Review of the Book:

What is Cooperation?
By James Peter Warbasse

Joseph Dana Miller

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, January-February 1928]

This is another of the Vanguard Press series treating of various phases of social philosophies. Socialism, Single Tax, etc., are, as our readers know, treated in books that have preceded it.

The author of this book is the outstanding authority on Cooperation and president of the Cooperative League. Cooperative Democracy published in 1923, and reissued in a revised edition in 1927, is the larger work of the same author on which the present manual is based.

There is here everything the general reader will want to know of the reasons for and history of Cooperation in the United States and in Great Britain, in which latter country the movement has attained such imposing proportions.

There is a chapter entitled "Criticism of Proposed Remedies" which is, on the whole, not unfair. On the subject of the Single Tax the author is in error in saying that "it would result in State ownership of the land." Perhaps, however, the author means people-owned, and this would be true in essence if not in form.

Mr. Warbasse says: "It would not change the motive nor method of business." He is silent, however, on whether it would or would not change the mater of distribution, and that is the important thing, whether production be carried on cooperatively or competitively. Many Single Taxers are affiliated with the Cooperative League, but most of us regard it as only one of the proposals for economic betterment which must be largely nullified as long as the source of all wealth the land is the private possession of the few.

We may say that cooperation is better than the reasons given for it. Under our present system it has its value; under a system where the rent of land was taken by the people and all natural resources were peopled-owned, there would be a vast extension of cooperative enterprises, and these would be largely substituted for individual enterprise, though cooperation would never wholly take its place for obvious reasons. But its progress under economic freedom would probably astound Mr. Warbasse if he is fortunate enough to live so long. For the workers will then be free to cooperate as they are not now, for there is a partner in all productive enterprises with whom real cooperation is quite impossible the owner of the land. Men who cooperate do so with the idea of each participating and contributing some effort which we call labor, but the landlord contributes no effort and no capital. Even if he throws in his land, rent free, he is only giving what was here before him. Usually, however, he will demand to be paid for his land, and if so there is just that much less for the real cooperators.

We have a fairly well grounded suspicion that Mr. Warbasse is not ignorant of this fact.