Rochdale Principles

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Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

“Twentieth-century economics assured us”: Kate Raworth, “A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow,” TED video, 15:53, April 2018, www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_should_be_designed_to_thrive_not_grow. “Can anything more insane be imagined?”: Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness, and Other Essays (London: Routledge, 2004), 6, www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html. known as the Rochdale Principles: “The Rochdale Principles,” Co-operative Heritage Trust, accessed September 1, 2018, www.rochdalepioneersmuseum.coop/about-us/the-rochdale-principles. one study of cooperatives: Virginie Pérotin, “What Do We Really Know About Worker Co-operatives?” Co-operatives UK, no date, www.uk.coop/resources/what-do-we-really-know-about-worker-co-operatives. “pre-written into code”: “What Is DAO,” Cointelegraph, accessed July 31,2016, https://cointelegraph.com/ethereum-for-beginners/what-is-dao#how-daos-work.

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Meanwhile, it’s possible that one part of the future of incorporation is actually a blast from the past. Cooperatives, which are jointly owned and democratically controlled organizations, have existed for hundreds of years, with the earliest examples emerging in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Co-ops generally embody a set of ideals known as the Rochdale Principles: (1) voluntary and open membership, (2) democratic member control, (3) economic participation by members, (4) autonomy and independence, (5) education, training, and information, (6) cooperation among cooperatives, and (7) concern for community. These manifest in an organization that is essentially for the people, by the people.

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Sharing used to mean something we do with the people we know and trust. In the so-called sharing economy, it means more convenient transactions that take place on distant servers somewhere. Convenience is great, but all along there has been a real sharing economy at work, the cooperative economy. One can trace the modern cooperative movement to the Rochdale Principles of 1844, in England, though it had precursors among ancient tribes, monasteries, and guilds around the world. The rudiments of this stuff could be basic common sense: shared ownership and governance among people who depend on an enterprise, shared profits, and coordination among enterprises rather than competition.

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From the history of cooperatives in the United States, we learned that they are indeed able to offer a more stable income and a dignified workplace. While the necessary enthusiasm of makers doesn’t always sit well with justifiably skeptical scholars, their dialogue is important. Jointly, they could rewrite the Rochdale principles for the digital economy, for instance. Education is an essential cornerstone of platform cooperativism. Platform co-ops should consider the following principles. The first one, which I explained already, is communal ownership of platforms and protocols. Second, platform co-ops have to be able to offer income security and good pay for all people working for the co-op.

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BUILDING THE PEOPLE’S OWNERSHIP ECONOMY THROUGH UNION CO-OPS MICHAEL PECK Cooperatives and unions started out their organized lives together. In gritty Northwest England, during the Industrial Age’s heyday—Manchester in the 1840s—the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers composed their Rochdale Principles, which became the foundation of the modern cooperative movement. It was in this same region, around the same time, that industrial labor unions were beginning to flourish. Since then, diverging histories, experiences, and destinies have caused cooperatives and unions to run along mostly autarchic paths, sometimes parallel, too infrequently connecting.

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike by Eugene W. Holland

business cycle, capital controls, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, commons-based peer production, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, deskilling, Eben Moglen, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lewis Mumford, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-Fordism, price mechanism, Richard Stallman, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, slashdot, Stuart Kauffman, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wage slave, working poor, Yochai Benkler

The federation thus retains the principles of equality and self-sufficiency that are crucial to its success as a self-organizing and self-managed production cooperative completely independent of hired labor and private capital.3 Of course, the concept and institution of cooperatives has a long his­ tory, dating back to the late eighteenth century. Among the best-known early cooperatives was the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society, which was founded in Rochdale, England, in 1844 and whose Rochdale Principles have since become a touchstone for cooperative organizing around the world (including Latin America). Unlike Robert Owen’s slightly earlier programs of philanthropy and community development from on high, the Rochdale Society was formed bottom up by a group of destitute weav­ ers who pooled meager resources to establish a consumer cooperative; its success quickly spawned cooperative housing and several manufacturing cooperatives in Rochdale itself and eventually generated an actual coopera­ tive movement throughout the industrializing world.4Within two decades, it was already a force to be reckoned with by Marx and Engels and other organizers of the First International.

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Healy, Llamas, Weaving, and Organic Chocolate, chapter 6. 4. O n the history of the Rochdale pioneers, see Brown, Rochdale Pioneers, and H olyoake, History o f the Rochdale Pioneers. On the cooperative movem ent and workers cooperatives more generally, see Adams, Putting Democracy to Work, esp. 11-14 on the Rochdale principles, and Dow, Governing the Firm. 5. Indeed, M arx claimed th a t the cooperative movement constituted a “greater victory of the political economy of labor over the political economy of property [than the Ten H ours Bill]” limiting the legal length of the w orking day. See M arx, “Inaugural Address of the International Working M en’s Association (The First In­ ternational),” in M arx and Engels, Collected Works, 20: 5 -1 3 ; quotation is from 10 . 6.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

“Co-op Facts & Figures,” National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, 2013, http://www .nreca.coop/members/Co-opFacts/Pages/default.aspx. 60. Ibid. 61. “Cooperative Principles and Values,” International Cooperative Alliance, 2011, http://www.cdi .coop/icaprinciples.html. 62. Ibid. 63. “The Rochdale Principles,” Rochdale Pioneers Museum, http://www.rochdalepioneersmuseum .coop/about-us/the-rochdale-principles. 64. “Cooperative Facts and Figures,” International Cooperative Alliance, http://ica.coop/en/whats -co-op/co-operative-facts-figures (accessed September 4, 2013); “Cooperatives Around the World,” 2012 International Year of Cooperatives, 2012, http://usa2012.coop/about-co-ops /cooperatives-around-world (accessed November 12, 2013). 65.