Class struggles and worker co-operatives in English Canada: 1844--1914

This thesis traces the root causes of the failure of the worker co-operative movement in English Canada to socialise production by examining class relations at the turn of the twentieth century. It attempts to establish why it is that this type of production faded to become a successful, wide-spread and viable alternative to capitalist relations of production. It is an exercise in historical materialism and thus seeks to unearth the mechanisms at work that not only formed this type of co-operation in the first instance, but also stunted its implementation, growth and therefore any of its revolutionary potential. As such, this thesis attempts to reinstate long-silenced voices into the discourse surrounding the worker cooperative movement itself through re-visiting the rise and the fall of the Knights of Labour in North America. The past is dredged up in order to learn the lessons of these early co-operators so that the same mistakes are not repeated. This is critical because contemporary national and international industrial relations of production are on the cusp of important change as witnessed by the recent collaborative agreement between the United Steelworkers of America (USW) and the MONDRAGON industrial co-operative organisation of Spain1. The lessons of the past documented in this thesis are, therefore, important for two reasons. First of all, they teach us what does not work. Secondly, by teaching what does not work, they point the way to what will.;The conclusion reached in this thesis is that if the past teaches us anything, it is that only by politicising and centralising alternatives to capitalist relations of production can the movement's potential for reformation be realised. Worker co-operatives need to be politicised. Local, grassroots movements need to be connected to a universal project of emancipation that can act as the glue that holds the movement together. Because local spaces "...are subject to the power of capital over the co-ordination of universal fragmented space and the march of capitalism's global historical time lies outside the purview of any particular one of them" (Harvey, 1990: 239), collective, co-operative action by local communities is the only strategy that will work. A co-ordinated, international effort must be grow out of this that is capable of supporting this undertaking in order to try to match the powers of global capitalism.;1See Appendix D for full text.;Co-operatives tend to thrive when there is structural upheaval, economic crises, and when capitalism spreads. This is what happened in the past and it is what is happening now. Globally, co-operatives 'now employ more workers than all multi-national corporations combined (CCA, 2009) and the annual aggregate turnover of the top 300 mutuals and co-operative organisations is equal Canada's national output. The resources and the sheer numbers for a potential revolution of the social relations of production do exist. And yet the workers remain unorganised and worker co-operatives remain the smallest contributors to this global output. The historical reasons for this contemporary situation are explored throughout this thesis by i) examining the initial rise of co-operation in Britain during the Industrial Revolution, ii) tracing how the British and European movements influenced the pioneers of the Canadian co-operative movement, and iii) exploring what the lessons of the past mean for the future in the final chapter.