Developing democracy: cooperatives and democratic theory

Impoverished communities often suffer not only from the lack of wealth, but also from a kind of democratic deficit. To be poor means not only not having money, but also being buffeted by the winds of fortune, with little sense of control over the major forces that commonly affect people's lives. As a model of development, cooperatives have been promoted not only as a model for community wealth-building, but also as a form of empowerment due to their inherently democratic nature. But how democratic are they, really? This paper explores this question from the perspective of democratic theory, using a theoretical framework developed by the nineteenth-century political economist William Thompson, who laid out the principles on which the cooperative movement is based. An important element of Thompson's theory is that the cooperative structure alters the socio-economic relations of their members, aligning their interests with one another on the basis of a strong principle of equality. It is this alignment of interests on the basis of equality that gives cooperatives their strongly democratic character. However, the paper finds that the democratic nature of cooperatives is challenged by a number of factors. These include internal dynamics, such as managerialism and size, and external dynamics such as the tensions that may arise between workers and consumers or between members' interests and those of the broader community. The existence of these tensions and dynamics means that an effective community wealth-building strategy needs to incorporate mechanisms for the harmonisation of interests and the integration of different perspectives in a network model that promotes internal exchange and integration.