A F Laidlaw (1980)
A F Laidlaw, Canadian cooperator and student of Moses Coady, delivered Cooperatives in the Year 2000 as a report to the 1980 Congress of the International Cooperative Alliance convened in Moscow. His language choices and framing, notably made before the end of the Cold War and within the former Soviet Union, align more with contemporary youth voices than with the International Cooperative Alliance texts of today. He structures his report in six sections:
- Movement Status Quo
- General Global Conditions
- What are cooperatives?
- Problems Within and Faced By Cooperatives
- Choices Cooperatives Have for the Future
- Major Questions Facing cooperators
MOVEMENT STATUS QUO & GENERAL GLOBAL CONDITIONS
After orienting cooperators in the status quo by providing highlights of work done leading up to the Congress, he begins to discuss the realities of the world in 1980 that he felt will shape cooperatives in the year 2000. First, he humbles many readers by pointing out the loudest complaints about economic woes in the 1970s were coming from “the affluent people and the rich nations […] getting just a taste of what is normal and perennial for the poor of the earth” (18). He goes on to further frame the economic downturn as nothing new for most of the world since “the poor tend to remain poor until the whole structure of society is transformed. Simple reform is not usually effective, and besides, it is painfully slow” (27). His overall commentary on how the Cooperative Movement fits into this context is that it will only succeed in the future if it focuses on strengthening its movements in the developing world. He consistently identifies capitalism as a threat and in direct opposition to cooperativism, and he asserts that in some parts of the world, “a whole new economic and social infrastructure will have to be constructed” (26).
He, then, dives more deeply into the role of cooperatives at the turn of the century within the global context he described. He warns that many cooperative systems will fail in an anticipated economic crisis while other cooperatives will have an opportunity to intervene to provide basic social services on a large scale when governments become unable to do so. He details how cooperatives cannot and should not try to compete with capitalistic enterprises, particularly those in multi-national markets. He explains how cooperatives’ capital returns on dividends and their use of democratic decision-making processes mean the rules for the two groups are too different for them to be playing the same game. He also suggests cooperatives pursue enduring relationships with governmental institutions for an especially interesting reason - to be first in line to take ownership of traditional government services as they are defunded, before capitalistic enterprises can take them over and turn them into profit-generators.
“If [governments] are persuaded of the relevance of cooperatives to their own pressing problems, they may be more active in encouraging cooperative development and a wider application of cooperative principles” (29).
Such a suggestion of the “wider application” of cooperative principles is still radical today – a shift from the conventional and narrow application of cooperatives to the private or social sectors, as the space of essential societal infrastructure has, in most places, been occupied by government agencies over the last century. This dovetails with his calls for creating community-scale cooperative commonwealths via multi-purpose and multi-functional cooperatives with community-wide membership, thereby blurring any divisions between the public and private sectors, as a stepping stone on the way to global social, economic, and political transformation of broader society (35).
WHAT ARE COOPERATIVES?
His third section, outlining cooperative theory and practice as it operated during the last decades of the twentieth century, exposes a litany of issues, including:
- need for stronger cooperative ideology and accountability, where nominal allegiance to the movement’s values can sometimes serve as a “system of presumed virtue” via which practitioners will consider themselves righteous without a deeper examination of whether their actions actually align with their professed values (32),
- issue with the growth of nominal cooperatives, as “legal requirements and corporate structure” can distort a cooperative’s ideal nature; capitalist businesses are unjustly taking on the cooperative moniker, and formerly value-aligned cooperatives are succumbing to economic pressures and adopting practices that degrade their integrity (22, 35-36),
- needs for promptly and consistently revising the current wave of cooperative philosophy, which is too consumer-oriented (33-34),
- need for understanding that much of existing and past cooperative development – specifically international - has been for “prestige” or “visionary value,” rather than meeting the immediate needs of the world’s poor (34), and
- need for understanding that the democratic character of cooperatives is increasingly at stake; cooperatives must consider many more issues besides “one member, one vote” to assess whether or not they are truly democratic - for example, women have full membership powers, all workplaces must be controlled by the workers themselves, comprehensive education and leadership training programs need to be in place for members at all levels, among others (36-37).
