The Cooperative: An Anarchist Utopia That Works Beautifully
What if the economic model that could finally rid us of capitalism had already been up and running all over the world for almost two centuries? I’m talking about co-ops, of course.
No predatory shareholders, no boss who can’t be touched. Anyone who joins becomes a co-owner. Every member gets one vote. The board is elected, it can be voted out and it answers to the general assembly. So the person running the place carries out a collective decision, they don’t dictate it.
And it works! Three million co-ops worldwide, a billion members, in every sector you can name: farming, banking, health care, industry, media… These outfits ride out crises better, lay off fewer people and offer really good working conditions.
The history of co-ops: from working-class roots to a global model
The story of co-ops starts in poverty. In 1844, in Rochdale, England, 28 weavers on the edge of ruin pooled their tiny savings to open a store of their own. No boss, no shareholder. Every member paid in and every member had a say. They had no idea the whole world would copy them, but they’d just laid the foundation of the modern co-op.
They didn’t stay alone for long. The same idea popped up everywhere, carried by the boiling labor movement of the 19th century, back when the fight for self-management and Proudhon’s mutualism pulled big crowds. So the co-op isn’t a concession torn from capitalism by force. It’s an answer built quietly from below, by people who had nothing left to lose and decided to organize differently without asking anyone’s permission.
In the 20th century the model spread and branched out. In 1956, in the Spanish Basque Country, a priest named José María Arizmendiarrieta founded the first co-op of what became Mondragón, today one of the biggest cooperative groups on the planet with more than 80,000 member-owners. In Scandinavia, farm and banking co-ops turned into pillars of the national economy. In Africa, Asia and Latin America, millions of farmers and craftspeople took up the model to survive and grow outside the claws of the multinationals.
Today the International Cooperative Alliance brings together organizations from more than 100 countries. So the co-op isn’t some activist curiosity. It’s a worldwide economic model, road-tested, that made it through two centuries of crises without dumping its founding principles.
How does a co-op actually work? Governance, democracy and shared power
In a regular company, power follows money. Whoever holds the most shares calls the shots. A co-op flips that around, because power follows people. One vote per member, whether you put in €500 or €50,000. That’s the founding principle and it changes everything.
The governance setup is simple in principle: the members elect a board from among themselves. That board sets the strategy and appoints an executive director to carry it out. The director answers to the board, and the board answers to the general assembly of the members. The chain of power always runs back up to the collective, never to an outside shareholder.
The general assembly rules. The big calls get voted there: how profits are split, where the company is headed, any change to the bylaws. Every member weighs the same, no matter how long they’ve been around or how much money they put in. Leaders answer for what they do. They can even be fired without much trouble.
This democratic wiring mechanically wipes out a few serious and well-known diseases of the capitalist firm: the manager hired because he golfs with the right people, the board with no clue what happens on the floor, the CEO handing himself an obscene paycheck while he cuts jobs… In a co-op, all of that has to go past everybody. Sure, a collective filter doesn’t guarantee perfection, but it does make abuse structurally much harder to pull off.
Which sectors can run on the cooperative model?
That’s usually the first objection: co-ops are fine for small outfits, local craftspeople or the corner grocery store. Reality says otherwise. There isn’t one sector of the economy where co-ops haven’t already proven themselves, at scale included.
Farming has always been the most fertile ground. Millions of producers worldwide grouped into co-ops to push back against the big retail chains, share equipment and bargain together. In Kenya, India and Brazil, those groups pulled whole communities out of their dependence on predatory middlemen.
What about heavy industry? For 70 years Mondragón, in the Basque Country, has been answering everyone who claims the model can’t scale. More than 80,000 member-owners, work that runs from machine tools to retail chains to research and higher education. That’s a multinational in cooperative form, plain and simple.
Banking and finance are no exception either. Credit unions, up and running in more than 100 countries, handle their members’ savings and loans collectively without squeezing out profits for outside shareholders. In Sweden, the JAK bank works with zero interest, and in the Netherlands, Triodos only funds projects with a positive social and environmental impact.
Health care, housing, energy, media, tech, legal services… Anywhere humans run an economy, co-ops have shown they can hold their own and thrive. So the question isn’t whether the model works. The question is why it isn’t the norm yet.
Co-ops vs conventional companies: performance and resilience
People tend to see the co-op as a nice but fragile thing, doomed to stay marginal next to the capitalist giants. The numbers tell a radically different story.
Take the 2008 financial crash. Cooperative banks held up far better than their conventional rivals. While the big private banks were getting bailed out by governments or dying outright, credit unions and co-op banks kept working. That’s how they protected their members’ savings and kept lending to the local economy. No miracle involved: their model just doesn’t push them into reckless bets to juice the quarterly return of anonymous shareholders.
