I read a comment, “There is no law preventing socialists from pooling their own money together to fund all of their good ideas.” I suspect that I lived in that society here in Trego between 1960 and 1965. Thing is, I think the adults who participated thought of it as neighboring.
I remember the Grange – it was on Eureka’s main street when I was a kid. Wiki describes it “The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, is a social organization in the United States that encourages families to band together to promote the economic and political well-being of the community and agriculture.” As I remember, Winton Weydemeyer, a long-term conservative Republican, was one of the last active members in Eureka’s Grange. Organizations like the Grange were a spot where the more left wing farmers met with the more conservative ones to work together for better support of agriculture.
In Minnesota, the old trappings still exist – there, it’s the Democratic Farmer-Labor party. Judging from what I’ve seen and read coming out of Minnesota, they have pretty much jettisoned most of the farmers and laborers – but history still leaves a name that includes farmers and laborers.
I like cooperatives – people working together to get services that they could never get as individuals under the basic capitalist system. Our electric service here started as a cooperative – and still has the motto “Owned by the people we serve.” The problem with cooperatives is that, when they work well, the people who worked together to start them move to the sidelines. Then the cooperatives’ employees basically take over the co-op, making the management decisions and creating a puppet board for member input.
There are still some 200,000 members in the National Farmers Union. Cenex is now the brand name for what was once the Farmers Union gas stations. I still gas up there when I’m in Whitefish or Kalispell – but I see little evidence of the farm background when I walk inside from the pumps. Along the Highline, it’s a different story – Cenex stations still show their agrarian roots there. But in northwest Montana (and I take the purist boundary as the continental divide) Cenex appears no different that any other corporation.
When we get down to Libby, the Flathead Electric Cooperative bought out the power company thirty-odd years ago – so we have a spot where the cooperative is the company. This isn’t a complaint – I’m just pointing out that when a co-op is successful, it becomes the company. When a co-op is unsuccessful it just fails.
In downtown Eureka, Manifestations is an artists co-op. I don’t know what the future holds – but the individual artists need the combination of skills and people to market what they produce.
Cooperatives are unique. In many cases – like the rural electric cooperatives and Cenex – they develop from individual consumers working together to develop the infrastructure, then turn into facilities that are virtually indistinguishable from their corporate competitors that made the co-op necessary in the first place. Not a problem – the natural path of a successful co-op is to just become one more power company, or one more fuel company. Cenex has grown to a spot where they no longer really benefit from wearing the skin of the Farmer’s Union co-op. Our rural electric cooperatives, with government benefits and funding available, maintain the illusion that they are co-ops – “Owned by the people we serve.” Still, if you look at it, the people of Libby are served by FEC, but definitely lack ownership.
Cooperatives do provide a way for people to work together to get services that might never show up without the co-op. The thing is, a co-op is a transitional change – once the service arrives, the co-op morphs into just another company – the stockholder structure is just a little different.
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