More broadly, he points to inherent difficulties in research, schisms in movement ideology, the role of the state, and the movement’s orientation within world politics. He highlights:
- much of cooperative organization’s key strengths, objectives, and outcomes are difficult or impossible to measure and assess quantitatively,
- the movement experienced an ideological split mirroring Cold War logic – especially in Western countries – between movement actors who envision cooperatives competing within capitalism, and others whose ideals for cooperatives eschew capitalism and competitions and “aim to fulfill social and community aims instead” (38),
- the relationship between cooperatives and the State is highly controversial within the movement, and should be settled simply in acknowledging that cooperatives must be entirely autonomous for reasons even beyond those encompassed within the 4th Principle of Autonomy and Independence (4), and finally,
- the goal of cooperation remains to build a global, cooperative commonwealth, rather than simply excelling at marketplace competition (42).
PROBLEMS WITHIN & FACED BY COOPERATIVES
In the report’s fourth section on cooperative performance, Laidlaw discusses factors within and in between cooperatives. He begins by stressing the necessity of strong membership commitments, the need for real participatory democracy rather than performative or representational democracy, and – quite importantly – the need to address the widespread neglect of cooperative education by the movement to those yet unfamiliar with cooperativism and its potential. He believes cooperatives tend to communicate (i.e. educate) poorly or insufficiently to the general public about who they are and what they do. Active and powerful outreach is often the main contributor to the perception of cooperatives in a given community - assuming there aren’t pre-existing stereotypes (e.g. a class-specific institution, or a government agency in disguise) - in which cases, cooperative education of the general public becomes all the more important. Interestingly, his orientation of this critique within his assessment of individual cooperative performance illuminates that he believes promotion and advocacy of cooperativism is primarily a responsibility of cooperatives in their local communities, rather than of movement or support organizations.
Within cooperatives, he cites increasing internal challenges between rank-and-file and managerial class professionals. The managerial class often takes control of the cooperative over time, and the rank-and-file members merely play a perfunctory role. Relatedly, he calls out that “most cooperatives try to be no more than conventional employers,” and that all cooperatives should pursue “autogestion,” or worker self-management, for their firms (53). Further, he suggests some “mission drift” has occurred within cooperatives and, in order for them to regain their ideological integrity, they must assess how aligned they are with addressing societal problems (e.g. hunger, extreme poverty, gender and race based violence) and, specifically, if and how well they serve the poor.
Of considerable note in his discussion of cooperative performance is the relationships between cooperatives. He recounts how the sixth principle of “Cooperation Among Cooperatives'' directs us to create a commonwealth that eclipses the influence of capitalism and oppressive state systems; however, the Cooperative Movement has specifically struggled to connect in this regard across national borders to accomplish the creation of a global commonwealth. He owes this struggle to internal conflict related to the proper role of the State and capitalist practices within cooperatives and their development, as well as to the lack of funding for governance and relationship building structures (e.g. International Cooperative Alliance) and events that most visibly consistute the movement.
Additionally, he owes some of the difficulty to the reality that cooperatives account for some of their strength to their strong rooting in local cultures, languages, traditions, and social systems; however, this works against cooperatives internationally as it typically requires taking action across such differences or divides that can be difficult to traverse. Laidlaw recounts how the bulk of the cross-border work taking place is that of “international development,” which mostly consists of projects funded by foreigners that are shaped more by their vanity or impractical visions than by the actual needs of the recipient community. He also, in complement to his earlier critique of the state of local cooperative education and outreach, laments that the Cooperative Movement continues to rely on external agencies (e.g. United Nations) to do its advocacy and recruitment work on the global scale. The important irony in this reliance is that these external agencies are the same institutions from which cooperatives stress their autonomy.
CHOICES COOPERATIVES HAVE FOR THE FUTURE & MAJOR QUESTIONS FACING COOPERATORS
Given the historical context he presents and potential issues he identifies, Laidlaw sketches out what he perceives to be the necessary foci of the movement in the future: ensuring the global food system is designed to serve the world’s hungry rather than funnel money to its most powerful, addressing the plight of workers throughout the world as of primary importance, reimagining the consumer cooperative sector beyond its limiting orientation of “consumer” as it is increasingly irrelevant to the aims of cooperativism, and attention to evolving community cooperative commonwealths by creating multi-purpose cooperatives that fulfill some of the basic service provisions once promised by many governments. He closes by offering critical questions alongside several sub points for further consideration. His closing message is that future leaders of the Cooperative Movement must be sufficiently educated so as to be able to lead cooperatives as means to the end of social transformation in pursuance of a cooperative commonwealth, rather than as endgame business units. The text closes with a quote from British economist Alfred Marshal: “The world is just beginning to be ready for the higher work of the Cooperative Movement'' (71).