The emancipatory promise of cooperatives in a historical perspective: Evidence from an ice-cream factory in France

ABSTRACT

By popular media, Milkerie worker cooperative in France is foremost described as an alternative to capitalist enterprise. The cooperative managed to preserve jobs that the previous capitalist owner did not. By situating Milkerie as a production site in the broader macro-economic history, I show how cooperatives can and cannot propose an alternative to capitalism. In a cooperative, capital becomes means: it is used for safeguarding the activity of the cooperative and the livelihoods of its members. Similar to class struggle through the labour law, cooperatives provide a form of economic governance through which workers can shape the economy. However, cooperative decision-making and claim-making through labour law surge in different historical circumstances. Their success in safeguarding worker livelihoods depends on the enterprise's capability to create economic wealth through commodity production, which is highly dependent on the macro-economic context. Thus, although, in a cooperative, capital becomes means for other social goals than profit-making, capital above everything remains a relation, i.e. an impersonal mode of social domination that pushes for productivity growth and worker externalization from the economy. For a cooperative to succeed, it needs to be profitable in a capitalist market economy, which makes cooperative enterprises to adopt capitalist-like practices. The evidence presented in this article shows the pitfalls of a timeless theory on cooperatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Cooperative
• labour law
• alternative to capitalism
• economic democracy
• France

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I do not have precise data that takes into consideration all anterior mergers and acquisitions, but when Milk Union was created in 1988, it had subsumed under its umbrella at least 79 different and for the majority cooperative dairy production and transformation entities that at some point in history were independent enterprises (calculation made by me based on data presented in Bonin 2005, 73 and 177).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number Doc.CH P0GEP1_162176].