I had reason to go to Gangnam Station for the first time in a while -- and on one of my personal pilgrimages, I stopped at the Aladin used bookstore, spotted a book that caught my eye, and paid for it on the spot.
Titled...
Re-Asking the Cooperative https://www.aladin.co.kr/shop/wproduct.aspx?ItemId=283952669
Looks like it came out at the end of '21... picked it up cheap at the Aladin used bookstore. (I love Aladin so much ;D !!!)
Re-Asking the Cooperative
Marking ten years since the Cooperative Framework Act took effect and the era of ‘20,000 cooperatives,’ this book examines the history and current state of co-ops, explores what Korean co-ops should do, and proposes the ‘cooperative hub theory’ as a new alternative.
www.aladin.co.kr
Wow, this is wild. Ha -- seriously, it's crazy. Of course the book above is purely about cooperatives. (*Warning: zero mention of IT -- especially, nothing about blockchain.)
But...
Cooperation to the Association landed for me with the same nuance as Chain to the Block.
And I'm confident that anyone active in blockchain, DAOs, or MyData who reads this will hear a big echo too. So before this impression fades, I'm leaving some personal thoughts in a post.
Blockchain has many important keywords, but if we pick the single most representative, it would be the orientation toward no central authority. And to actually turn that into code, various consensus algorithms are being born. Watching these algorithms get born, get absolutely roasted, cause losses, go bust, get rebuilt, and improve -- you start to notice that the process, the failures, and the rebuilding look remarkably similar to sociology, social phenomena, and social structures.
But personally this was a vague feeling, and when I actually try to map things one by one, especially around ideologies like democracy and socialism, they implement in different directions (sure, you could compare public vs. private...). Comparing at the scale of nations or ideologies is too broad, not actually useful, and too abstract. You get a quick "ah, I see, that could work" and little else -- not much I could keep using in practice.
But this keyword -- "cooperatives" -- is different. Even just the table of contents is clearly concrete and close to the market. The real-world cases are close too. Especially the stories of how co-op identity and structure, together with the clash between their interests and those of the government or corporations, led to failure and then rebuilding -- those feel applicable in many ways.
One thing that characterizes daily life in 2022 is, I think, that we're all living in different worlds at the same time.
Even something as everyday as "doing a bank transfer" comes with huge variation: calling the bank, installing the bank app, sending via KakaoTalk, and so on. Step up a bit -- what about AI? For some, it has already seeped so deeply into daily life that it feels threatening; for others, it's pie-in-the-sky or just sci-fi. Some people spend most of their smartphone time on KakaoTalk, YouTube, or games; others use the smartphone as a tool for generating income; still others collect the objects and phenomena of everyday life in the form of voice and photos, sort them by type, turn them into data usable by AI, and sell it for money.
Same story in IT or IoT practice: if you're not in a related role, it's much the same. The moment the words "metaverse" or "blockchain" come up, further words become unnecessary. Everything is already written on their faces. Probably because they got burned before the market and tech matured and expectations weren't met, or because it's still so far removed from daily life.
At just this moment --
this book had, somehow... a pickle-like, kimchi-like crispness that cut through the greasy feeling of being too submerged in tech for too long. Something like the moment on a three-hour ride when your throat is parched and a cold sports drink hits -- that clean feeling in the back of the throat.
Looks like the book came out at the end of '21... I got it cheap at the Aladin used bookstore. I love Aladin so much!!!
For reference, in December 2021, the 33rd World Cooperative Congress was held at the Grand Walkerhill in Seoul, South Korea, under the theme "Deepening Our Cooperative Identity." (ref. ICA Guidance Notes to the Cooperative Principles)
Highlights
p.24
The argument is that a new cooperative movement is needed.
Analyzing the past cooperative movement, we define what the fourth-generation cooperative movement should aim for as "the cooperative hub theory." The cooperative movement works to bring the market back into society by cooperating with various forces, but the cooperation it aims for is open cooperation oriented toward society. Open cooperation means: while acknowledging the market, it rests on the premise that the market can never self-regulate, and it becomes a social adhesive for people trying to bring the market back into a functional role for society; through this, it helps small cooperations gradually grow into larger cooperations. In the cooperative hub theory, the cooperative movement's mission is not merely a residual, passive role of complementing the failures of state and market, but one of actively taking on the problems our society faces -- as a macro innovator with its own mission.
pp.61-62
Main content of the Cooperative Identity Statement.
The ICA's 1995 definition of cooperatives rests on a philosophical view grounded in fundamental respect and trust in humanity, a belief that applying democratic processes to economic activity is both possible and effective, and that democratically-managed economic organizations can contribute to the public good.
A cooperative is an autonomous association of people who voluntarily unite to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise.
The ICA's definition of a cooperative comprehensively explains (1) the subject, (2) the purpose, (3) the organizational character, (4) the ownership and operation method, and (5) the means. That is, a cooperative is: (1) a body whose members (associates) are voluntarily-united people, (2) with the purpose of meeting their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations, (3) based on an organizational character as a people's association, (4) so it is jointly owned and democratically operated, (5) as an enterprise doing the business needed to achieve the purpose above.
p.140
For cooperatives to use business methods to solve the problems that many citizens have and to build a better society, they need a deeper understanding of the market and corporations, and the ability to change them through complex interrelationships and processes. State and politics are included in this too.
Framing the problem this way lets the debate on cooperative identity move away from the defensive "what is a cooperative, and what distinguishes it from what is not a cooperative?" toward an expansive direction for solidarity and cooperation: "what is a cooperative, and what can we do, and how far?"
We need to separate the "markets as phenomena" we actually encounter from the "abstract, perfectly-competitive market" that mainstream economics constructs conceptually and sets up as a normative, ideal autonomous mechanism. The abstract perfectly-competitive market is an unrealistic space that, given more than ten assumptions, operates with only "price" as its signal. By contrast, "markets as phenomena" are real-world spaces interwoven with all kinds of social relations. Luigino Bruni saw the market-as-phenomenon as a social space in which, among various reciprocities, "contractual reciprocity" operates especially prominently. That is, the market-as-phenomenon is a form of society; and with the development of capitalism, the largest economic actor in such markets should be understood as the "for-profit enterprise = company" grounded in contractual reciprocity. Explained this way, Polanyi's concept of the "complex society" becomes easier to grasp. A company is both a part of the larger society and a society in itself. But this particular type of society -- the company -- has the potential to destroy other societies by putting forward the logic of the "market as autonomous mechanism" to maximize its own interests, suppressing other reciprocities in society. It's like a cancer: a mutated cell that is part of the organism, yet if it runs wild, it can destroy the organism.
As productivity developed, societies expanded and the spatial reach of single markets enlarged beyond face-to-face circles, so the "civic economy" -- rooted in the image of city-state markets handed down in Italy -- is no longer easy to use by itself to explain markets. In the current situation, where markets moving via "contractual reciprocity" are widely formed across and beyond nations, this is in some respects unavoidable.
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