ABSTRACT
The cultural context would seem to have been propitious for the germination of the co-operative idea and the co-operative movement. Schultze-Delitzsch saw credit associations as a way of strengthening the small independent producer, but in Russia, as a result of their cultural origins, these institutions were interpreted as an instrument for developing producers’ artels and co-operatives. Bureaucrats from the lowliest clerk in a village to the provincial governor used a multiplicity of administrative strategies to obstruct the development of co-operatives. For Tugan-Baranovskii nothing could be more blatantly false than the assertion by many advocates of co-operatives that they had a non-class character. The essence of a co-operative was that it should be free and voluntary, independent and democratic and - ‘if the co-operative movement is really seeking to challenge and supersede the capitalist organisation of society’ - have a ‘labour base’.
