| A
Compelling Case For Cooperatives |
by Ray Marshall
How do you make it possible for low income Blacks and low income whites
in the mountain areas to improve their income? I can't think of an
institution better suited to that than a co-op. Co-ops are the best people
development institutions you can have. With cooperatives you deal with all
of it - you are involved in the leadership development, people have to
learn to run co-ops, work with people, learn to make plans, meet and set
goals, marshal resources.
I have always been interested in rural development in the South. It's
not well understood outside of the South that there's a connection between
economic independence and political independence - that people didn't have
economic independence if when they voted they lost their jobs or got
kicked off the plantation. The whole reason for forming cooperatives is to
give people economic independence so that they could have independence in
political and other matters.
In our early organizing work in the South we learned a lot about how
the economy works - particularly how the federal government works. We
couldn't get help from the federal government for low income farmers
because they were biased toward large farmers. Most of our financial
institutions were set up to help those who didn't need help and to take
money out of our rural areas and not to put it pack in. We need
institutions like the Federation/LAF that understand the conditions of
rural America and are controlled by the people there. Nobody, for example,
can better understand the problems of the small farmers in Georgia and
Mississippi than the farmers themselves.
Cooperatives are very important because if we're going to make our
political system work in this country we have do it from the bottom up.
I'm an optimist about that. All over the world you see democratic
institutions sprouting up and we need to strengthen our democratic
institutions here. The basic evolution is that first you have political
institutions that are controlled by the people and not special interest
groups - that's political democracy.
After workers get the right to vote then you have industrial
democracy which means worker participation in the work place.
That's collective bargaining. Most countries have taken that further than
us. Then there's social democracy
where you have safety nets - a minimum level of welfare services. Every
industrial country in the world is more developed in social democracy than
us in, for example, health care and education. Finally, there's economic
democracy where individuals and not special interests control
their economic institutions. Economic democracy strengthens all other
forms of democracy. If you have economic democracy then people can't
intimidate you when you vote.
America would be better off with a strong cooperative movement. Most
countries that are having trouble economically are those that are weak in
economic democracy. The main economic developmental strategy in the United
States is to keep people's wages and income down. That's a loser and you
wouldn't want to win it. Most other countries know that a much better
approach is to try to compete by improving productivity and quality and
that means more efficient institutions. A co-op can be one of the most
efficient institutions you can put together because it's controlled by its
members who have a vested interest in achieving their own objectives. |
