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Critique of elitist, individualist and extreme-collective economic systems, philosophies and practices

Synergism and sharing paradigm in collective productivity and prosperity.

Promotion of successful enterprises that are broad and popular in ownership, management and operation in the mold of genuine cooperatives

Promotion of bigger roles for cooperatives in major industries and the economy

  1. Total Human Development and Harmony Through Synergism

  2. Holistic Health Care and Medicine

  3. Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature 

  4. Sense of History and Sense of Mission

  5. Civics and Democratic Governance

  6. Culture as Community Creativity

  7. Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education

  8. Gender Sensitivity, Equality & Harmony

  9. Reconstructive/Restor-ative Justice

10. Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development

11. Synergetic Leadership and Organizations

12. Appropriate/Adaptive Technology

13. Mutual Enrichment of Families and Friendships

14. Human Dignity and Human Harmony: Human Rights and Peace

15. Aesthetics Without Boundaries: 'Art from the Heart'   

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Beyond Simple 'Concern':

Rootedness in Community

By Agaton Cruzada

Former Board Member, SanibLakas ng Taongbayan Foundation; member, Advocates of Cooperative Education on Synergism (ACES).

This article was first published in LightShare Digest.

THE SEVENTH Principle, the latest one to be added to the evolving list issued by the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), situates the social synergy of personal enterprises in the community. It mandates a measure of concern, the resulting activities of which may vary from cooperative to cooperative, depending on inner capabilities, breadth of consciousness and specific milieu.

There are at least two related elements in the Seventh Principle that should be pondered on: the cooperatives’ concern for society, and working for sustainable development.

The first element — the cooperatives’ outward look, respect for humanity and concern for community — is inextricably tied up with the historical role and the “social movement” factor that molded the ideals of cooperativism and fuelled the formation and spread of cooperatives as a movement.

The second element, which sets the movement’s mission towards sustainable development, requires multi-dimensional and wholistic approaches for ad- dressing the short, medium and long-term needs of the community and the bigger society. It is about building self-propelling and empowered groups, structures and localities that are oriented towards exercising increasing influences to effect bigger and more complex changes in various spheres: economic, political, social, cultural and environmental.

“Concern for the Community” (Principle 7) was the last one to be added to ICA’s list of Cooperative Principles. But rootedness in the community has always been a guiding principle, indeed the very seedbed, of cooperativism right from the very start.

Studies have revealed that cooperatives in a given society that took the form of a “mass phenomenon,” i.e., cooperatives working for a common vision combined with some kind of unifying methods and structure for achieving it, and those waged in step with the wider people’s movements of their time, have all flourished to be sustainable and effective players in shaping their own societies.

The social theories and movements against extreme and widespread deprivation, hunger and oppression in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries gave birth to coope-rativism as a form of social response.

Cooperation or cooperativism was proposed as alternative to the decadent, profit-driven, acquisitive and individualistic system that has consistently favored the concentration of control of capital, farms, industries, and political power in the hands of the rich minority.

The early advocates of cooperation acted and organized. They experimented on building new communities, protested, lobbied, saved, built farms and industries, traded, offered housing and social services, educated the young and the old, and linked with varied groups who were likewise searching for social change to realize their vision of a cooperative system or community.

The attempts that proved effective in bringing about long-lasting impact to the unique character of cooperatives were the ones that had a unifying vision of the society and socio-economic relationships they wanted to have.

Such is the historic contribution of the Rochedale Pioneers. It was founded in the midst of widespread poverty and social uproar in Rochedale Town by 28 Owenites, social activists, chartists, religious reformers, teetotalers, and trade unionists, whose common desire was to see the triumph of equity, equality, human rights, and democracy. They blazed a trail through self-help, self-responsibility and interdependence, setting the course of cooperation’s modern history. Many other 19th century cooperatives in the United Kingdom worked hand in hand with the labor, women, religious reform and temperance movements.

At the same period and thereafter, the credit unions and rural cooperatives flourished in Germany, Denmark, Canada, United States and Japan with the support of their respective farmers’ movements.
The 1995 ICA Statement’s Background Paper resonates the need to have a systems view of cooperatives and the inevitability of a systems approach to social change:

Cooperatives today are confronted by economic, social and cultural problems of greater magnitude. These problems are associated with fundamental changes in the human condition around the world. They include issues raised by rapid increases in the global population, growing pressures on the environment, increasing concentration of economic power in the hands of the small minority of the world’s population, varying crises besetting communities within all kinds of cultures, deepening cycles of poverty evident in too many parts of the globe, and increasingly frequent outbursts of “ethnic” warfare…

The Advocates of Cooperative Education on Synergism (ACES) group has maintained that cooperatives must not only have “concern for the community.” Cooperatives must be rooted in the community! This is not a matter of being altruistic benefactors of the community but conscious stakeholders in the latter’s weal and woe.
We’ve been asked about federations, unions and “apex” cooperatives— what communities should they be rooted in? What is of utmost importance is that primary cooperatives should be deeply and firmly rooted in local communities.

And the rootedness of “national” cooperative formations would be in the actual synergy of these primary cooperatives that form them. After all, being “national” doesn’t merely mean being based in the national capital region with some commanding and fund-centralizing connections with primary cooperatives. Moreover, there is no “national reality” to speak of unless it is a real synergy of local communities.

For the cooperative movement in the Philippines to have any rootedness in community, it must be a strong synergy of all primary cooperatives rooted in their respective local communities that, in turn, synergize to form the nation.

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