Cooperation After Capitalism: Mutual Aid and Modernity in the United States

Abstract

The history of cooperatives is often told as a story of contradiction. Scholars observe that the cooperative movement’s institutional formation made it politically malleable—cooperative ideologies have moved between anti-capitalist insurgencies and attempts to secure capitalist markets against existential threat. This dissertation reinterprets this contradiction through an intellectual history of cooperatives in the United States. “Cooperation After Capitalism” traces the cooperative movement’s evolution from the mid-nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century. I follow a constellation of people and organizations who worked to build an independent cooperative economy that would reunite consumption and production. Concentrated in an industrial corridor stretching from New England to the upper Midwest, over time this movement linked local cooperative societies through networks like the Cooperative League of the USA. Drawing on institutional records, movement literature, and personal papers of cooperative advocates, I show how these cooperators adapted long-running mutual aid traditions for the modern area. Expanding beyond accounts that attribute cooperative expansion to acute economic factors (such as wartime inflation), this dissertation situates the cooperative movement on a longer timeline of contested attempts to absorb communal economies into market logics. Rather than a competition between two modern paradigms—capitalism versus socialism—I reframe the struggle for cooperatives as a creative response to compounding defeats. I argue that visions for the end of capitalism and wage labor endured even as cooperators turned to building entities that were privately-owned and market-based. Yet as cooperatives came up against political backlash and economic pressures, the most oppositional cooperative alliances lost ground and the movement withered. This dissertation explores the cooperative movement as a collective reckoning with modernity and a foreclosed pathway to an alternative cooperative economy.