fund. Since that time there have been several strikes against
cooperative societies. The whole question of the relation be-
tween the cooperative democracy and its employees has been
raised by these events, and in 1921 it remained unsettled. It was
complicated by the demand among certain sections of labour for
workers' control of industry. Many cooperators believed that
the workers should be given some share in control, i.e. that they
should share with the consumer in the determination of rates of
wages and conditions of employment. On the other hand it is
obvious that the whole principle of consumers' cooperation,
control of industry by the community of consumers for the use
of the community, is inconsistent with the complete control
either of individual factories and workshops or of whole indus-
tries by the organized workers, the principle of producers' co-
operation, syndicalism, and guild socialism.
Foreign Countries. The consumers' movements outside England owe their origin directly to the British movement, and all of them were many years behind it in development. But the history of their progress has been almost precisely similar to that of the British movement. In 1921 there was hardly a single European country without consumers' societies. Nearly all of these foreign movements showed a considerable increase in membership and trade during 1910-20; the war, both in belligerent and neutral countries, had a marked effect in increasing the number of cooperators and in ex- tending the development and scope of cooperative industry. The following figures show the growth of some of the Continental movements after 1914:
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Country.
Total Membership.
Total Turnover.
1914-
IQIQ.
1914.
1919.
Denmark France Germany Norway
Sweden Switzerland
244,000 88o,ooo> 1,717,519 31,000 111,293 276,431
317,000 1 ,3OO,OOO 2,308,407 8o,OOO 225,423 353.8II
Kr. 103,000,000 Frs. 321,800,000' Marks 4g2,g8o,5ig Kr. 10,019,600 Kr. ' 39,466,473 Frs. 143,650,971
Kr. 150,000,000 Frs. 1,000,000,000 Marks 1,075,581,269 Kr. 71,215,200 Kr. 216,118,000 Frs. 289,666,373
1 Estimated.
Though the Continental movements were not so advanced, particularly on the productive side, as the British movement, there is evidence that most of them were firmly established in 1921 and were rapidly following the same path of successful development. The German movement, the largest and most successful on the Continent, had in fact reached the same stage as the British; its membership increased while the number of societies was stationary or decreased ; it had a highly developed wholesale society, the Gross- einkaufsgesellschaft Deutscher Konsumvereine, whose productive act- ivities included tobacco, soap, matches, textiles and clothing, and confectionery. The majority of the other Continental movements were still in that stage of structural consolidation which in England had been largely completed before 1900. Its most marked feature is federation or amalgamation of small, and often competing societies, so that an increase in the number of cooperators may be accompanied by a decrease in the number of societies. Examples may be found in the recent developments in Denmark and France. In Denmark, although agricultural cooperation had reached a very high state of development, consumers' cooperation in the towns only began about the beginning of this century. Its progress was slow until 1910. Then there was a rapid increase in the number of societies, members, and turnover; this was followed by a period of consolidation, in which there was extensive amalgamation among the Copenhagen societies while the membership and turnover continued to increase. This process, typical of the development of a consumers' movement, can be seen in the following statistics of Danish urban cooperative societies :
Year.
Number of Societies.
Number of Members.
Turnover Kr.
1910 1914 1919
44 92
79
I5.7io 39,698 64,187
4,876,000 14,378,000 23,648,000
The same tendency is at work in France, where since 1914 has been seen the establishment of large district societies which absorbed the small local societies.
Another feature of foreign cooperation, which should be noted, is the development of wholesale societies. The development of a consumers' movement into a large industrial system depends upon the growth of a strong wholesale society which shall eventually be capable of undertaking a great variety of productive enterprises. It is significant that in 1919 no less than 19 European movements had wholesale societies. It is true that many of them were still in the stage of wholesale dealing for the supply of the local distributive societies, but the history of the British movement shows that this stage must precede any large development in manufacturing enter- prise, and many foreign wholesale societies, e.g. the French, German, and Swiss, have greatly extended their productive activities.
Lastly, it should be remarked that in 1910-20 consumers' co- operation established itself in many countries outside Europe. For instance, up to very recent times consumers' cooperation could hard- ly be said to have existed in the United States, but latterly, partly owing to the educational work of the Cooperative League of America, a vigorous movement and some 2,000 societies had come into exist- ence. Cooperation had also established itself and was making prog- ress in Armenia, some of the British dominions, e.g. Canada, South Africa, and India.
Industrial Producers' Cooperation. The typical example of producers' " cooperation is the workers' society in which the workers own and manage the factory and divide the profits of the enterprise among themselves. But many distinct types of industrial organization are ordinarily included under the term producers' or workers' cooperation, types differing as widely from one another as the ordinary business or joint stock company which gives its employees a share in the profits, and the self- governing workshop. Here we shall deal only with producers' cooperation in the strict sense, i.e. societies or enterprises in which the instruments of production are owned and control exercised by the workers or producers.
There was little change in the position of producers' coopera- tion during 1910-20. There was no marked extension in the number of enterprises or in the sphere of their operations either in Great Britain or abroad. Thus the number of productive societies in the Cooperative Union actually declined from 108 in 1913 to 95 in 1919, while the number of members rose from 34,662 to 39>33i- It is true that their annual sales during the period rose from 3,710,234 to 7,047,147, but the rise in prices would more than account for this increase. The history of the workers' society from 1907 to 1921 is, in fact, a repetition of its previous history. This form of industrial organization is liable to peculiar difficulties. A small self-governing workshop is easily started and a small workers' cooperative society easily formed. But the problem of internal wganization and discipline is extremely difficult, if full democratic control is exercised by the workers. Hence in Britain, France and Italy workers' societies are con- tinually coming into existence, but, with a few exceptions, their lives are short. And, since the larger and more highly organized the enterprise the more acute become the difficulties of organiza- tion, control, and discipline, the workers' society, where success- ful, has practically always remained a small and simple indus- trial unit. These facts account for the lack of development in producers' cooperation and its failure hitherto to adapt itself to the large-scale, complex organization of modern industry.
It should be noticed, however, that both syndicalism and guild socialism advocate forms of industrial organization which would in effect be developments of producers' cooperation. The workers' society takes the workshop or the factory as the unit of industrial organization and places the control of industry in the hands of the workers organized in factory or workshop; the syndicalist or guild socialist would make each industry, e.g. mining, railway transport or building, the unit of organization and would give control to the workers organized in these larger units. But, although experiments in guild socialism have already been made in England in the build- ing trade, and although the Works Councils Act in Germany and legislation in Italy, following the seizure of factories by the workers in 1920, made some approach to a syndicalist control by workers, both syndicalism and guild socialism still remained in 1921 in the theoretical stage. They had, however, as theories and ideals of industrial organization, taken the place which previously workers' cooperation, in the strict sense, occupied with many people.
Cooperative Credit and Banking. If the consumers' cooperative movements of the world owe their origin to the British move- ment, Germany can claim to be the pioneer of cooperative credit and banking. Two well-known types of credit societies are dis- tinguished in Germany, the Schuke-Delitzsch and the Raiffeisen. Apart from their differences in constitution and structure, these two types are characteristic of a difference in function which runs through the whole of cooperative credit in every country. The Schulze-Delitzsch bank supplies credit or loans to the small industrialist in towns; the Raiffeisen bank supplies credit to farmers and agriculturists. This distinction of function is fun- damental, and therefore it is not surprising that the history of the spread and development of urban and rural cooperative credit has not followed the same course.