In a downturn, co-ops lay off far fewer people than regular companies. When a traditional firm cuts headcount right away to protect its margins, a co-op looks for something else first: a temporary pay cut, shared hours, some other internal reshuffle. The reason is easy enough to get. Member-owners don’t fire themselves lightly, and they know exactly what wreckage a layoff leaves behind.
The economic performance is real too. A University of Bologna study of Italian co-ops found a five-year survival rate well above that of conventional firms in the same sectors. In France, Quebec and the UK, the data points the same way: co-ops last longer, come through crises better and keep productivity on par with their competitors.
The reason is structural. In a co-op, what’s good for the workers and what’s good for the company line up. Nobody gains by sinking the ship to strip it for value and walk away with a golden parachute.
What does the cooperative social model look like?
In a co-op, economic democracy doesn’t stop at the door of the general assembly. It runs straight through every ordinary workday. And that’s where the model produces its most concrete, most visible and most human effects.
The toxic manager, the petty tyrant who feeds on humiliation, the supervisor nobody can remove because he’s buddies with the owner… All those familiar horrors of the regular workplace hit one big structural wall in a co-op before they can work their quiet damage: they have to answer to colleagues who carry exactly the same weight they do in the governance. Abusing power isn’t impossible, it’s just much harder to keep up over time, because the collective can shut it down fast.
Working conditions show it. Co-ops report higher job satisfaction on average than conventional companies, mostly thanks to arrangements that fit family life, flexible hours, generous parental leave and a general willingness to work around personal constraints. That’s not starry-eyed idealism, and it’s not charity that costs money. The member-owners vote those rules themselves, and they have every reason to want decent living conditions, because that’s what keeps productivity up. The capitalist system will never understand that you can’t get the best out of someone by holding them under permanent pressure and permanent insecurity.
Pay is spread out more evenly too. At Mondragón, the bylaws cap the gap between the lowest and the highest salary. No CEO taking home 300 times what a line worker makes while he announces layoffs. Internal inequality still exists, sure, but it’s capped, argued over and voted on.
So working in a co-op doesn’t mean working for somebody who grabbed the land or the tools. It means working with people who decided to pool what they have and build a company that means something. And the first thing it means is serving human beings, on the company side and on the customer side alike.
Companies that converted to co-ops: when firing the boss changes everything
None of this is theory. Hundreds of documented cases around the world show conventional companies flipping over to the cooperative model. Sometimes out of conviction, more often out of necessity, always with results worth a close look.
The usual script: a company in trouble, an owner who bolts like a thief in the night or gets shoved out the door, and workers who refuse to let their livelihood die and buy the place collectively. In France they call it the SCOP de transformation, a worker-buyout co-op. The UK, the US and Argentina have similar setups under different names. Everywhere the principle is the same: workers taking back control.
The results hit hard. A UK study of cooperative conversions shows most of them back in the black within three years. In the US, industrial companies written off as dead were restarted as co-ops and came back more productive than they were before.
In Argentina, after the 2001 crash, hundreds of factories abandoned by their owners were taken over by their workers and turned into co-ops. Some are still running today, twenty years later, in fields as different as printing, metalwork and health care.
The message is dead simple. The boss and the shareholders were never the essential gear the system keeps telling us they are. They were the obstacle to the company’s prosperity and survival. Kick the parasites out and the thing starts working for everybody again.
Stay alert, or the cooperative model gets watered down
Left unwatched, the cooperative model is no cure-all. Idealizing it blindly would be as dishonest as throwing it out wholesale. Take Mondragón, precisely because it’s the biggest.
Mondragón is undeniably a huge success: average pay above conventional firms, solidarity mechanisms between co-ops when one hits trouble, real internal democracy at the local level. But as the group grew and went global, cracks opened up. Today only a third of the 74,000 people working for the group are actual members of the cooperative. The rest are temp workers in Spain or employees of foreign subsidiaries in China, Mexico or Turkey. None of them get the rights or the benefits the member-owners have.
The picture gets less glamorous. It brings to mind Athenian democracy, the one textbooks love to idealize. Citizens with full rights, a sovereign assembly, active participation in the life of the city. But… right next door, a majority of slaves everyone tends to forget about. That part sells a lot worse.
On top of that, internal pay gaps widened a lot as the group went international. Some executives in the group’s big entities now draw pay that has nothing to do with the founding principles. That’s the old capitalist poison seeping in: the savior-leader theory, and the one about the indispensable executive who deserves the moon because he has charisma and the right diploma. In some of the largest subsidiaries the pay ratio hits 9 to 1, while most of the group’s co-ops keep the gap between the highest and the lowest pay somewhere between 3 and 6 to 1. Nothing like the 300 to 1 you see all over regular multinationals, granted. No argument there. But it’s a real slide away from the founding principles, and it’s a reason to keep watching.
Also, unions aren’t allowed at Mondragón, on the grounds that the co-op members are their own employers. The argument holds for the members, sure. It leaves thousands of non-member employees with nowhere to go. And that too takes us back to the unshared democracy of ancient Greece.
