Pursuit of Social Goals Through Consumer Co-operatives
Many advocates of the formation of consumer cooperatives - from a variety of political perspectives - have seen them as integral to the achievement of wider social goals.
Thus, the founding document of the Rochdale Pioneers, who established one of the earliest consumer cooperatives in England in 1844, expressed a vision that went far beyond the simple shop with which they began:
- "That as soon as practicable, this society shall proceed to arrange the powers of production, distribution, education, and government, or in other words to establish a selfsupporting home-colony of united interests, or assist other societies in establishing such colonies."
Cooperative Federalists, a term coined in the writings of Beatrice Webb, were advocates for the formation of federations of consumer cooperatives as means of achieving social reform. They anticipated such a development as bringing a broad set of benefits including economic democracy and justice, transparency, greater product purity, and financial benefits for consumers.
The Neo-Capitalist economic doctrine seeks to transfer the provision of almost all government provided public goods and the conversion of any large privately owned monopolies into consumer cooperatives.
Read more about this topic: Consumer Cooperative
Famous quotes containing the words pursuit of, pursuit, social, goals and/or consumer:
“The necessary has never been man’s top priority. The passionate pursuit of the nonessential and the extravagant is one of the chief traits of human uniqueness. Unlike other forms of life, man’s greatest exertions are made in the pursuit not of necessities but of superfluities.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“You, Aubrey, are my most complete man. You’re a brave, compassionate, kind and content, man. That’s your secret—contentment. I’m 24 and I’ve never known it. I’m forever in pursuit and I don’t even know what it is I’m chasing.”
—Colin Welland (b. 1934)
“The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.”
—Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923)
“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)