In spite of their steady expansion and the growth of their turnover, the cooperatives as they exist and operate today are merely dim shadows of what they were designed to be in the ambitious schemes of their first promoters. Robert Owen, William King, and Ferdinand Lassalle planned a cooperative organization of industrial production as a “New System of Society.” They wanted to eliminate the entrepreneurs and the capitalists altogether.

The capitalistic market economy, the system of private profit-seeking enterprise, is essentially social cooperation under the division of labor. The various specialized enterprises and branches of industry cooperate with one another. The objective of each of them is collaboration for the production of all those goods and services which the consumers want to use. Within each enterprise, the various divisions and subdivisions cooperatively turn out products which are delivered to other enterprises which again use them for the production of more elaborate products.

Within the cooperative movement of all countries, it is possible to distinguish two main groups: the farmers’ cooperatives and the consumers’ cooperatives of the non-farming population.

The objectives of the farmers’ cooperatives are the marketing of farm products on the one hand and the distribution of farm supplies and the consumers’ goods which the farmers require on the other hand. Both objectives are in themselves perfectly legitimate and could, apart from the problem of tax and credit privileges, be approved by everybody.

Capitalism needs neither propaganda nor apostles. Its achievements speak for themselves. Capitalism delivers the goods.

But the cooperatives cannot do without passionate propaganda. They call their promotional campaigning “cooperative education.”

The avowed objective of consumers’ cooperatives and of the farmers’ purchasing cooperatives is to provide their members with commodities and services at lower prices than those which they would have to expend in the absence of these associations. This is a perfectly legitimate task. We shall have to examine whether and how cooperatives really attain this end.

The romantic revolt against logic and science does not limit itself to the sphere of social phenomena and the sciences of human action. It is a revolt against our entire culture and civilization. Both Spann and Sombart demand the renunciation of scientific knowledge and the return to the faith and the bucolic conditions of the Middle Ages, and all Germans who are not in the Marxist camp joyfully agree with them.

Subjectivist economics would be guilty of an omission if it did not also concern itself with the objections that have been raised against it from political and factional standpoints.