For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America by John Curl (review)

One of the problems for those studying co-operatives is the lack of recent scholarly interest in this subject, both in research and teaching. In the US literature, particularly, there is a silence on co-operatives and communes. Recently published works have focused on cooperatives in either a specific period or region. There is a clear problem with this lack of interest when the United Nations endorsed this business model in 2012 through declaring that year the International Year of Co-operatives.

John Curl’s book is to be welcomed for its efforts to catalogue the various forms of co-operatives and communalism in the USA over its entire recorded history. He notes, “both movements are for social justice and personal liberation.” (279) He distinguishes between co-operatives, which “are limited to particular functions” and communalism, which “invites members to join in more intensive and inclusive ways.” (279) The main focus of the book is on co-operatives, with a shorter last section of the book being devoted to communalism. The book also is a personal journey as the author documents his own experiences with co-operatives, primarily in the Bay Area of California, notably the Berkeley Consumer Co-operative and the Heartwood Co-operative Woodshop, of which he has been a longstanding member. While the focus is on the US, there are some references to impact of these movements on Canada, with a discussion of the influence of the North Dakota Non-Partisan League on the formation of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in the 1930s (187) and the formation of African American communal colonies in Canada in the mid-19th century. (296–300)

Part 1 of the book, which examines co-operatives and co-operative movements, begins with a discussion of cooperation among Native Americans and then early European settlers. Curl notes that early worker co-operatives tended to be a strategy related to strikes by workers rather than permanent attempts to create an alternative to capitalist enterprises. Curl also argues that the consumer cooperative movement in the US was nativist and predated the influence of the UK Rochdale consumer co-operatives. He notes this particularly with the development in Boston in 1845 of the Protective Union, which did not require members to buy shares in the store, as with the Rochdale model, but required them to pay an initiation fee and small monthly subscription. Eventually, as Curl notes, most of the “American consumer cooperative movement would turn to the Rochdale system.” (57) Throughout the book he notes the tensions that arise from Rochdale consumer co-operatives denying their employees self-management in their stores and manufacturing facilities. This was particularly an issue in the Berkeley Consumer Co-operative, for example, which denied workers a direct voice in co-operative management. Finally during the 1980s it was proposed to set up a hybrid consumer-worker cooperative to save the Co-operative.

Curl notes in his discussion the significance of labour movement attitudes towards co-operatives. While the Knights of Labour encouraged both consumer co-operatives and worker co-operatives, the American Federation of Labor (afl) limited itself to “bread-and-butter issues” (104) and supported the wage system as permanent. The afl rejected worker cooperatives because they obscured the line between employer and employee and were associated with radicals. This has remained the view of the afl and later the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (afl-cio). The view was reinforced by the tendency of worker co-operatives to be established in near bankrupt firms where despite their efforts the workplace still fails and bankers wind up “the only real winners.” (232) The afl did endorse consumer co-operatives as the “twin-sister” (140) of trade unionism and saw them as a particularly useful tool in fighting profiteering and price rises.

Curl also explores the relationship between farmers and co-operation. He adopts the frontier thesis to...