts of industry, such as agriculture, mining, transport, building,4 metal-working and machine-making, which the Cooperative Movement has hardly touched, nor are there signs of any rapid extension in these fields of enterprise.In point of fact, cooperation has almost entirely confined itself to trades and industries where competition is normally free, and where the object of cooperation has rather been to save and secure as 'divi' certain ordinary expenses of competitive businesses than to invade the strongholds of highly profitable capitalism where unearned surpluses are large.While, then, a considerable proportion of the total working-class income is expended upon articles bought in the stores5 and valuable economies are affected, only a small proportion of the eleven millions paid in dividends and interest to consumers can be taken to represent unproductive surplus absorbed into wages.While, therefore, the advance of the Cooperative Movement in recent years, alike in membership, in volume of trade and in profits, has been rapid, a careful examination of the field of cooperative progress does not indicate any solution of the main problem of distribution along these lines.The areas of really profitable private enterprise are to all appearance unassailable by the Cooperative Movement.
§8.But we find within the Cooperative Movement some experiences which shed light upon the problem of business administration.If the truly social nature of the 'business' is to be expressed in its government, the Rochdale plan, upon which the main cooperative structure has been erected, contributes an element of really vital importance.It asserts that a business exists, not to furnish profit to the capitalist employer or wages to the workers, but commodities to consumers.The consumer, being the end and furnishing by his purchase-power the stimulus, should hold the reins of government.He is the owner, he shall rule, he shall receive the whole gain.This is a complete reversal of the ordinary idea of the business world, to which a business exists to secure profits to business men, the worker and the market (consumer) being mere instruments in profit-making.
Hardly less does it counterwork the ordinary ideas and feelings of the working-man, for whom the business exists merely as a means of remunerative employment, and whose sole idea of reform is to secure in higher wages and improved conditions of labour as much of the profits as possible.To neither does it for one moment seem reasonable that the consumer should interfere in the administration of the business, or take any share in its gains, save such as must come to him in the ordinary course of trade.
Thus the success of the Rochdale plan is a dramatic assertion of a revolutionary idea in the organisation of business.It is proved that large numbers of routine businesses can be conducted by and for consumers.But it cannot be assumed that this concentration of the meaning, the utility and the government of industry in the consumer, has complete validity.
