the overthrow of capitalism, and to allow the cooperative book-keepers to plume themselves on the profits they had snatched from the petty traders. Cooperation adapted itself to capitalism, and came to play a definite part in the capitalist system of distribution. It was even advantageous to capitalism, for it reduced the cost of the capitalist apparatus of distribution, and thus set free a certain amount of trading capital for use in productive industry. On the other hand, cooperation, by reducing the number of petty middlemen and by bringing the consumer into closer contact with the large-scale capitalist producer, accelerated the exchange of commodities, guaranteed the prompt and conscientious payment of obligations, and in the last resort made the position of the industrial reserve army even worse than before — for the members of the industrial reserve have often been inclined to take refuge in the life of petty trade. Moreover, numerous investigations have shown that as far as cooperation among the peasants was concerned, its advantages were mostly confined to the vigorous and well-to-do peasants, whereas the poor peasants profited by it very little.
Considering the class to which their members respectively belong, the distributive cooperatives may be divided into workers’ cooperatives, peasants’ cooperatives, and the cooperatives of comparatively well-to-do town-dwellers — petty bourgeois and civil servants. The workers’ cooperatives always form the extreme left wing among cooperative institutions in general; but as regards the class organisations of the proletariat they constitute the extreme right wing. In the peasant cooperatives, the well-to-do peasants have the decisive voice. In the third type of cooperative, the predominant place is occupied by the petty bourgeois intellectuals, of the same calibre as those whose mentality has dominated the whole cooperative movement — persons who believe that cooperation has a great mission for the destruction of capitalism by means of cooperative vouchers and loaves of cooperative bread.
The true nature of the cooperative movement was disclosed by the proletarian revolution in Russia. Except for some of the workers’