What Is a Cooperative?
Cooperatives are formed when a group of like-minded individuals join together to accomplish something that
each acting alone would never be able to achieve.

Successful coops are always born out of need. They cannot be imposed on a community — they have to grow
from the energy and commitment of the local people themselves.

Coops are different to traditional private and public sector enterprises. They represent a third way that
integrates economic and social objectives. Unlike the private sector, which tends to concentrate wealth
and power in the hands of a few, coops spread wealth and power to each member equally. Unlike government,
which tends to be remote and unresponsive to the communities it is supposed to serve, coops are driven by
their members and reflect their needs.

Cooperatives have a tremendous competitive advantage over both private enterprises and public enterprises:
coop members have a personal interest in their coop’s success. The members own the coop, so they are more
likely to buy the coop’s goods or use its services. Shares in cooperatives are not publically traded because
the shares are owned by the members. The members themselves decide how to spend the coop’s profits.

Maple Street Cooperative
Maple Street Cooperative opened its doors on January 14th 1980, nearly a year after a small group of people
met to discuss how to satisfy their need for whole-foods. The coop started by selling both wholefoods and
produce grown by local farmers. Today Maleny Street Coop operates an organic health food retail outlet in the
main street of Maleny, is open 7 days a week, and has 450 active members. Although it functions as a
consumers’ cooperative, it still sells to the public. The coop’s policy is organic first, then local, then
Australian. It does not stock any products that contain genetically modified material, nor does it stock
products from companies that are regarded as exploiting people or the environment. It operates on the
principle of consensus decision making.

For the last 6 years, the coop has made a profit. However, the coop is structured as a non-profit enterprise,
meaning that the profits go back into the coop, to expand its services and develop its infrastructure, or into
community activities.

At first labour in the coop was voluntary, but as the coop prospered, the number of paid workers slowly
increased. Today the coop employs 11 part time staff and one full time manager. In the near future it
will have paid off all its loans and own the coop premises. The coop publishes a 16 page bimonthly
newsletter that outlines current activities and brings information to members on subjects that are of
special interest, such as the irradiation of food, genetic engineering, and microwave emissions. It
produces 1,400 copies. The coop is registered as a trading coop. Active members are required to pay an
annual membership fee of $11 and to spend at least $20 per year in the coop to retain their active
membership status. Active members get a 5% discount off all purchases. During its 22 years of operation,
it has overcome several major hurdles. On occasions in the past, it had no business plan, operated at a
loss, made poor investment decisions, lacked experienced financial management, and had to spend a lot of
time resolving differences of opinion among the members.

Learning from experience, the coop gradually evolved a formulae for success. It now has a sound strategic
and financial plan, regularly makes a profit, cultivates the support of both the members and the community
at large, and ensures that the staff and management are honest, dedicated and competent.

Maleny Credit Union
The Maleny Credit Union was started in 1984 by several local people with the idea of setting up an ethical
financial institution to foster regional financial autonomy. Initially the Credit Union was staffed by
volunteers, worked from rented rooms, and entered deposits manually into a journal. On the first day of
operations, local people deposited more than $50,000.

Today the Credit Union has grown to have more than 6000 members, 14 paid staff, and $15 million in assets,
and has purchased its own premises. People from all over Australia invest their money with the Credit Union,
and about half the Credit Union’s deposits come from outside Maleny. It is one of only a handful of
financial institutions in the country that operate according to cooperative principles. The Credit Union
offers savings, cheque, loans, and term deposit accounts, as well as credit card facilities, and can arrange
superannuation and various types of insurance for members. In addition, the Credit Union contributes
substantially to the local community and leads its development.

Over the years the Credit Union has given out many small loans to local people who would not be eligible for
loans from the major banks. This has helped many people buy land, build their own home, and start their own
business. In dollar terms, 80% of the Credit Union’s loans are housing loans.
The Credit Union’s ethical activities include:
* allocating 10% of its profits to its Community Grants Scheme,
* establishing a tax-deductible Charitable Fund,
* paying an eco-tax to Barung Landcare based on every ream of paper used,
* offering low fees to members and special arrangements to cooperatives and community groups,
* lending only to local people and projects to keep money circulating within the region,
* purchasing locally wherever possible,
* providing loans for environmentally and socially beneficial projects,
* creating a democratic workplace, and
* conducting an annual social, environmental and financial audit of the coops operations and accounting in
the annual report.

