Republished from Pat Conaty:

“History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. I fear tragic farce due to deep ignorance on practical things that is a widespread problem currently, at least in my view. Let me explain.

In brief, Co-operative Commonwealth has been a sound vision since it was first articulated in the first big economic crash after 1815 by British and Irish co-operators and French mutualists. Robin Murray puts this well. He says what we need to reclaim is this historic and episodic Social Imaginary for Co-operative Accumulation.

Knowledge acquisition towards the construction and development of co-operative and commons sub-systems of this social imaginary but that can become viable has been fraught with failure because this positive alternative of a peaceful and equitable economy has been undermined by accumulating enclosure, especially in relation to concentrated and centralised ownership of land, corporations, intellectual property and finance. Marx’s analysis of this problematique in Capital Volume 1 was fundamentally correct. Karl Polanyi in the Great Transformation restates this but points a way forward for reversing systematic enclosure and moving once again toward the vision of Co-operative Commonwealth.

Partial views that focus just on co-operative ownership of companies are one-eyed and three-quarters blind. Co-operative companies to be robust require the support of common/public ownership of land, money, finance, etc Co-operative and peaceful economy requires commonly owned systems that allow for private property but within strict limits of what is equitable as Ruskin showed.

Even the first Co-ops for consumption repeatedly failed. The Rochdale model of 1844 and the patronage quarterly dividend and the seven Co-op principles made a huge advance towards what would work and become viable and scalable. US Consumer Co-op repeatedly failed until the 1880s when Rochdale was adopted increasingly. Other European countries and countries throughout the world have benefited from these seven ethical principles that in fact apply to all forms of co-op enterprise: worker ownership, finance, housing, energy, etc

Experiments with worker ownership repeatedly failed between the 1820 and 1940s. The invention by Mondragon Co-ops of an integrated system of a Co-op bank at the heart of a hub of a broad range of worker ownership spokes revolutionised how worker ownership Co-ops can be set up and extended. They introduced an amazing system of individual and collective capital accounts. We are still struggling to defuse this knowledge today but the know how is being picked up.

Land ownership commons have been fraught with massive failures and very few examples of how to do this at an entire city level are available. Robert Owen, the Chartists, the US land reform experiments failed again and again. Also in India after Gandhi died the land reform movements brought millions of hectares of land into the commons but failed to structure the property rights correctly between the farmer’s lease and the community ownership system. Also how to finance the farmers has been fraught with failure. However the modern CLT movements in the USA and here in the UK are finding ways to solve these problems but after 180 years of failure.

Energy services and water Co-ops have had also big problems and have been open for privatisation because of this. The Danish green energy Co-ops appear to be overcoming these problems in a big way through public-Co-op partnerships and taking systems to scale. They have brought some 40% of the energy market into a combination of municipal and Co-op ownership.

I could go on but each area of Co-op and Commons political economy is tricky in its own right. We need to understand what history has shown us in relation to viable systems and systems that will simply repeat the past mistakes and waste time and in due course bloody collapse.

Unless we create a Dissenting Academy rather like the Enlightenment of the 18th century, we cannot set the vision we require and we cannot collect and structure the Commons Encylopedia and the Co-operative and Commonwealth knowledge transfer system that is needed. Hence the fundamental and strategic importance of Co-operative and Commonwealth education joined at the hip to real live practices at the micro, mezzo and macro-economic levels.

Open systems and transparency plus the self-evident necessity to move to a renewable and green economy globally that is actiively democratic and equitable is our strongest card. Also the fact that the political class has no grip on things indicates to me that some sound politicians could be convinced by a Plan B for a system of Co-operative Accumulation to avoid things slipping badly downwards very vicious authoritarian outcomes.

Kenneth Boulding, the ecological economist pioneer, talked about the Cowboy economy and the Spaceman economy in the 1960s and he showed how a steady-state could be achieved. But before he died, he forecast that the Kondratiev shift necessary from a fossil fuel bonanza to a solar power paradigm shift was a root and branch shift towards the Co-operative knowledge economy. Organising and structuring this is where we need to focus, I would suggest.”