Eugen Schwiedland, Die Wirtschaftsgenossenschaften (1919)

Schwiedland’s treatise defines the cooperative as an economic association rather than a charitable or merely political form:

Genossenschaften sind Vereinigungen von Wirtschaftern oder von Unternehmern zur Förderung gemeinsamer Ziele.

English translation: Cooperatives are associations of economic actors or of entrepreneurs for the promotion of common goals.

From this starting point he presents cooperation as organized self-help. Its legal features—membership, shares, reserves, liability, and open entry—are important because they enable members to combine demand, capital, labour, or knowledge in order to perform jointly what a merchant, lender, landlord, or entrepreneur would otherwise perform for profit. The cooperative is therefore not simply anti-capitalist; it is a way for dispersed households, peasants, artisans, traders, and workers to gain some advantages of scale without surrendering their independence.

The book is structured typologically. Schwiedland moves through purchasing, sales, machine, productive, building, insurance, credit, and mixed cooperatives, asking in each case what economic function is being withdrawn from private entrepreneurial control. He is most confident about purchasing cooperatives, especially consumer societies, because they unite demand, buy wholesale, regulate quality, impose cash discipline, and return surpluses according to use rather than capital.

In allen ihren Formen verbinden Bezugsgenossenschaften Verbraucher, um deren bisherige Lieferanten zu ersetzen, also um für ihre Teilnehmer selbständige Händler entbehrlich zu machen.

English translation: In all their forms, purchasing cooperatives unite consumers in order to replace their previous suppliers, that is, to render independent merchants dispensable for their members.

This explains his interest in Rochdale and in wholesale federations: central organization is not necessarily a betrayal of cooperation, but often the means by which local members acquire market power. Similar reasoning applies to agricultural supply societies and merchants’ buying associations, though Schwiedland repeatedly stresses that success depends on discipline, mutual confidence, and competent management.

Sales cooperatives receive a more cautious treatment. They must not merely gather sellers; they must standardize goods, secure customers, bear commercial risk, and create trustworthy market channels. Agricultural dairies, wine cellars, grain warehouses, and produce-marketing associations work best where quality can be controlled and where common sale genuinely strengthens small producers. Machine and works cooperatives have a narrower but clear function: they allow farmers or artisans to use expensive equipment while leaving production itself privately organized. Building cooperatives extend the same anti-speculative principle to housing by limiting the gains of landlords and builders, improving dwellings, and often drawing on municipal or public credit.

Schwiedland’s sharpest reservations concern productive cooperatives. He reconstructs the nineteenth-century hope that workers might become their own employers, but argues that such enterprises still face the ordinary pressures of capital, credit, management, discipline, and markets. When they prosper, they often reproduce inequality internally, with older or favoured members forming a privileged core while wage labour reappears around them.

Die Produktivgenossenschaften sind daher keine Vorbilder für die Aufhebung der Lohnarbeit.

English translation: Productive cooperatives are therefore not models for the abolition of wage labor.

This judgment is anti-romantic rather than hostile to reform. For Schwiedland, cooperatives are strongest where a definite common need—cheap goods, reliable credit, shared machinery, secure housing, mutual insurance, or better sale of produce—creates durable solidarity. They are weakest where they attempt to replace the entire capitalist enterprise without solving the problems of authority, risk, and capital formation.

The credit sections give the work its deepest social significance. Schulze-Delitzsch and Raiffeisen appear as urban and rural variants of a common principle: collective responsibility can make small borrowers creditworthy. In villages, neighbourly knowledge and moral supervision allow personal credit to replace dependence on usurers or mortgage lenders. Credit cooperation thus becomes economic education, training members in saving, calculation, repayment, trustworthiness, and administration, and often serving as the basis for later purchasing, selling, or machine cooperatives.

Schwiedland closes by treating cooperation as a flexible modern counter-power. Liberals, Catholics, conservatives, and socialists can all use it, which shows that its practical meaning exceeds any single party doctrine. After war, scarcity, and growing economic concentration, he presents the cooperative as a third path beside private capitalism and public enterprise: not a utopian abolition of markets, but a disciplined form of self-organization.

Somit ist die Genossenschaftsbildung ein bedeutsames und erfreuliches Mittel der Selbsthilfe wie der Selbsterziehung.

English translation: Thus the formation of cooperatives is a significant and gratifying means of self-help as well as of self-education.