During the course of the last year, grants from the Credit Union’s Community Grants Scheme went to the
Maleny Swimming Club, River School, Altair Youth Crisis Centre, Maleny High School, Sunshine Coast
Environment Council, Maleny Community Centre, Booroobin School, and the Rural Fire Brigade.

By the end of 2001, the Credit Union had provided finance for over 180 new jobs in 78 new businesses. Since
its was established, it has reinvested over $50 million back into the local community. Like the Maple
Street Coop, in its early years the Credit Union went through periods of difficulty. However, improved
planning and financial management overcame these problems. Today the Credit Union is extremely successful,
principally because it developed the right balance of financial expertise and cooperative spirit.

The Up Front Club
Late in 1993, a diverse group of Maleny residents got together to form a cooperative club. The aim was to
establish a licensed venue to eat, drink, relax and socialize. Today it is a place where the food is
wholesome and inexpensive, the coffee is great, and local musicians and entertainers can gain exposure.

When the Club first started, instead of relying on voluntary labour it took on the financial challenge of
paying wages to all its workers. But because it was under-capitalized, it was forced to take out a loan
to pay for the lease. Although it had over 1,000 members, each year it sustained a loss. At the beginning
of 2000, three directors took over the voluntary management of the Club, enabling it to remain in existence.
Then, on the 15th January 2000, the Club turned a corner. Over 100 members attended a special general
meeting, talked of what the Club meant to them, and committed to regular voluntary work so that it could
stay open. Since then, members and visitors alike have commented on the changed atmosphere in the Club.
The financial position has improved markedly, and for the first time the Club has posted an operating profit.

Thanks to the support of the members, the Club continues to provide services to its members, their families
and guests. It is open six days a week, providing healthy meals at reasonable prices. Members get a 10%
discount. The Club also publishes a quarterly newsletter. A share in the coop costs $10 and shareholders
pay an annual membership fee of $30 per person or $45 per family. Members are encouraged to volunteer their
time and support Club activities. Over the years the Club has showcased a wide range of local talent,
hosting everything from classical evenings to CD nights for teenagers. For many, it is the cultural centre
of the Maleny community. Local Economic and Enterprise Development Cooperative LEED is one of the most
recent coops established in Maleny. It is registered as a workers’ cooperative, and is dedicated to
creating new businesses and jobs on the Sunshine Coast Hinterland. It employs 6 people.

LEED recognizes that most investment, jobs and economic development in the Sunshine Coast Region occur on
the coastal strip. It believes that it is vital for the hinterland to develop its own jobs by creating
viable small-scale businesses. The seeds of LEED were sown in early 1997 after a local economic development
forum. A group of local people came together to help people on the hinterland start their own businesses.
The group organized forums on topics such as product development, marketing, financial management, and
other business skills. In July 1999, LEED and Maleny Credit Union entered into a partnership to develop a
Peer Support Lending Scheme. Under the scheme, the Credit Union provides small unsecured loans for start-up
businesses and LEED members mentor the new business people for the first 12 months of their operation.
The Scheme is supported by a grant from the Department of Family and Community Services. 14 new small-scale
businesses participated in the Scheme, with 12 continuing to operate successfully after a year. As a result
of this initial success, 13 new loans were given out in the second year of operation. So far the Scheme has
provided a total of 27 loans to new small businesses; 23 businesses are continuing to operate successfully.

Local Energy Transfer System
Maleny has one of Australia’s most successful LETS schemes. LETS began in Canada in 1982, and was
launched  in Maleny in October 1987. There are now over 200 LETS schemes in Australia. LETS functions
as a cashless  trading coop. LETS members trade their skills and provide services to each other without
the use of money. In Maleny members trade their products and services in the local currency, the Bunya,
named after the  local native pine nut, allowing people with little or no cash to participate in the
local economy.

Environmental Cooperatives
Maleny has 4 environmental coops: Maleny Wastebusters, Barung Landcare, Booroobin Bush Magic, and
Green Hills Fund. Maleny Wastebusters is a community based recycling coop which encourages people to
reduce, reuse and recycle; to sort their rubbish; and to avoid buying poor quality and over packaged items.
It employs 20 local people, and its slogan is: “Waste not, want not”. Barung Landcare is one of several
hundred community based landcare groups throughout Australia. It is dedicated to empowering landholders
in the local area to take ownership of environmental problems and their solutions. It provides a range of
environmental services, publishes a bimonthly newsletter, and participates in the LETS scheme by accepting
Banyas as part payment for the trees it sells. It hosts the annual From Chainsaw to Fine Furniture Wood Expo
which promotes the sustainable harvesting of native timber. It also runs a successful nursery which
propagates local native plant species which have not been genetically modified.

