“At a very early period in the movement, co-operation set before itself the task of becoming mentally independent as being quite as important as that of becoming independent in its groceries.”
Our local high street Co-operative Food is about to turn into a Quidsaver. Meanwhile Barkingside (not somewhere most people are too poor and ground down to spend an extra few pence making sure the producers and workers get paid OK) apparently finds it “too dear” and prefers to drive to Tesco and Lidl as if the world owes it cheap food and owes the producers a slow asphyxiation. And if it’s hard for us (and for most of us round here I seriously doubt it) imagine how hard it is for them. Quidsaver, like Tesco, probably depends on slave labour somewhere down its murky supply chain.
Since Barkingside consumers are not so poor as ignorant, I read this history of co-operative education by Keri Facer and try not to indulge my futile neighbourhood fury.
From it:
“… a ‘learnt associational identity’ (2011) was expected to grow out of the experience of mutual support and participation in democratic practices. Co-operative education was understood not only to be education about co-operation, but education through participation in the co-operative movement. Education was not a professionalised theoretical activity, rather ‘education and co-operation were at times coterminous, woven into interconnected webs of working class activity’”
but
“The first tension is a product of a commitment to co-operative values. The commitment to self-reliance and self-responsibility, and the flourishing of a highly divergent co-operative movement, means that there was resistance to a universal centrally dictated model of education. Instead, there were tensions between the need to maintain local autonomy and the desire to build a wider movement, between the growth of common feelings and solidarity through locally determined societies and the efficiencies to be gained from formality and national organisation. The principle of local autonomy tended to prevail, and as a consequence, there was often scant local formal education provision.”
And now, again,
“As of 2011, and the publication of the new Public Services Bill which paves the way for co-operative and mutual models of public services delivery, the Co-operative College is also exploring how to support the development of co-operative models of children’s services provision, music services, early years and youth provision.”
Read on for how that’s going (promisingly).
Flesh is Grass 