1 Coöperation Today

Coöperation surrounds us today and thrives in the social and economic spheres. It is, however, disfavored and discouraged by our tax system, our laws, our politics, and our reigning ideologies. Capital, by contrast, is favored through all kinds of incentives and preferences, such as low capital gains tax rates, retirement account structures, government bailouts, the fetishization and legal treatment of the stock markets, and the ideology of pioneering individualism. Today, the material reality and the public imagination in Western liberal democracies, especially in the United States, is stacked against coöperation and in favor of capital competition.

This makes it all the more remarkable that coöperationist enterprises actually flourish in capitalist economies. Even though the entire weight of American law, politics, and ideology presses against coöperation, these kinds of solidaristic arrangements can be found practically everywhere and, in some industries, permeate the field. Just imagine what we could achieve today if these types of social and economic ventures were favored.

The insurance industry, for instance, has always been home to large and resilient mutualist societies. Half of the largest 10 property and casualty insurance companies, in fact, are mutuals, and together, those five mutual insurance companies serve 25% of the entire market (by contrast, the other five largest non-mutual insurance companies serve only 21% of the market).³⁰ Most of the household-name insurance companies—State Farm, Liberty Mutual, New York Life, Nationwide, Northwestern Mutual, Mutual of Omaha, etc.—are mutuals and are extremely resilient. The median age of a U.S. mutual insurance company is about 120 years.³¹

The financial sector as well is populated by credit unions, which developed importantly starting in 1920 with the Massachusetts Association of Credit Unions and in 1934 with federal laws enabling their formation. Credit unions gained lasting status by surviving the Great Depression and the financial crises in the 1980s, and today have over 100 million members in the United States.³² In a country like France, the Crédit Agricole Group, which is formed by 39 regional banks that are full-fledged coöperative entities, serves over 21 million customers, and has over 9.3 million member-clients at the local level.³³ As of September 2018, Crédit Agricole had 23.3% of French household deposits and total assets of 1.7 trillion Euros.³⁴

Farmer and producer coöperatives, consumer, worker, and retailer coöperatives thrive across economic sectors today—again, despite everything being stacked in favor of capital. In fact, and quite surprisingly, coöperatives in the United States “survive through their first six to 10 years at a rate 7% higher than traditional small businesses.”³⁵ To get a preliminary sense of things, let’s quickly take a whirlwind tour of some of these collaborations in the United States and abroad.