by Michael Bettencourt

Created on: April 19, 2008

CO-OPS PROVIDE AN ALTERNATIVE

James Loewen, in his critique of American history textbooks, "Lies My Teacher Told Me," accuses publishers and textbook acceptance boards of promoting a kind of nationalistic piety that does not accord with the facts of the American past and present. This boosterish approach to American history states that America is exceptional and on a continual upward arc of progress, has found a balance between political democracy and economic capitalism, and has prospered because of individualistic entrepreneurial vigor and the rigors of the free market.

One need not go along with the corrective histories he presents in his chapters to agree with his point that the way our society portrays itself in these textbooks obscures, if not obliterates, the many alternative paths Americans have created for themselves as they've struggled to protect the inclusive dictates of democracy against the exclusive Darwinism of the capitalist system.

One such tradition is the rich history of coperative associations in the United States, which include, to name a few, the somewhat staid farming and utilities co-ops, the more experimental, and sometimes outlandish, communes of the 19th and 20th centuries, and even the Amish and the Quakers. Despite this fertile diversity of approaches, all modern co-operative arrangements have shared one specific principle: that the depredations visited upon common people by the capitalist economic system can only be blunted by uniting their strengths in what Ann Hoyt of the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives once called "a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise." In other words, co-ops depend upon what many believe constitutes the best part of the American character: democratic activity in service to the common good.

But do co-ops really work? In the United States, the co-op movement, despite playing a relatively small role in the economy, still include tens of thousands of food and housing and other kinds of co-ops. Co-op America is one example of a broadly based organization that promotes investment in "green" businesses and runs a wide-ranging education effort to teach people how to reduce their consumption and invest money in sustainable community development. And believe it or not, communes still exist in the United States. Despite amazing pressures to the contrary, the co-op spirit endures here.

In other parts of the world, that spirit is much stronger, and co-operative arrangements are quite economically

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