I once wrote a book about cooperatives called Everything for Everyone; the title is a reference to an old Christian doctrine that the world is the shared inheritance of us all. But the title is dangerously close, I have since realized, to a tempting error for many new co-ops: the urge to be everything to everyone.
When people first get excited about the cooperative idea, they can start to imagine it might solve all the problems of the world—even human nature itself. I know the appeal. But get over this as soon as you can, as it leads to ruin.
Consider a classic commune—of counterculture hippies or a religious sect, what have you. They get on a plot of land together and build a new world on their own terms—from how they eat to what they produce to whom they love. It almost always ends up in one of two places quite quickly: utter disarray or a miserable dictatorship.
Both outcomes have the same cause. Getting any significant group of people to agree about every aspect of life is hard. Either a dictator forces agreement, or it’s not going to happen. There is no such thing as utopia.
Fortunately for co-ops, they are not communes, and they don’t have to try.
The British co-op tradition traces its lineage, often, to the New Lanark textile mill of Robert Owen in the early 19th century. Owen created a renowned factory that provided diverse services and benefits to workers in a feat of paternalistic largesse. He then attempted to replicate the model in the United States with New Harmony, a village in Indiana; it more or less failed. The British co-op model really only took off and became repeatable when textile workers themselves (not the boss!) formed a store at Rochdale, near Manchester. It solved a simple problem: affordable access to high-quality staples. Everything unraveled from there. The model spread from city to city, and its descendants are still one of the country’s major grocery chains.
What the modern cooperative movement does best is solve a specific problem for members. Have other problems? Start a different co-op to solve it. One of my favorite examples of this is Colorado’s own “Namaste Network“; instead of scaling a single worker co-op nationally, those workers spun out separate co-ops for purchasing, maintenance, lending, and investments.
Having a clearly defined, narrow focus means that a co-op’s members don’t have to agree on everything. They don’t have to be all alike. They just have to be able to benefit from a common activity. The cooperative commonwealth can develop among these many overlapping needs, not an all-promising, all-delivering monolith that tries to make everyone happy all at once. Really, I think that’s the only way it’s going to happen, and the only way we should want it to.
For those interested in building co-ops that will not collapse under their own ambition, allow me to suggest a few little rules:
Set honest expectations. Don’t claim that you are the long-awaited revolution that will change everything all at once. Don’t promise to be morally perfect, because every business has to make compromises somewhere. Doing so should not seem like a betrayal of the mission.
Start by doing one thing well. When you can’t grow on hype, you have to grow on providing real benefits. Save members money on a product they buy or offer what they can’t get elsewhere. If you can do one thing well, then you can try two, maybe three. Probably not more.
Keep the structure simple. I live in Colorado, where our gloriously flexible Limited Cooperative Association statute lets you have as many member classes as you can dream of. But that doesn’t mean you should do it. Most co-ops will be best served by having only one member class. It keeps the operators focused; they know who they’re ultimately accountable to when hard choices have to be made. They can still be nice to other stakeholders. (If workers aren’t the owners, they can and should have a union.) For the co-op to have a clear purpose, it helps enormously to have a membership that has a basic shared interest in common.
Communes have produced important social experiments that sometimes bear fruit. But few of them last long enough to be stewards of power lines, mortgages, factories and retail chains, which co-ops pull off every day. Know the difference, and know which you’re building.