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MODERN COOPERATIVE SOCIALISM Synopsis  March 14, 2010 Modern cooperative socialism is a movement for socialist cooperative republics in the various countries. Its objective is to bring an end to world monopoly capitalism in the near term. It developed out of two real-life experiences:

A) The failure of socialist experiments based on “concentration of all the instruments of production in the hands of the state,” as hypothesized in the second chapter of the 1848 Communist Manifesto, and experimented with in various countries beginning in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution; and

B) The success of the economic hypothesis of “cooperative worker ownership of the instruments of production,” as validated by the experiment that began in 1956 in the Basque village of Mondragon, Spain, and has continued to the present day.

Based on these experimental results—the former negative and the latter positive—a new hypothesis for workable socialism was formulated:

1) The political state would be a “democratic cooperative republic,” led by a socialist transformational party. It would function according to a “National Plan,” constantly reviewed by a representative “National Council.”

2) The primary economic units would be employee-owned cooperative corporations on the Mondragon model.

3) The historically evolved institutions of the trading market and private property rights would be retained and used for socialist construction.

4) Adjustable blocks of non-controlling, preferred stock would be held by the socialist state, making taxes and tax bureaucracies unnecessary. Government would be freed from bureaucratic management of economic enterprise.

5) Privately owned small businesses would compliment the larger employee-state economic units. To protect and assist small entrepreneurial families, wholesale prices would be required by law to be the same for all enterprises, regardless of the size of orders.

6) The “fractional reserve” credit and monetary system would be retained, but the central reserve bank would be co-owned and co-managed by the socialist state and cooperatively-owned banks. The powers to extend credit—and therefore to issue money—would no longer be in the hands of private capitalists.

7) All citizens would be covered by some form of “single-payer” health care, legal services, education, and retirement pensions, but no restrictions would be placed on persons supplementing or opting out of these systems.

8) In theory, there would be no unemployment, no national debt, no taxes, no landlordism, no exploitative mortgages, no military-industrial complex, and no false-fronted wars against other nations.

9) The extinction-level problems of global warming and oceanic destruction would be addressed on an emergency, almost “declaration of war” basis.

This movement pledges to defend freedom of spiritual conscience and religious practice.

It embraces patriotism, believing that the true patriotism of every country in this historical era is the striving for a socialist cooperative national state.

In the United States, four cardinal principles for the winning of the people have been established: Non-violence, Legality, Openness and Persuasion.

A distinguishing feature of modern cooperative socialist theory is how it believes that society may achieve the elimination of social classes. By transforming the working majority into a property-owning class, it believes that a steady cultural and intellectual merging with the non-monopoly entrepreneurial class and productive intelligentsia would ensue. This would result, theoretically, in the fading away of social classes.

In addition, according to the theory, as class distinctions fade, the coercive attributes of government also would diminish. This, it is believed, would achieve the classic socialist vision of the gradual withering away of the state and of national boundaries. # # # Historical links: Mondragon Corporation; Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (INDUSCO); Gung Ho; Robert Owen; Rochdale Pioneers; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; Farmers’ Alliance (U.S. 1880’s); Workers’ Self-Management; Worker Cooperatives. Cooperatives in the United States: U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives; Cooperative Businesses in the United States (2005); National Cooperative Business Association; Network of Bay Area Cooperatives; History of Cooperatives in United States. Resources: Two short films that have influenced this movement -- “The Mondragon Experiment” and “Democracy in the Workplace” -- may be found at video.google.com. The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in the United States by Lawrence Goodwin (Oxford University Press, 1978).

Dollars Sense/GEO # 71- Cooperatives in the United States.