One of the most common questions raised about the coop movement is: where did the money come from?
This paper analyzes the economic factors which gave birth to the coops, the causes of their phenomenal growth, and subsequently the stagnation of the coops.
Labor is the basis of capital
Any economic analysis must start with the source of all wealth in society -- human labor. Labor not only creates all value, but also it is the measure of all value. Concretely labor can be equated with a dollar value because labor is the basis for all wealth.
The same economic fact is also true in the coop system. Thousands of people have labored long hours in order to build the coop system. Why did so many people work so hard? In fact people had become motivated because of the coop ideal, an ideal which led people to believe that they were creating a new order of society for themselves. With the impetus of this ideal of the coops, long hours of labor were expended in an attempt to realize the ideal in reality. New skills were developed as they were needed in order to further put this ideal into practice. These skills, such as refrigeration repair, ordering and marketing, electrical repair and bookkeeping, were learned out of a desire to build the coops into a movement.
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