Conference "Co-operatives and Capitalism: Economy, Morality, and Transformation"

The co-operative movement is a “quiet giant”. At least 12 percent of people on earth are co-operators of any of the 3 million co-operatives. Co-operatives provide jobs or work opportunities to 10% of the employed population. Historically, they have promised a more humane way of doing business, maybe even a more humane capitalism, or a completely different economic order and society altogether. After the Global Financial Crisis and against the backdrop of the huge challenge before us—to transform the existing economic order towards sustainable and more equitable outcomes—, co-operatives, once more, seem to hold promise of transforming capitalist forms of ownership and further economic democracy. The United Nations declared 2025 the second Year of Cooperatives (after 2012) “as a way of promoting cooperatives and raising awareness of their contribution to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and to overall social and economic development”, especially in developing countries.

Our intuition for this workshop is that this is the perfect time to reassess the history of the co-operative movement focusing on its relationship to capitalism: to re-evaluate both, co-operatives and capitalism. The goal is to move the history of co-operatives from the periphery to the center of debates on the development, critique, and transformation of global capitalism. We propose three interconnected focal points that use the co-operative as a lens to address critical gaps and generate new questions in the New History of Capitalism, Global Intellectual History, and the Global History of the Co-operative Movement.

1. Cooperatives as Agents of Incorporation
While the New History of Capitalism has powerfully traced the rise of finance, industry, and commodification, its gaze has often stopped at the city limits or the plantation gate. Co-operatives were a primary institutional mechanism for integrating the smallholder countryside—in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa—into national and global capitalist circuits in the late 19th and 20th centuries. They were also instrumental to develop modern mass consumption, facilitated by building global commodity chains in Europe and North America. This focus shifts the story from one of passive incorporation to active institutional negotiation, where co-operatives become central to understanding the “how” of capitalism's geographical and social expansion.

Key questions:
- How did credit, marketing, and consumer co-operatives function as vehicles for embedding rural producers in cash economies, standardizing production for distant markets, and creating new debt and dependency relations?
- Did they act as a “soft” alternative to violent enclosure or a complementary tool for state-led modernization?

2. The Intellectual History of Capitalism Through the Co-operative Lens

The co-operative movement generated a vast, global, and contentious intellectual terrain where the very nature of capitalism was dissected and alternatives were theorized and practiced. Co-operators developed a sophisticated critique of capitalism with the aim to transform, “moralize”, or even supersede the economic order in a “Co-operative Commonwealth”. This track positions co-operatives at the heart of ideological struggles over capitalism’s past and future.

Key questions:
- What were co-operative analyses of capitalism and how did they relate to well-known classical positions?
- How did co-operators criticize capitalism: as an economic system and/or a cause of moral degradation of the working classes?
- Which alternatives did they envision based on their critique—gradual reform, state capitalism, or “Gemeinwirtschaft”?

3. Testing Transformation: Did Co-operatives Transform Capitalism?

The ultimate promise of co-operatives was to transform fundamental capitalist categories and introduce moral values into business. By comparing different forms—like Rochdale consumer co-operatives, Mondragón-style producer co-operatives, or state-controlled colonial marketing boards—, this track moves from theory to practice, asking empirically: Did they?

Key Questions:
- Did shared ownership truly disrupt the capital-labor relationship, or did it create new hierarchies (managerialism in large co-ops, exclusion of non-members)?
- Were co-operatives vessels for incremental reform, pockets of resistance, or laboratories for post-capitalist social relations that were often re-absorbed or defeated?

Through this agenda, the workshop will position co-operatives not as a nostalgic sidebar, but as a central, contradictory, and essential force in the global history of capitalism—a force that simultaneously built, critiqued, and transformed the modern economic order. By looking “through the lens of critique” we aim to understand both capitalism and co-operatives differently.