Booroobin Bush Magic runs a rainforest nursery, while the Green Hills Fund works to reafforest the Maleny
hinterland.

Community Settlement Cooperatives
The settlement coops around Maleny include: Crystal Waters Permaculture Village, Manduka Community
Settlement Coop, Prout Community Settlement Coop, and Cedarton Foresters. Crystal Waters is situated on
640 acres of land, and is the first Permaculture village in Australia. It incorporates 83 private
residential lots, a village commercial centre, visitors accomodation area, and over 500 acreas of common
land.

Manduka is situated on over 150 acres of land 6 kilometres outside Maleny. It is home to 18 adults and 6
children. The residents believe in living simply, sharing resources, reaching agreement through consensus,
and managing their land in an ecologically sustainable way. Prout Community is situated on over 50 acres
of land, and is home to 3 families and a primary school run by the Ananda Marga spiritual movement. The
Ananda Marga River School has over 100 students, ranging from kindergarten to grade seven. It employs 7
full time and 8 part time teachers, and 2 administrators. The curriculum emphasizes experential and whole
brain learning, creativity, ecology, arts and music, all with a child centred approach.

Cedarton Foresters is situated on 200 acres of land 19 kilometres from Maleny. It contains 22 private
residential lots and is home to 40 people. The community’s main aim is the rehabilitation of the land.
Although Booroobin Bush Magic is part of Cedarton Foresters, it is structured as an independently
registered enviromental cooperative.

Other Cooperatives in Maleny
Other cooperatives in Maleny include: Maleny Film Society (MFS); Family and Community Empowerment (FACE);
Maleny Neighbourhood Centre; and Hinterland Community Radio, a cooperative radio station.
Building Successful Cooperatives
The experience of the Maleny cooperatives shows that building successful cooperative enterprises involves
several steps.
1. Fulfil a need. People have to come together in order to fulfil a need in the community. No matter how
good the idea, if there is not a community need, the enterprise will not succeed.
2. Establish a founding group. A few committed people have to take on the responsibility of developing
the initial idea through to inception. However, one person will have to provide the leadership.
3. Commit to a vision. Commit to the ideals and values implicit in cooperative enterprises, and try to
ensure that both the members and the management are honest, dedicated and competent.
4. Conduct a feasibility study. To evaluate whether or not the perceived need is feasible, conduct a
feasibility study.
5. Set out clear aims and objectives. Each enterprise must have clear aims and objectives. This will help
direct everything from the founding group’s initial focus to promotional strategies and budgetary
processes in the years to come.
6. Develop a sound business plan. The enterprise will require capital, have to manage its finances
efficiently, and at some point have to make decisions about loan repayments and profit allocation.
7. Ensure the support and involvement of the members. The members own the enterprise; at every step, their
support and involvement is essential.
8. Establish a location. Establish a physical location for the operation of the enterprise, preferably in
the centre of the community.
9. Get skilled management. From within the community, bring in to the enterprise people who have the
necessary management, business, financial, legal and accounting skills.
10. Continue education and training. Ideally, the members will have the skills, particularly the
communication and interpersonal skills, necessary to run the enterprise successfully. If not, they will
either have to develop such skills themselves or bring in new members who have them. The golden rules for
beginning a community economic strategy are clear:
* start small, with the skills and resources available within the community;
* make use of role models, those with experience in community development, wherever possible; and
* make sure the enterprise involves as many people as possible.

Community Benefits Cooperative enterprises benefit a community in many ways.Socially, they bring people
together, encourage them to use their diverse skills and talents, and often provide them with the
opportunity to develop new capabilities. They create a sense of belonging, build close relationships
among different types of people, and empower them to make decisions to develop their community. All this
fosters community spirit. Working together, a community is able to accomplish much more than if the
various individuals go their separate ways.

