Marx, Marxism and the Cooperative Movement

Abstract

This paper has a dual aim: first, to draw attention to a number of passages in which Marx explicitly extolled the cooperative movement and thereby confute the wrong but widely held assumption that Marx was inimical to the market and rejected cooperation as a production mode even for the transition period; second, to argue that the continuing neglect of Marxists both of the cooperative movement and of the passages from Marx (and Engels) that present a system of producer cooperatives as a new production mode can be traced back in part to the late emergence of an economic theory of producer cooperatives.

Keywords: Marx, Marxism, Socialism and cooperative movement