"Who owns the co-op?” In some ways, this is a simple question: The thousands of households who have joined Weavers Way and paid their equity are the owners of this institution.

Andy Lamas, member of Weavers Way and a faculty member in the Urban Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, brought a broader theoretical perspective to this question at a Nov. 15 workshop. He started out by objecting to a recent Weavers Way T-shirt that says “I own it”; in fact, it should say “We own it.”

Andy tried to show that there are various modes of ownership of co-ops, in particular, consumer-owned, worker-owned, and hybrid consumer-worker owned. He contrasted Weavers Way (consumer-owned) with Weaver Street Market, based in Chapel Hill, NC (hybrid consumer and worker owned).

Even though all Weavers Way employees are members of the Co-op, they are members as consumers. Any “surplus” that the cooperative earns may be distributed to them based on their patronage, but not on their work. Weaver Street, on the other hand, has 18,000 member-owners plus 200 worker-owners. The two groups vote separately for representation on the Weaver Street board of directors.

Andy was trying to make the point that, in general, value is actually based on labor provided, and he implied that it should be rewarded in a different manner. In a “hybrid” co-op, this labor theory of value does give some reward separately from that of consumers. Ideally, all members of society will own items in common, presumably based on their labor.

This discussion started on a highly theoretical level, something reflected in the description of Andy’s interests listed at the University of Pennsylvania: “He focuses on the theoretical and practical dimensions, as well as the philosophical and religious bases, of social justice and economic democracy — in the context of historical and contemporary capitalist urbanization.”

He used a number of analogies in an attempt to get at the nature of the co-op movement, but I found these rather hard to understand. As an example, he used the term “Catholics,” and suggested that the term is so all-inclusive that we don’t know exactly what it stands for. So “co-op” is too inclusive to understand without further definition. He also used a number of words in a very loose manner, such as “commodified,” “bourgeois” and “capitalism,” with the assumption that everybody knew the meanings of these terms, and that they shared his negative perception of them. He also went on to assume the labor theory of value, an idea that goes back to Karl Marx and other 19th-century economists and social critics. This idea completely discounts any contribution of what has been called “entrepreneurship,” signifying a different kind of contribution to value.

Andy’s approach suggested a distrust of private property, with references back to the enclosure of common lands in England in the 17th and 18th centuries as “accumulation by dispossession.” All such references require much more historical explanation than was possible in the time allotted in one evening at Weavers Way.

Although he extolled the  hybrid cooperative form, he did not respond to questions about the scale of operations and the difficulty of local control of large-scale operations. Once a co-op gets big — even a small group like Weavers Way or Weaver Street — it is hard to see how “ownership” gets translated into control and policy-making. On the level of Weavers Way and other co-ops, it seems clear that policy is made by a board of directors. Even if theoretically thousands of people own the co-op, they really do not control the decisions and directions of the institution.

In general, Andy made no distinction between ownership and control. This is a problem both in capitalist societies, where supposedly shareholders “own” a company, and in societies that have substituted state ownership. In both cases, there is a real question of who makes policy and who controls these institutions.

The discussion stimulated the audience into evaluating our notions of a co-op, and provoked some very interesting discussions on ownership and owner participation in governance.