Economically, cooperatives produce various types of goods locally, provide a range of local services,
create employment, circulate money within the community, and make the community economically selfreliant.
Because cooperative enterprises are owned by the members themselves, the profits they generate stay in
the local area. Cooperatives thus build the wealth of the community. In essence, successful cooperative
enterprises transform a community by establishing economic democracy. Cooperative enterprise is the
socio-economic system of the future. In Maleny, that future is unfolding before us right now.

*********
The Maleny Cooperatives:
* Maple Street Cooperative
* Maleny and District Credit Union (MCU) – www.malenycu.com.au
* The Up Front Club
* Local Economic and Enterprise Development Cooperative (LEED)
* Local Energy Transfer System (LETS) – www.lets.org.au
* Maleny Wastebusters
* Barung Landcare
* Crystal Waters Permaculture Village – www.ecovillages.org/australia/crystalwaters
* Manduka Community Settlement Cooperative
* Prout Community Settlement Cooperative – www.amriverschool.org
* Cedarton Foresters
* Booroobin Bush Magic (BBM)
* Maleny Film Society (MFS)
* Green Hills Fund
* Family and Community Empowerment (FACE)
* Maleny Neighbourhood Centre
* Hinterland Community Radio
Published by:
Prout Community Settlement Cooperative, January 2002
PO Box 177, Maleny, 4552
References:
Maleny Coops Work, published by the Maleny Credit Union, 2001
Maleny Credit Union Social, Environmental and Financial Annual
Report 2001, published by the Maleny Credit Union
Community and Economic Development: Towns Shaping Their Destiny,
by Jill Jordan, March 2001
Chronological List of Historical Events for Maleny and Districts,
compiled by Amanda Wilson, July 2001

Political democracy requires a population that is well educated, with a high standard of morality and a keen socio-economic consciousness. Otherwise money can manipulate elections and corrupt politicians. Corruption and mismanagement in the past has resulted in a crushing external debt that reduces social services to pay exorbitant interest.

Economic democracy means regional, democratic control of resources, ceilings on the super accumulation of wealth, employee ownership and cooperative management of medium-scale economic enterprises, and guaranteed employment with sufficient wages for purchasing basic necessities–food, clothing, housing, education and health care. An ideal constitution should guarantee these rights and prevent financial exploitation.

Venezuela is today at a critical juncture: though wealthy in natural and mineral resources, millions of its people suffer in desperate poverty. Selfish greed has created a tremendous gap between the rich and the poor. Materialism is rapidly destroying our natural environment with no thought for the future. There is need for deep structural transformation. Prout offers a new socio-economic paradigm that provides social justice for all based on human and spiritual values.

Below are some very brief points that we believe should be included in the new constitution:

CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS

1. Every person is guaranteed the five minimum necessities of life: food, clothing, shelter, education and medical care.

2. Every person has the right to a job with adequate purchasing power.

3. Cultural expressions and indigenous languages must be protected.

4. The country’s bio-diversity and endangered species must be protected, and pollution of the air, water and land is prohibited.

5. Spiritual and religious practices for self-realization must be protected.

6. No expression of these rights can be allowed to violate cardinal human values.

7. Three socio-political principles must be guaranteed:

a) people should not be allowed to lose their jobs until and unless alternative employment can be arranged for them;

b) people should never be forced to convert from one religion to another;

c) no one’s mother (native) tongue should be suppressed.

8. The penal code must be based on universally accepted cardinal human values such as the right to a decent life. Capital punishment is banned.

9. Quality education must be guaranteed for all and free of political interference. This includes objective
knowledge, ethics, character building, creativity, spirit of cooperation and service, and selfknowledge.

10. We are all members of one human family without divisions. No person can be discriminated against because of race, sex, color, language, beliefs, sexual orientation, origin, or health status.

THE ECONOMY

Economic democracy is essential to eliminate poverty and continually elevate the standard of living of everyone. For this reason, the following policies should be implemented:

1. Private enterprise will be permitted and encouraged for small-scale businesses that produce non-essential items.

2. Most enterprises will be run as cooperatives. Industrial and agricultural, producers and consumers coops will produce essential items.

3. Key industries will be administered by the government.

4. A ceiling on income and wealth will be established to prevent superaccumulation and economic exploitation.

5. Raw materials should not be exported out of the country. Rather they should be processed or refined in the local region and then sold for local consumption. The excess can then be traded or sold abroad.

6. The banking system should be run as cooperatives, while the Central Bank will be controlled by the government. Money should be based on proportional quantity of gold bullion.