The lesson is clear. Bigness is the natural enemy of cooperative democracy. The larger a structure gets, the more real member participation erodes and the stronger the pull toward classic management habits. That’s no reason to dump the model. It’s a reason to stay alert, and a golden chance to remember that democracy isn’t a done deal, it’s a living thing. On the economic side, it means we have to be done for good with the nonsense of growth for growth’s sake. Because let’s settle this once and for all: no, trees can’t grow all the way to the sky!
Fake co-ops: when finance hijacks the label
The model’s success produced a predictable side effect: capitalist outfits with no shame left grabbing the label for marketing. So the words “mutual” and “cooperative” now get slapped on organizations that don’t respect a single founding principle.
Insurance and banking are the favorite hunting ground for these impostors. Financial groups worth tens of billions of euros sell themselves as mutuals serving their members and run ads about solidarity and being close to people. Behind the smoke screen they do business exactly like any other shark in finance. Boards that lost touch years ago, executives on obscene pay packages, general assemblies turned into social events where turnout among small members scrapes absolute zero and strategy decided far away from anything resembling democracy.
The way it rots is well documented. A genuine co-op or mutual grows, professionalizes its leadership and pulls in managers from the regular private sector who bring their reflexes and their value systems along. Little by little the internal culture tips over… Members stop being sovereign owners and become customers to be retained. The general assembly stops being a place of power and turns into a club where people sip champagne, work through the canapés and congratulate each other on the year’s juicy profits.
Telling a real co-op apart is simple enough. Who actually decides? Who sets executive pay? What’s the turnout at the general assembly? Do the profits go back to the members or into the group’s growth? Four answers are usually enough to rip the mask off.
So the cooperative label guarantees nothing. It’s a promise, and the people who supposedly own the thing have to check it and defend it constantly.
Toward a global cooperative economy: utopia or real alternative?
Whether the cooperative model works isn’t the question. It’s proven. Three million co-ops, a billion members, every sector, every continent, two centuries of it. That debate is over!
The real question sits elsewhere. Why does the model stay marginal against a capitalism that turns out record inequality, one crisis after another and ecological destruction nobody needs to prove anymore? The answer is political, not economic. Capitalism doesn’t dominate because it works better. It dominates because it controls governments, laws, access to credit and the major media. Co-ops have none of those levers. They fight with worse weapons, inside a legal and financial framework built by their opponents, for their opponents.
Good signs keep piling up anyway. Cities like Preston in the UK built local development policy around the cooperative economy, with measurable results on jobs and inequality. In Quebec, the solidarity co-op movement is testing hybrid models that put workers, users and the wider community into the same governance. In tech, platform co-ops are showing up as a straight alternative to Big Tech, delivering the same services without pumping value out to invisible shareholders.
Capitalism survives by convincing you nothing else is possible. Co-ops disprove it every single day, in bakeries, banks, factories, newsrooms and doctors’ offices. Not in some hypothetical future. Now, everywhere, run by ordinary people who stopped waiting for the system to reform itself.
Conclusion: what anarchism actually has to say about the economy
Time to set the record straight! The word anarchism has been smeared, cartooned and weaponized so thoroughly that most people only picture window-smashers and idealists with their heads in the clouds. The system did its dirty work well! Orwell called out that trick a long time ago when he explained that whoever controls language controls thought.
Here’s the truth. Real anarchism, the one built by the major thinkers who shaped political and artistic thought, isn’t chaos. It’s the exact opposite! On the ground, anarchism means concrete alternatives. Alternatives that work, that last and that give everybody a decent life. The proof: the people who actually work in co-ops swear by them.
If you doubt any of that, go read up on Spain in 1936 and the CNT, the anarcho-syndicalist union. Workers took over 3,000 companies across every sector and turned them into common property, and their daily lives got a whole lot better. That’s not communism in the political sense. Absolutely not! It’s applied anarchism, and it worked, giving citizens their full place by kicking out every last one of those destructive monsters of finance. It’s a long subject and it deserves its own posts later on.
In the meantime, we’re going to keep taking capitalism apart brick by brick. And we’re going to build anarchism up brick by brick. Co-ops sit right there among the first bricks, and they sit well.
But the media, sold to capitalism almost across the board, won’t be spreading this kind of idea in a good light. In this story, it’s just you and me. That already makes two 🙂 Decent start. Don’t you think?
So take a few seconds to share this piece. You can even republish it or print it, it’s pure copyleft. The more of us pushing these ideas, the more weight they finally carry in public debate. That’s how we break out together from wage labor, this modern slavery that leaves you just enough to cover bills that keep getting heavier. On top of that we’re stuck watching our planet fall apart day after day for lack of a credible alternative to capitalism. So spread the word about NovaFuture around you, and see you very soon for more adventures in economic alternatives.
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