I have some observational experience of the cooperative movement in two European countries (UK and Italy), having lived in areas where such movement was deeply entrenched in collective consciousness.<p>My experience is that cooperation is nice but it doesn&#x27;t scale. As soon as you reach a significant size (a few hundred people), hierarchy is established;  leadership will then progressively solidify around a specific network of people, which becomes a de-facto separate class; eventually, you end up in a situation that is cooperative in name only, with a traditional managerial class dominating an exploited workforce; in the best case, the organization will share a culture of respecting workers slightly more than regular companies, but that&#x27;s about it.<p>Note that I&#x27;m not discarding the model entirely, it can work extremely well on a small scale. There are also &quot;hybrid&quot; examples (like the John Lewis Partnership) which seem to better embody the cooperative ethos than &quot;pure&quot; coops at scale.