To me, this has been a useful way to put it into words: Co-ops have traded lateral relationships for vertical ones.
I could take just about any example of a great co-op’s origins, but the account I’ve most recently read is The Poor Man’s Prayer: The Story of Credit Union Beginnings by George Boyle, a somewhat fictionalized biography of Alphonse Desjardins, the founder of the North American credit union movement, published in 1951. Two significant patterns jump out in the story, patterns that are utterly typical in the genre of co-op origins.
First, the leadership of Desjardins and his family is critical; great co-ops tend not to emerge from amorphous groups, as I’ve seen many new cooperators assume, so much as from visionary leaders able to bring groups into being. It is through those groups that the co-op becomes truly powerful. How? The second pattern is that the early, great co-ops grew out of what members can do for each other. Through member-to-member self-help, they were able to fill missing markets and compete with better-financed capitalists.
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