Theory and Vision · 7 min read

Cooperatives didn’t emerge from thin air. Their roots run deep into socialist thought — collective ownership, democratic control, and the belief that work should benefit the people doing it. Understanding that connection doesn’t just explain where cooperatives came from. It explains why they work.

1844 — year the first modern cooperative was founded · 28 Rochdale Pioneers who started it all · 3 core socialist principles at the root of every co-op



Not the Same Thing — But the Same Soil



Let’s be clear upfront: cooperatives are not socialism. You can have a worker-owned bakery in a fully capitalist economy. You can have a food co-op in Texas and a housing co-op in Tokyo with no socialist political agenda attached.

But the ideas that make cooperatives work — collective ownership, democratic governance, shared surplus — come directly from the socialist tradition.



Where the Ideas Come From



The cooperative movement and socialist thought grew up together in the 19th century, both responding to the same crisis: industrial capitalism was concentrating wealth at the top while the people doing the work had nothing. Marx himself watched this unfold directly — he singled out England’s early producer cooperatives in his 1864 Inaugural Address to the International Working Men’s Association, writing that “the value of these great social experiments cannot be over-rated,” because they proved a factory could run “without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands.” For Marx, cooperative labor represented what he called a victory of the political economy of labour over the political economy of property — proof, by deed rather than argument, that workers didn’t need an owner standing over them to organize production.

Source: Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association, 1864 — Marx, via Marxists Internet Archive

Illustration of five people planting a sapling together above ground, its roots below descending into a glowing underground circle where twelve figures sit in a democratic council meeting, with a smokestack pyramid of workers on the left contrasted against a solarpunk community of wind turbines, solar panels, and gardens on the right.

Robert Owen, one of the founding figures of both movements, didn’t just write theory — he built. He founded New Harmony, Indiana in 1825 as a planned cooperative community in the United States, and backed a similar project at Orbiston in Scotland around the same time, arguing in his 1813 work A New View of Society that human character is formed by circumstances, not innate virtue or vice — that if you changed the conditions people worked and lived in, you changed the people themselves.

The Rochdale Pioneers — 28 workers in England, popularly remembered as weavers, who founded the first modern cooperative in 1844 — were steeped in Owenite socialist thought. Of the roughly 30 identifiable founders, 15 were Owenite socialists, with only about 10 actually working as weavers; the rest included cloggers, tailors, joiners, and cabinet makers, alongside some ex-Chartists and temperance campaigners. Their founding principles weren’t invented from scratch. Even their chosen name signaled it — “Equitable” was one of Robert Owen’s favorite words, drawn from his own plan for “Equitable Labour Exchanges.” They were socialist values translated into a business structure.

Each fruit is a living institution where those root values are practiced every day — not as ideology, but as operations.



What Socialism Contributes to Cooperatives



The socialist tradition gave the cooperative movement four things it couldn’t have built alone:

  1. A critique of capitalism — socialism named the problem clearly: when capital owns labor, labor loses. Cooperatives are a structural answer built into the legal DNA of the enterprise.
  2. A theory of value — socialist economics insists that human labor is the primary source of value, not capital or machines. Cooperatives operationalize this by making workers owners.
  3. A vision of democracy beyond the ballot box — political democracy without economic democracy is incomplete. Cooperatives extend democratic control into the workplace itself.
  4. Solidarity as infrastructure — workers’ power comes from collective action. Cooperative networks like Radical Routes in the UK and Cooperation New Orleans put this into practice as loan funds and mutual aid systems, not just slogans.



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What Cooperatives Contribute Back



The relationship isn’t one-directional. Cooperatives have given the socialist tradition something equally important: proof.



The Solarpunk Connection



Solarpunk is the growing cultural and political movement that imagines a future that is both technologically advanced and radically equitable. It rejects the false choice between progress and justice. Cooperatives are solarpunk economics — decentralized, democratic, rooted in community, oriented toward collective flourishing rather than individual extraction.

The roots are socialist. The fruits are cooperative. The future, if we build it right, is solarpunk.



“There’s a systemic crisis, and out of necessity, people have started experimenting, at the local level, with different ways of doing things… We may, in fact, be moving toward a new economy — and most people don’t even know it.” — Gar Alperovitz, interview with Orion Magazine



Why This Matters Right Now



The old story — that markets left alone produce justice, that growth benefits everyone, that individual ownership is the only path to security — is failing visibly and measurably.

A new story is being written. It’s being written by people building cooperatives, land trusts, credit unions, and solidarity economies in cities and towns everywhere. You don’t have to call yourself a socialist to build a cooperative.

But it helps to know where the ideas came from — because the people who built those roots knew something important. They knew that another economy wasn’t just possible. It was necessary.

And it still is.



Keep Going





This is part of our Theory and Vision series. Want to go deeper? Join the Solidarity Economy platform and be part of building it.



Written by the Cooperative Codebase team — Aaron, Israel, and Jamie. Part of the Solidarity Economy Marketplace. Last updated: July 2026.