Page 145 - The_story_of_the_C._W._S._The_jubilee_history_of_the_cooperative_wholesale_society,_limited._1863-1913_(IA_storyofcwsjubill00redf) (1)_Neat

The Root of the Evil.
workers to better efforts. Or, much more generally, they are simply
mothers with children to feed, or trainloads of people going about
their businesses, or citizens of all degrees wanting coal—in short,
everybody, high or low. What superiority there is in the consumer
is simply economic. He it is who creates and determines demand;
and he, alone, justly may exorcise competition. Working from
demand to supply—that is to say, from human need to human
satisfaction—co-operation has to recognise this economic priority.
But the great world of competitive industry has developed under the
idea of making speculatively and fighting for a market; and, largely
for this reason, all the high organisation of factories and offices and
" selUng forces " cannot save capitalist production from being a
series either of feverish or dismal adventures.
Simply on its economic side, this difference between the method
of the store movement and the system of capitalism is radical,
and amidst the commercial fever of 1873 a clear comprehension
of it was especially necessary. Yet the little group of educated,
eloquent, disinterested men who commanded co-operative opinion
failed in just this particular. Their fear of the Wholesale Society
going its own way, and their preconceived idea of self-employing
groups of workers (toiling in the manner of the village blacksmith)
stood between them and reality. Meanwhile the times were too
tempting for many of the working-class co-operators around them.
Men fell to seeking personal independence and comfort through
the formation of joint-stock companies. The fever was infectious.
Even members of the C.W.S. Committee were perilously mixed up
with ventures that came to the Wholesale for money. As private
persons, of course, one and all had the liberty to do what they
chose. The evil was in the cloaking of private profit making by
co-operative righteousness. A regard for men as co-operators was
stretched to cover those instances in which they acted simply as
individual profit seekers. Ordinary company promoters, provided
they flavoured their concoctions with a spice of profit sharing, found
themselves able to borrow names of co-operative honour. So the
entire movement drifted from the idea of supplying the demand
of organised consumers. Even Dr. Watts was persuaded into a
directorship of that disastrous promotion, the Cobden Mills.
Nobody knew where co-operation began or where it ended.
Under these circumstances the lot of the C.W.S. Finance
Committee was not easy. It was impressed upon them that the
C.W.S. were the bankers not merely of the store movement, but of
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