The Cooperative Movement: History, Growth & Global Reach

What Is the Cooperative Movement?

The cooperative movement is a global social and economic phenomenon in which people across industries, countries, and political systems have organized enterprises along cooperative principles — member ownership, democratic governance, and distribution of benefits based on use rather than capital investment.

It is not a single organization or ideology. The cooperative movement encompasses dairy farmers in New Zealand, urban housing cooperatives in Berlin, worker-owned factories in the Basque Country, rural electric utilities in Kansas, and platform workers in Brooklyn. What binds them is a common organizational model and, loosely, a shared set of values formalized by the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA).

By 2024, the ICA estimates there are more than 3 million cooperative enterprises operating worldwide, with combined revenues exceeding $2 trillion and a combined membership of approximately 1 billion people — more than one in eight people on earth belongs to at least one cooperative.

Origins: The Rochdale Moment

The movement's founding date is conventionally set at 21 December 1844, when the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers opened its first store at 31 Toad Lane, Rochdale, Lancashire, England.

The 28 founding members — mostly weavers and other textile workers — each contributed £1 to start the store. In the first year, the store sold butter, sugar, flour, oatmeal, and candles, generating £710 in trade and £22 in profit. Simple as this was, the Rochdale model introduced three innovations that defined the movement:

Selling at market price (rather than cost price), which generated a genuine surplus
Distributing that surplus as a patronage dividend to members in proportion to purchases
Documenting the operating rules clearly enough that others could replicate them

By 1850, dozens of stores had adopted the Rochdale rules. By 1870, the movement had spread to France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and the United States. The Rochdale Pioneers' actual store building still stands and operates as a museum.

Key Milestones in Cooperative History

1844–1880: The European Foundation

The Rochdale experiment coincided with parallel developments across Europe:

1849: Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen founded the first rural credit cooperative in Flammersfeld, Germany, to provide low-cost credit to farmers excluded from commercial banking. Raiffeisen cooperatives expanded rapidly through Germany and Austria, eventually spreading to India, Japan, and across the developing world.
1864: Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch organized urban credit cooperatives (Volksbanken) for small artisans and merchants in Germany.
1863: The Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) was founded in Manchester to supply retail cooperatives at wholesale prices — creating the first cooperative supply chain.
1869: The Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society was established, later merging with CWS.

1895: The ICA and International Coordination

The International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) was founded in London in 1895, providing the movement its first international coordinating body. The founding members included cooperative federations from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United States.

The ICA established a common identity for cooperatives globally, published cooperative statistics, and eventually codified the Statement on the Co-operative Identity in 1995 — the definitive modern statement of cooperative values, principles, and definition.

1900–1940: Agricultural and Credit Expansion

The early 20th century saw cooperative growth concentrated in agriculture and credit:

US agricultural cooperatives grew dramatically under the Capper-Volstead Act of 1922, which exempted agricultural cooperatives from antitrust prosecution, allowing farmers to jointly market their products.
Land O'Lakes was founded in 1921 by Minnesota dairy farmers. It is now the second-largest US dairy cooperative.
Credit Unions spread widely in North America under the advocacy of Alphonse Desjardins, who founded the first North American caisse populaire in Lévis, Quebec, in 1900.
SEWA (Self-Employed Women's Association) in India, while not founded until 1972, has roots in this period's cooperative labor organizing tradition.

1956–1975: The Mondragon Experiment

The most discussed cooperative development of the 20th century began in Arrasate (Mondragón), Spain, in 1956, when Father José María Arizmendiarrieta guided five workers to create ULGOR, a cooperative producing paraffin heaters and cookers. Arizmendiarrieta had founded a technical school in 1943 and spent years educating workers in cooperative economics before launching the first enterprise.

By 1975, the Mondragon group included 40 cooperatives in manufacturing, education, and banking. The Caja Laboral (Working People's Bank), founded 1959, provided the financing model: worker deposits funded cooperative expansion, with the bank providing both capital and managerial advice to new enterprises.

The Mondragon model attracted global attention because it demonstrated that worker cooperatives could compete in industrial manufacturing — a context where most economists had assumed cooperatives were structurally disadvantaged.

1980s–2000: New Generation Cooperatives

Agricultural cooperatives in North America faced a structural crisis in the 1980s: traditional cooperatives could not raise sufficient capital for processing investments because they lacked mechanisms for members to price and trade their equity stakes. The New Generation Cooperative (NGC) model, pioneered in Minnesota and North Dakota, addressed this by:

Issuing tradeable delivery rights that entitled members to deliver a specific quantity of product
Requiring members to purchase delivery rights proportional to their planned production
Allowing delivery rights to trade on a secondary market, making cooperative equity liquid

NGCs like American Crystal Sugar (founded 1973, restructured as NGC 1993) and North American Bison Cooperative demonstrated that cooperatives could attract the capital needed for value-added processing while maintaining member control.

