The role of new cooperatives in the Soviet economy

Traditionally, cooperative enterprises are a combination of workers’ entrepreneurship and social ownership. Cooperative members/workers earn a share of enterprise value added and exercise decisional powers collectively through representative organs; the residual nature of their incomes and their part in decision-making is radically different from the wage earning and subjection to authority typical of dependent labourers in conventional enterprises in both the private and the state sector. The social character of cooperative ownership lies in the fact that members’ entitlement to participation in income and decisions ends with the cessation of cooperative employment; thus members do not have a claim on enterprise capital financed out of undistributed value added, nor on any increment in the present value of the enterprise deriving from enterprise success: the value of enterprise capital, net of members’ contributions possibly revalued to compensate for inflation, is owned not by current members but by the entire cooperative movement, as it were, including future members of the same cooperative or of other cooperatives which might acquire cooperative capital in the case of liquidation.