The Emerging Cooperative Economy by E.G. Nadeau
Today’s global economy delivers a cornucopia of material goods for humanity’s collective pleasure, but for this we and the earth pay a price. This material abundance is brought to us by a host of powerful, undemocratic multinational corporations whose essential purpose is to extract as much financial wealth as possible from us as consumers, and as much labor as possible from us as employees. The incomes these corporations generate in turn get distributed to stockholders and employees in a manner highly skewed toward the wealthiest among us. On top of this, corporations in their production of material abundance overexploit nature’s treasures, one of which is climate stability. Rapidly rising global temperatures are now an existential threat to both humanity and the earth’s nonhuman species as the news media reports to us daily.
As E.G. Nadeau lays out in his new book, it doesn’t have to be this way. What we need to do is replace the inequities and destructiveness of the corporate form of business organization with economic democracy in the form of consumer and producer cooperatives. Cooperatives are tried and true means of productive organization that already constitute 10 percent of the global economy. For consumer cooperatives, it is consumers as a group that own and democratically run the business. They elect a governing board that is charged with hiring the staff and setting policies. A local example in Milwaukee is the Outpost Natural Foods Co-op. For a producer cooperative, it is the employees that own and run the business, and it is their governing board that hires managers and sets business policies. Here in Wisconsin, Organic Valley, a farmer owned dairy cooperative, constitutes a producer cooperative. The point is simple—if all of us as consumers and employees democratically control the organizations of production, we can insure a more equitable distribution of the world’s material abundance and prevent the destruction of the earth’s natural riches.
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If you are unfamiliar with the evolution and history of human production and want to find out more about economic democracy and how to achieve it, Nadeau’s book would be a great read for you. Nadeau excels at explaining the changes in global governance required for achieving a true economic democracy. A missing component of this book, I believe, is its limited attention to local co-op successes that show how consumer and producer cooperatives lead to a more equitable and environmentally friendly world.
Douglas E. Booth, author of The Immaterial Economics of Saving Nature.
Get The Emerging Cooperative Economy at Amazon here.
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