VI. The Future of Capital and Human Labor

On the other hand, producers can join together; this has already happened to a great extent within our economic system, and this is where the production cooperatives come from. Now, both types of cooperatives have very different tendencies. If you study consumer cooperatives, you will find that consumer cooperatives are primarily interested in buying as cheaply as possible and secondly in having as many people as possible in their ranks. They never resist the expansion of their cooperative if they have their true interests in mind. The production cooperatives have the opposite characteristics. The participants will fear competition if they expand, and they have every interest in selling as expensively as possible. This indicates that in the future, salvation can only come from bringing together people with consumption and production interests, in consumption-production or production-consumption cooperatives, where not only consumption will regulate production but where even the size of the cooperative will be regulated, in that consumption tends to make the cooperative as large as possible, that is, to expand and grow, while production tends to set limits to the cooperative. In this way the social structure is created out of the essence of things, out of reality itself. I could cite innumerable cases from which you would see that anyone who is capable of thinking in terms of reality, anyone who really wants practical ideas in their head today, will find the foundations of true, genuine socialization that is beneficial to people in the beginnings that already exist in reality.