7. In addition to the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of the government, there should be the addition of an independent financial department. This will monitor government spending and publicize the strengths and weaknesses of its programs. This department will keep the accounts of the other three branches and prevent corruption. All of these powers should function independently.

8. The first priority of the government shall be to guarantee the production of the five minimum necessities to all people at accessible prices. Each region of the country must be made self-sufficient in these five necessities.

9. Impoverished regions will be developed especially through the development of agricultural cooperatives,
agro-industries and agricoindustries. This decentralization of the economy will create economic democracy,
in which the local people will make all economic planning. Foreigners may not interfere in economic planning.
Profits may not be exported out of the country, but rather should be re-invested for the development of the
country.

10. Income tax should be abolished, rather tax should be placed on the production of goods.

References:
Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, Proutist Economics: Discourses on Economic
Liberation. Ananda Marga Publications, Calcutta, 1992.

Little remains of the numerous conflicts between these two camps owing to the collapse of Communism beginning about ten years ago. The victory of private enterprise, with its claim of being based in the cherished reality of human freedom, covered the victory with a moral and humanistic cast. “The End of History”, as Francis Fukuyama entitled his 1992 book, does appear to be here—and just in time for the 21st century.

Others would say that the history of human freedom has only started—and that there are alternatives to the behemoths of both largescale enterprises like corporations, the type of private enterprise at issue here, and government authority over society as dominant motifs. One such alternative was advertised on television throughout much of 1999. The ad promoted something called “Florida’s Natural” orange juice as a product of a “co-op of Florida growers whose only business is making juice. They own the land, they own the trees, they own the company.” This co-op message, plainly and clearly delivered, stuck out from the usual glut of slick and clever corporate self-promotion as immaculately as a white gown amongst dark business suits for those as accustomed as most Americans are to a steady (albeit forced) diet of corporate messages only.

Further checking revealed that the co-op, called CitrusWorld, Inc., based in Lake Wales, Florida, comprises 12 grower organisations owning close to 60,000 acres of citrus groves, with a 540-acre citrus fruit processing center capable of extracting juice from over 10 million pounds of oranges every 24 hours. The juice is sold in liquid and frozen forms as a broad variety of juice products. The co-op also has a processing plant in Fullerton, California, and has recently planted over 15,000 acres of new groves in South Florida.

Cooperatives in this country have existed since its founding. President Washington’s cabinet contained a
co-op advocate. Subjecting co-ops to damnation by faint praise as just another way to do business
(something implied by President Reagan, for example) misses the point, however. Co-ops are not just
another way to do business. They are the next step forward in human freedom and democracy. A step that
will take us beyond the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and all other efforts aimed at
lifting people out of the socially repressive aspects of monarchies and the Middle Ages.

 Who Own Americans?
In the typical corporation, whether employing a few dozen or a few hundred thousand people, control is
centralized at the top in the hands of a small number of relatively wealthy shareholders and high-level
executives. All others are, to use a Prout term, “subordinated” to their desires and decisions. The vast
majority of people working in these structures, including mid- and lower-level managers, are under their
control either directly or indirectly. To use the language of government, they lack the freedom to govern
themselves within the corporate structure. True freedom to decide is reserved for a few. This consolidation
of authority makes corporations “private” in spite of the fact that the buying and selling of shares on
the open market makes them seem to be “public” entities.

Thus, though ideologues of the modern system of thought called Liberalism like Francis Fukuyama, Milton Friedman (who wrote Capitalism and Freedom), and a multitude of others claim that we live in the freest of conditions, reality is something else when we look at how the private sector is set up along lines that could be called more fettering and authoritarian than free or democratic. It is more accurate to say that we lose our freedom—and democratic rights—when we go to work, and that private enterprise is a mechanism that institutionalizes this loss. On the door to every corporation should read the inscription, “Democracy not allowed. Leave your rights at the door.”

The New Synthesis
Co-ops resist the deprivation of freedom inherent in corporate enterprise. Rather than centralize decision-making, they decentralize it so that all members partake in key decisions, either directly or through a board of directors that they themselves elect. It is like the difference between being told by your parents what to do (even at age 50 or 60)
and being able to decide for yourself. Or between being told how to vote by party apparatchiks and weighing the virtues of various candidates and voting for yourself.

