Talk:Cooperative

NPOV: "Social transformation in cooperatives"

This whole section seems to be pushing a socialist/communist POV under the guise of "Social transformation". It starts strong with this this statement: "Most workers cooperatives have in their DNA the social transformation role." It even mentions Gramsci as if he was a household name the reader would recognize with the "Gramscian terms", and not some obscure communist of no relevance.

This section should either be deleted or at the very least heavily rewritten. Arcade222 (talk) 18:30, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

I deleted the section for violation of WP:NPOV. If someone wants to re-add it, it needs to be rewritten from an objective perspective talking about cooperatives in communist thought (my impression is that cooperatives were only seen as tools to win people over to the workers movement in the short term by Marx and Lenin, who didn’t think much of them, whilst in the present communist academics have termed cooperative economy market socialism) Alexanderkowal (talk) 11:14, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

Citation needed under history

The first sentence in the "Origins and History" section is marked as "citation needed".

> Cooperation dates back as far as human beings have been organizing for mutual benefits. Tribes were organized as cooperative structures, allocating jobs and resources among each other, only trading with the external communities.

David Graeber's Debt: the first 5,000 years covers this pretty well. Would that be an appropriate citation? Drewmca (talk) 05:17, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

Do you mind pasting the relevant text? I think it would have to be verbatim in the source otherwise it risks being WP:Synth. Also I’m not sure whether that is a WP:RS but when you do the citation for it, it’ll tell you whether it is WP:Blacklisted. It seems to be a reliable source. Alexanderkowal (talk) 05:50, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

I’m sure there’s good quality articles or books written on cooperative history that will say something along those lines, the current sentence looks like someone’s WP:OR Alexanderkowal (talk) 05:52, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

(Sorry for such a delay in responding)

I only have the epub, so no physical page numbers but, footnote 120 for Chapter 4 "Cruelty and Redemption" says:

> On cacao, Millon 1955; on Ethopian salt money, Einzig 1949:123–26. Both Karl Marx (1857:223, 1867:182) and Max Weber (1978:673–74) were of the opinion that money had emerged from barter between societies, not within them. Karl Bücher (1904), and arguably Karl Polanyi (1968), held something close to this position, at least insofar as they insisted that modern money emerged from external exchange. Inevitably there must have been some sort of mutually reinforcing process between currencies of trade and the local accounting system. Insofar as we can talk about the “invention” of money in its modern sense, presumably this would be the place to look, though in places like Mesopotamia this must have happened long before the use of writing, and hence the history is effectively lost to us.

Chapter 2 also mentions the topic a few times:

> Lewis Henry Morgan’s descriptions of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, among others, were widely published—and they made clear that the main economic institution among the Iroquois nations were longhouses where most goods were stockpiled and then allocated by women’s councils, and no one ever traded arrowheads for slabs of meat.

With a footnote #30 attached to that:

> Morgan’s work in particular (1851, 1877, 1881), which emphasized both collective property rights and the extraordinary importance of women, with women’s councils largely in control of economic life, so impressed many radical thinkers—included Marx and Engels—that they became the basis of a kind of counter-myth, of primitive communism and primitive matriarchy.

Within a page or two, he cites a translation of Levi-Strauss (1943) (full citation below):

> Now, all this hardly means that barter does not exist—or even that it’s never practiced by the sort of people that Smith would refer to as “savages.” It just means that it’s almost never employed, as Smith imagined, between fellow villagers. Ordinarily, it takes place between strangers, even enemies. Let us begin with the Nambikwara of Brazil. They would seem to fit all the criteria: they are a simple society without much in the way of division of labor, organized into small bands that traditionally numbered at best a hundred people each. Occasionally if one band spots the cooking fires of another in their vicinity, they will send emissaries to negotiate a meeting for purposes of trade.

And he goes on describing the specifics there. I'd be hesitant to cite his sources instead, since Graeber seems to pull from a number of different specific examples to make the general claim here, that "tribes generally were cooperative internally, only trading externally".

Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1943. “Guerre et commerce chez les Indiens d’Amérique du Sud.” Renaissance. Paris: Ecole Libre des Hautes Études, vol, 1, fascicule 1 et 2. Drewmca (talk) 03:27, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

Does he explicitly say "tribes were generally cooperative"? If not it might be WP:Synth.

See:

• Curl 2009 chapter 1: Early cooperation in the Americas
• Rasmussen 1991 pg 21: The first cooperatives ... were informal
• Bennett 1983: indigenous cooperation consists of forms of reciprocal exchange and sharing which emerge in social life as a necessity for continuous operation or survival, and which are patterned in accordance with principles attached to various social groupings and strata.

The first two are just on the US, but the third is general. If we are to include this I suggest we paraphrase Bennett and work the word "informal" in there to differentiate between the formal institutional cooperatives that came later, as the sources do. However I'm sceptical whether we should be including this at all, it seems very revisionist and anachronistic.

Btw if you want help making a citation, see WP:Citing sources or just copy how others have done it/what you see in the code when you click 'edit'. Alternatively, you can use 'Visual editor' and type <ref and then paste a link to the book on Google Books or Internet Archive and it'll do it for you. Kowal2701 (talk) 20:53, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

That quote itself doesn't appear, but the book/chapter is making that argument, yes. He's responding to "the myth of barter", the idea that tribe members would generally trade or exchange goods, and his point is that, generally, that sort of exchange only happened externally to tribes, not internally. So therefore internally, if goods weren't traded, they were held in common & managed (informally, as you mention) cooperatively.

That said, maybe it is WP:Synth, since it's a few logical steps away. Maybe this first sentence needs to be adjusted to just mention our cooperative nature, rather than making the claim it is now. Drewmca (talk) 23:11, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

Agreed. It seems more mainstream to focus on cooperative principles here. Kowal2701 (talk) 23:18, 22 November 2024 (UTC)