Mr. Gerald Balfour's speech to the Co-operators at the Crystal
Palace on Tuesday was not only remarkably able and luminous, but will, we hope, prove of real value. Like all out- siders who address Co-operators, he urged the importance of co-operative production, but admitted the difficulties of the problem with more insight than do most critics of the Co-opera- tive movement. Personally, we should be intensely glad to see greater encouragement given to co-operative production, but we cannot disguise from ourselves that in co-operative pro- duction you begin at the wrong end. Those who produce in the hope of finding customers must to a certain extent be speculators, and such speculation does not fit in with the essential ideal of co-operation, which is the self-supply of the various needs of life. Men who club together to get boots cheap, and set up a factory to supply those boots, are really doing a different thing from the men who co-operate to make fine linen, not to wear themselves, but to sell. Prob- ably the best form of co-operative production would be a factory run by the Wholesale, in which every worker was a member of a store which bought every article from the Wholesale. In this way the workers would get, indirectly, the profits of their industry, or, at any rate, a good share of them.
Previous page