2010s: Platform Cooperatives

The emergence of gig economy platforms in the 2010s — Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit — prompted a new wave of cooperative thinking. Trebor Scholz coined the term "platform cooperativism" in 2014, arguing that the technical infrastructure of digital platforms could be owned collectively by the workers and users who create their value.

By 2020, dozens of platform cooperatives had launched globally: Stocksy United (photographer-owned stock photo platform), Up&Go (worker-owned cleaning service), Resonate (musician-owned streaming), and Drivers Cooperative (NYC rideshare). The movement remains small relative to venture-backed platforms, but has demonstrated the viability of the model.

Global Architecture of the Movement

The International Cooperative Alliance

The ICA headquartered in Brussels serves as the global apex organization. It maintains sector organizations:

ICA-Europe: European regional office
Cooperatives of the Americas
ICA-Africa
ICA-Asia Pacific

The ICA publishes the annual World Cooperative Monitor, ranking the largest cooperative enterprises globally. In 2022, the top five cooperative and mutual enterprises by turnover were:

Crédit Agricole Group (France) — banking — €23.4 billion net revenue
Berkshire Hills Bancorp — not a cooperative, but frequently misidentified in rankings
Zenkyoren (National Mutual Insurance Federation, Japan) — insurance — ¥6.1 trillion in assets
REWE Group (Germany) — retail — €77.4 billion revenue
Migros (Switzerland) — retail — CHF 29.3 billion revenue

Sector-Specific International Bodies

IDF (International Dairy Federation): Coordinates dairy cooperatives globally
ICBA (International Cooperative Banking Association): Represents 3,000 cooperative banks and credit unions
ICA Housing (International Housing Cooperative Organization): Affordable housing cooperatives
CICOPA: International Organisation of Industrial and Service Cooperatives (worker cooperatives)

The Cooperative Movement Today

The movement's scale is often underappreciated because cooperatives do not appear on stock exchanges and receive less media coverage than listed corporations. Some sector statistics illustrate the scale:

Agriculture: Cooperatives handle 30% of global agricultural output. In France, 40% of all food processing is done by cooperatives. US agricultural cooperatives had combined revenues of $221 billion in 2020.
Banking/Credit: There are approximately 56,000 credit unions and cooperative banks globally, serving 375 million members.
Insurance: Cooperative and mutual insurers hold approximately 26% of global insurance market share.
Retail: The Swiss retail sector is dominated by two cooperatives — Migros (28% market share) and Coop (17%) — giving cooperatives a combined 45% of Swiss grocery retail.
Electric utilities: Nearly 900 rural electric cooperatives serve 42 million customers across 56% of the US landmass.

The cooperative movement faces persistent structural challenges: capital constraints that slow growth, succession problems as founding-generation members age, and increasing competition from well-capitalized investor-owned platforms. But the movement's resilience over 180 years across radically different economic and political environments suggests the organizational model addresses enduring human needs that purely investor-driven structures do not.

The ICA Statement on Cooperative Identity

The most authoritative definition of the cooperative movement comes from the Statement on the Co-operative Identity, adopted by the ICA at its 1995 Manchester Congress and refined since. The seven principles are covered in detail in cooperative principles. The Statement has three components:

Definition: A cooperative is "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise."

Values: Cooperatives are based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, and solidarity. Following the tradition of their founders, cooperative members believe in the ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility, and caring for others.

Principles: The seven cooperative principles provide the operational guidelines through which cooperatives put their values into practice:

Voluntary and Open Membership
Democratic Member Control
Member Economic Participation
Autonomy and Independence
Education, Training, and Information
Cooperation Among Cooperatives
Concern for Community

The sixth principle — cooperation among cooperatives — is operationalized through the network of cooperative federations, wholesale societies, cooperative banks, and development organizations that form the movement's institutional infrastructure. When a local consumer cooperative sources products from a cooperative wholesale society, deposits cash in a cooperative bank, and provides member education through a cooperative training fund, it is enacting the sixth principle in practice.

The seventh principle — concern for community — distinguishes cooperatives from both investor-owned firms (which have no organizational obligation to community welfare) and nonprofits (which lack the self-sustaining economic base to make community investment sustainable long-term). Cooperatives distribute 10% of pre-tax earnings to community causes in several national cooperative traditions (notably in Spain and Italy), and many cooperative laws require a community benefit fund contribution as a condition of legal status.

Understanding the ICA Statement is essential for analyzing whether a given organization is genuinely a cooperative or merely using the cooperative label for marketing purposes. Organizations that concentrate governance in a single large member, eliminate the one-member-one-vote principle, or systematically fail to distribute patronage benefits cannot legitimately claim cooperative identity under the ICA framework, regardless of what their incorporation documents say.