Co-operative movement

The Co-operative movement is often identified solely with retailing, and its foundation ascribed to the ‘Rochdale Pioneers’ who set up the first store to pay dividends to members on the basis of how much they had purchased. It originated in the ideas of Robert Owen, the factory owner and social thinker of New Lanark. During the 1820s and 1830s many groups of people started on the road to creating an alternative society based on mutual assistance rather than competitive individualism, the ‘New Moral World’ whose superiority would drive out capitalism. The first step was to set up a shop, whose surpluses could then be applied to manufacturing and ultimately farming. The Rochdale Pioneers system rendered Co-operation attractive to those who sought to save as they spent. After the Pioneers began in 1844 the movement spread rapidly, making a distinctive virtue of refusing credit. Co-operation was especially popular in the textile towns of Lancashire and west Yorkshire in the mid-Victorian years. Societies were locally based, but theCo-operative Wholesale Society co-ordinatedpurchasing and then manufacturing for the whole movement from 1863. Although most members came to view the dividend as the most important aspect, the Co-op never lost its idealism completely, providing classes and libraries, supporting strikes, and (through its Women's Guild) offering political confidence to working-class women. The societies were democratically run and in 1918 a Co-operative Party was set up, which ran in harness with the Labour Party. After 1945 the movement faced difficulties. Societies amalgamated, local identities were lost, the dividend itself was abandoned, and the Co-op seemed to many to have lost its way.