ABSTRACT
Holyoake’s pamphlet illustrates how co-operative ideologues played an important role in bringing the consumer into the discourse of political economy. Co-operation is an industrial scheme for delivering the public from the conspiracy of capitalists, traders, and manufacturers, to make the labourer work for the least and the consumer pay the utmost for whatever he needs of money, machines, or merchandise. Co-operation effects this deliverance by taking the workman and the public into partnership in every form of business it devises. In course of time, co-operation, which then discovered that the secret of its policy and power was the service of the public, took it into its fertile and good-natured head to try co-operative manufactures. Co-operation had for once a kindly word, as it always had a latent respect, for him whose forefathers, during a thousand generations, never had before known a disinterested friend; for no persons cared for the Consumer unless they wanted him to buy something.
