4.2 Fending Off the Skeptics

Could an economy based entirely on coöperation really exist? How would it compete against or within a global capitalist system? How would coöperative enterprises raise sufficient cash to grow? Could coöperatives become huge multinationals, like Boeing or IBM, or now Amazon, Apple, or Google? We know that economies of scale return profits to enterprises. How could domestic coöperatives compete with foreign giant multinationals?

Part of the puzzlement in this regard is a shared belief today—at least, shared by many if not most today in the United States—that capitalism won in 1989 and vanquished collectivism when the Berlin Wall fell. In other words, there is a shared imaginary that the United States and the U.S.S.R. were two competing models—capitalism versus communism, or some form of collectivism—and that the U.S. model prevailed. And it is certainly true that Russia, in the post-Soviet era, has itself turned to tournament dirigisme, and that China as well is there or headed there—and that collectivism everywhere else across the world has pretty much lost steam, whether in Vietnam or Venezuela. Most Americans share the believe that recent history reflects the triumph of capitalism.

As I argued earlier, though, this Cold War mentality is entirely misplaced, and both terms capitalism and communism are misleading. If anything, one style of dirigisme beat another, but that tells us nothing about the potential for genuine coöperation.

Coöperationism is not communism—in fact, it is just as opposed to the illusion of communism as it is to the illusion of capitalism. Both of those other political economic systems are types of state dirigisme that benefit elites—the wealthy or the party members, or both at the same time. By contrast, coöperationism, as described here, centers the consumers and workers and members of all the mutual enterprises. Coöperation turns the economy over to those of us who create, invent, produce, make, work, labor, and serve others. It privileges the welfare of us all—employees, workers, consumers, producers, credit union account- and mutual insurance-holders—and the sustainability of our enterprises, and of our environment.

So, we need to set aside the ideological debates about capitalism versus communism and understand that we have never honestly tried coöperation.