ABSTRACT
Why not? The cooperative movement has deep roots in the US and also an historic connection with the First International. For example, the International took its position on the legal limit of an eight hour working day from a declaration of the National Labor Union (NLU) at its 1866 convention in Baltimore, a hallmark in the history of trade unionism.53 Nevertheless, the NLU put cooperation on an even higher plane, and the subsequent development of the cooperative movement in the parts of the United States during the late 1860s and 1870s was substantial, though decidedly Proudhonist and anarchist rather than socialist.54 Cooperatives also developed along regional lines. In the South, African Americans forged local consumer cooperatives that demonstrated community control and democratic decisionmaking within the wider framework of self-help. Their leading theoretician, W.E.B. Du Bois, called for “a cooperative Negro industrial system in America” as part of a broader vision and belief that what lay in the future was “the ultimate triumph of some form of Socialism the world over; that is, common ownership and control of the means of production and equality of income.”55
