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    Co-operatives... Archived Message

    Posted by mack on February 2, 2019, 3:59 pm, in reply to "The Ecologist: Urban agroforestry in Budapest"

    Excerpt:

    Creating a resilient economy
    “The beauty of co-ops is that the customers and workers are the stakeholders, and that’s why it works so well. Under a purely capitalist system, human relationships are commodified and become a means to an end – which is to make money. Here people are at the centre and capital is just a means to an end. We exist to provide a service to our members and other customers that meets their needs, in a way that reflects their values.”

    A more cooperative economy is also much more stable and resilient than all-out capitalism, Woodell insists. “Just look at the privatised building societies: every single one has either failed like Northern Rock or been taken over. Not one survives. But with a few exceptions, those that remained as mutuals are still in business and are among the strongest financial institutions in the country.

    “Look more widely, and you can see that cooperatives form a real backbone of the global economy – bigger than all the multinationals put together! A single farmers’ co-op in India, IFFCO, has 55 million members, the International Co-operative Alliance represents well over a billion co-op members at the UN, and co-ops employ more than 250 million people worldwide, who contribute over US$2 trillion to the global economy. And it has all grown from that one original co-op in Rochdale.

    https://theecologist.org/2017/jun/15/were-still-stronger-together

    The 'means to an end' bit reminds of something Camus wrote about the idea of 'ends justifying means' being an inversion of how we might go about our human business, and if we thought about it a little more carefully, we might be better to go along a road where the means justify the end.

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