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Rh ouvrières de production, is directly due to his teaching, which led in 1848 to the starting of a large number of co-operative workshops. The suppression of association after the advent of Napoleon III. killed most of them, but with the return of liberty they revived and they have steadily increased ever since. They vary somewhat among themselves, but are in the main combinations of workmen to carry on their industries with their own capital or that of their trade unions. Their chief difference from English co-partnership societies is that they very rarely admit to membership any persons not belonging to the trade. They are engaged in a great variety of industries, selling comparatively little to co-operative distributive societies, as English co-partnership societies do, but taking contracts from government departments and the municipalities, and supplying the general public. Complete statistics of their total trade are not available, but it exceeds £2,000,000, and the separate societies seem to vary, like the majority of English co-partnership societies, from about £40,000 a year downwards, a few being larger but the great majority small. From about 140 societies in 1896 they have grown to between two and three times that number, and the increase continues with rapidity. More than two hundred of them are federated in the Chambre consultative des associations ouvrières de production, which looks after certain business interests of the societies, and also assists the formation of new ones by propaganda and advice. In Paris alone about a third of these societies are found.

It has been objected that their growth is artificial inasmuch as the government gives them certain advantages, such as preference over the private contractor at an equal price, exemption from the deposit of security, and special concessions as to payments on account. It also grants a subvention (recently about £7000 per annum), which was formerly all given to the societies in grants, but is now largely lent to them at not more than 2% interest through their own special bank. This bank was founded in 1893 to help the societies with loans and discounts, and was soon after endowed by a disciple of Fourier with £20,000. The societies have also benefited by other private beneficence and public help. As to the Government aid, it must be remembered that in France the state helps all forms of industry in ways unknown to us, and the French co-operative producers always declare that what is done for them is a trifle compared to what is done for other manufacturers. Moreover, they get many large contracts in open and unaided competition. In these societies the auxiliaires, or workers who are not members, are often numerous; but no society is now admitted to their federation which does not share profits with the auxiliaires and facilitate their admission to membership.

Consumers’ co-operation, credit co-operation, agricultural co-operation, and workshop co-operation, as exemplified in Great Britain, Germany, Denmark and France, are found in most advanced countries, some in one and some in another, in forms roughly similar to those above described. Of co-operation for production it might have been said, a few years ago, that outside Great Britain it everywhere meant associations of producers. Except bakeries, there was but little consumers’ production; that, however, seems now to be spreading in foreign countries also. The most important developments of co-operation not yet described are the socialist co-operation of Belgium, the co-operative building societies of the United States, the labour societies of Italy and Russia, the co-operation of German craftsmen to provide themselves with raw material, and the letting out of railway construction to temporary co-operative groups of workmen by the New Zealand and Victorian governments.

In Belgium co-operation is mostly socialist in the towns and Catholic in the country. In all the principal industrial centres are very important co-operative bakeries and distributive societies, owned by co-operative groups, numbering thousands of workmen of every calling. These Maisons du peuple are admitted to be well managed, even by those who dislike their politics. The socialist party look upon them chiefly as a means of organizing and educating the working classes for political and economic emancipation, and of providing funds for political warfare. Like the English stores, and allied societies, they are based on the consumer, but unlike them they pay no interest on share capital, though they do on deposits. A much larger part of the profit than in England is devoted to propaganda and common purposes, though a part is also paid to the consumers individually in the form of checks exchangeable for bread or other goods. The workers employed also receive a share of profit as a dividend on their wages, and elect their representatives on the committee of management. By means of these societies the party has a press, buildings, and the funds to fight elections and support members in parliament. In France, where the store movement has been of an individualistic, and often middle class, tendency, the socialists have lately imitated the example of Belgium, and seem to be winning more success than the older French stores.

In the United States there has long been much important agricultural co-operation, and there have been many much-advertised attempts to establish Rochdale co-operation, but there have so often been failures and even dishonesties that co-operation has had a bad odour in the country, and the developments come and go with such rapidity that it is difficult to speak with confidence of its stability. The branch of co-operation which has been a great success in the United States consists of the great co-operative building societies, but building societies are not considered part of the co-operative movement in Great Britain.

Co-operation of all kinds is greatly developed in Italy, but one form is specially notable. The Società di lavoro are co-operative labour gangs of great importance. They are counted by hundreds, and are found among navvies, builders, masons, carriers, stevedores, agricultural labourers and other workmen, and have carried out very great works in Italy and in foreign countries. They have, for instance, drained lands in the Campagna and made a railway in Greece. They differ from productive societies markedly in that they have comparatively little to do with capital or material, but contract mainly for labour.

The Slavonic races seem to have a special aptitude for grouping together co-operatively: it is said that men meeting casually on a journey will do so for the brief time they are together. In countries like Servia we see this ancient, and more or less customary, loose and unstable co-operation meeting the modern contractual, permanent co-operation of banks and other registered societies. So in Russia, where so large a part in the national organization is played by the Artel (see ), which may be a transitory co-operative group of workmen undertaking a particular piece of work, e.g. to build a house, or a permanent association like that of the bank porters combined together to guarantee one another’s honesty.

While English and some other forms of co-operation have always repudiated state help, and probably rightly, so far as their own work is concerned, the state in almost all countries, and conspicuously in England, has in fact helped to the extent of providing special legislation, and waiving fees, so as to encourage the formation of co-operative societies. A second form of state help is very noticeable in the modern development of agriculture, as in Denmark, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland and very many countries, where the state has played a great part in performing or assisting functions which neither voluntary association nor individual enterprise could well perform alone; in providing technical education, expert advisers, exhibitions and prizes; in distributing information in all forms; in finding out markets, controlling railway rates, subsidizing steamboats, and even grading, branding, warehousing and freezing produce, and maintaining trade agents abroad. These things have not been done for co-operative societies alone, but for agriculture in general; but co-operation has chiefly benefited, and much has been done expressly to encourage the formation of associations of cultivators, and provincial and national federations of such associations; and government departments of agriculture are found acting through such bodies, and with their advice and assistance. The third and most questionable