Cooperative Commonwealth
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Bibliographic Summary
Pat Conaty:
". It pops up like a wildflower field when times get really tough. You and find the concept in the Diggers under the first years of the Cromwellian commonwealth. Robert Owen's writings on Villages of Co-operation and Mutual Unity before 1820 and then with the Chartist Land Company in the 1840s, then again in the Long Depression from the 1870s to 1890s when William Morris wrote about this vernacular concept in the 1880s and so did Laurence Gronlund in the USA to go beyond just Henry George. Morris came up with a lovely word, Commonweal.
Lawyers seem to be interesting. Gronlund was a US attorney and so was Henry Demarest Lloyd who in 1894 published his best selling attack on Rockefeller and the Robber Barons, This was called, Wealth versus Commonwealth. Lloyd came to the UK thereafter to study the early work co-ops and the early housing co-ops and then wrote a less known book on peer to peer co-op models in a book about Tenant and Labour Copartnerships. Guild socialists in the 1920s were trying to make it happen. Then in Canada the New Democratic Party takes the CCF name. Some talk in the 1970s again about all this. I think what Mike Lewis and I have argued for in the Resilience Imperative is the most up to date source.
EP Thompson's book the Making of the English Working Class is all about the culture of co-operative commonwealth. In the German speaking world Gustav Landauer, Silvio Gesell and Martin Buber were all writing about this before and after the First World War. Unique in the Frankfurt School, Erich Fromm picks these arguments up in Escape from Freedom and the Sane Society (this book during the McCarthy era of 1950s USA). So we are just rediscovering a vernacular Commonweal." (via email, November 2014)