RED Notes

Here, I focus on the great victory of the cooperative movement mentioned by Marx. For cooperative production entails the workers producing on their own, avoiding the dominance of capital.

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With the extraction by traders and companies not only exploiting our working people in the countryside to a state of pauperisation, but also undermining agricultural production, can cooperatives create an autonomous system to provide decent work, incomes and food to our working people?

Subsequently in 1867, Marx’s Instructions for the Delegates of the Geneva Congress articulated the significance of the cooperative as one based on class struggle:

“We acknowledge the cooperative movement as one of the transforming forces of the present society based upon class antagonism. Its great merit is to practically show that the present pauperising and despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers.”