In dialectical terms, co-ops transcend the mediation and alienation inherent in both the large-scale private
enterprise of Capitalism and the centralized government control of the economy of Communism. The former
interpose a relatively small number of powerful corporate shareholders between employees (including most
managers) on the one hand and significant decision-making power and other legal benefits like rights to
profits on the other. The latter interposed the state, party apparatchiks and bureaucrats. Even trade unions,
said to be the most advanced form of labor organization in modern industrial societies, fail in this regard
They maintain the mediation between employer and employee rather than unify employer and employee in
worker/manager ownership, as co-ops do. The welfare state, the ambition of the modern Liberal Left, especially
on the federal level, also fails to overcome this mediation.

Both unions and the welfare state also have to contend with the caprices of political democracy, which has no
principled commitment to improving prevalent economic conditions. Often-lost battles for better income, better
working conditions, a shorter work week, mandatory health insurance and the like will continue until this
mediation is overcome, as will, most likely, extreme economic disparity.

Psychological Deprivation
Cooperatives overcome the contradiction between the promise of freedom and its extensive denial in the
economy. They also advance humanity psychologically and socially. Insofar as they extend decisionmaking
and other benefits beyond a small circle of key share-owners and executives to working members as a matter
of right, based on recognition of human freedom and rationality, they are psychosociologically embodiments
of a more mature condition of humanity.

Corporate enterprise, to compare, is a system that prolongs childhood and adolescence for the majority
since it reserves substantial freedoms and rationality for a few key players. By consolidating
organizational power and subordinating others beneath them in employee status, these few potentates
also instill a psychological condition of subservience in those beneath them, a condition broken only
at the risk of being fired. In the sense of being autocratic-dictatorial, large-scale private
enterprise, like that in large corporations governing many people, resembles the Communism it reviles
and the monarchies it overthrew. Its whole structure contains an intrinsic, fundamental social
inequality, not simply differences in opportunities to accumulate wealth. This social inequality is not
remedied by either equal civil or political rights since it is an essential part of modern economic
dynamics and the civil rights system. In Freudian terms, employee status resembles the infantile oral
receptive stage of character development.

“By the oral-receptive character Freud means the person who expects to be fed, materially, emotionally and intellectually. He is the person with the ‘open mouth,’ basically passive and dependent, who expects that what he needs will be given to him, either because he or she deserves it for being so good, or so obedient, or because of a highly developed narcissism that makes a person feel he is so wonderful that he can claim to be taken care of by others” (Fromm).

Employees of course work for a living, but they are essentially passive recipients of the orders of executives and owners. As a result of their work and status they expect to be taken care of via paychecks and benefits and to be relieved of the responsibility for decision-making characteristic of the mature personality. Many people operate from the oral-receptive stage of existence; many others who are mature and capable however are forced into this state by anti-democratic, authoritarian economic structures.

This category of character applies even more to the consumer mode of existence, by which people select from among the products and services offered them by others. Consumption of course is to a large degree oral-receptive by nature, but it can be more pro-active if organized cooperatively. In consumer co-ops consumers decide for themselves which products should be sold in their stores and have active, direct relations with manufacturers rather than submit to the tender mercies of middlemen. Large-scale private enterprise utilizes both socio-economic roles—the employee and the consumer—to impose or reinforce the psychological condition of dependence. Psychologically more mature conditions—independence, pride, and greater self-repect—are systematically stunted.

The main structural difference between corporate and communist enterprise is that in the former a relatively
small number of business owners and managers, instead of the monolithic state and its agents, accumulate
economic decision-making powers and rights over the majority of society. In both cases, however, working
people are administered like cattle or machines, not full-fledged participants in company policy-setting
procedures. Compare Bill Gates giving orders down the ranks to tens of thousands of employees with yourself
discussing freely and deciding democratically in a cooperative you own jointly with other working members, and
you will begin to get the idea about what is at stake.

Cooperatives are not just another business option—they are another species of economy altogether because of the way they affect and embody freedom. To the extent that freedom is a part of our humanity, co-ops reflect our humanity far better than either large private enterprises controlled by a few key players or Communism. And since, according to some philosophers, deliberative freedom, and not blind obedience or deference, is an element of morality, co-ops can better embody morality, too. This makes them a moral imperative, not just a business or political choice of convenience. The moral, humanistic economy of choice is mainly cooperative.

The moral and humanistic superiority of cooperatives is currently no shield against private enterprise,
however. Dan McSpadden of the marketing department at CitrusWorld declined to answer questions about the
co-op in large part because of the possibility that corporate juice manufacturers would use the information
against the company. A very real possibility considering the competitive—or, in less polite terms,
carnivorous—ethic of the private sector.

How Americans Lost Economic Freedom
The stage for the subservient position of most Americans in the economic structure was set at the nation’s founding. Then the economy was largely agrarian. Self-employment was the norm.

According to historian Joyce Appleby, the ideological ambience of the young economy was strikingly characterized by “the association of America’s prosperity with free labor —the free and independent labor of farmer-owners and their families” (italics added). Family farms were the expected norm—not employeeship, which to Americans of that time may have appeared closer to plantation slavery or European serfdom than independence.

Nevertheless, there was no prohibition or restriction on the exchange or accumulation of property. It is the
right of exchange and accumulation, otherwise known as the free market, that led to the accumulation of
productive property in fewer and fewer hands and the consequent demotion of free and economically independent
Americans to dependent hired-hand status. Most modern Americans have lost a freedom and independence that
earlier Americans once had. Rather than making people free, the “free” market, for most people, removes it.

Modern politics by both Left and Right is a continuation of what Prout terms the “subordination” inherent in employeeship.

The Left, after promoting the welfare state, government regulation and strong unions for several decades last century, has now widened and significantly shifted its focus to promote environmental protection, civil and cultural rights for racial and ethnic minorities, and gay agendas, using the free market as its economic engine.

The Right of course still promotes private enterprise and bitterly opposes any infringement on it. Entrepreneurial ventures and small family enterprises may receive support, but not in principle at the expense of corporations and shareholders. The freedoms the Right promises via the economy are radically curtailed when they concern
employees, which most Americans are. A large number of supporters of the Right are thus under an illusion about their own politics, and myopically assume only government can be the enemy of liberty. Neither Left nor Right promotes as a matter of principle the “insubordinate” kinds of economy embodied in small entrepreneurial
ventures, small family enterprises and cooperatives.

The current stage was set for the Left, or New Left, during the 1960s, when it made its fateful break from the communist-influenced economic thinking of the Old Left. The African-American civil rights movement came to serve as a paradigm for other social groups who in turn adopted the garb of the oppressed, including women, gays, and other racial and ethnic groups.

In opting for civil rights like desegregated schools and social venues as well as, later on, other rights against civil discrimination, the New Left effectively abandoned the Old Left’s goal of dictatorial control of the economy. As a result the condition of employeeship continues, though it would have anyway and in more extreme form under governmentcontrolled enterprise favored by communists had they come to power. In other words, the subordinated socioeconomic status of most Americans continues with the acquiescence of the main trends of the New Left. Unions, for all their value to working people, also perpetuate this subordination.

What Is to Be Done
Cooperatives like CitrusWorld stand as a repudiation by example to both the corporate private enterprise politics of the Right and the welfare state/minority civil rights focus of the New Left. Though no political, educational, social or religious leaders are taking up liberation economics via the cooperative cause at the moment, this is what is to be done if the majority of Americans, including minorities, are to taste true freedom, and greater dignity, in the economic sphere. According to Prout, to free the maximum number of working citizens from subordination the cooperative movement should include the manufacturing, service and finance sectors, not only agriculture. An
economic result of this step upward in dignity will be reduced economic inequity, another goal of Prout. Since co-ops greatly widen the population of owners, they will decentralize wealth into the hands of tens of millions more Americans—and not by taxation, which is unreliable for this purpose and is highly vulnerable to special interest
lobbying and the political centralization of power over society in the federal government.

CitrusWorld sells their fine-tasting orange juice and other products around the country and overseas under the brand names of Florida’s Natural (orange, grapefruit, apple, orange-pineapple and others), Bluebird, Texsun, Adams and Vintage, and are licensees of other brands. You can find their website at http//www.floridasnatural.com.

References
Appleby, Joyce. Capitalism and a New Social Order The Republican Vision of the 1790s, New York University
Press, New York, 1984, p. 42. Fromm, Erich. Greatness and Limitations of Freud’s Thought, Mentor,
New York, 1981, p. 53. Sarkar, Prabhat Ranjan. Proutist Economics Discourses on Economic Liberation.
Ananda Marga Pracaraka Samgha, Calcutta, 1992, pp.128-45.