Elite economists branded worker cooperatives as Bolshevik threats to established enterprise.

Evidence

By 1920, when the CGdL led some 800 of these cooperatives, there was seething unease among the country’s economic establishment. Even in their gradualism, the extent and political infl uence of these noncapitalist organizations was a menace to the status quo. Economists like Maff eo Pantaleoni branded them “Bolshevik associations” [associazioni bolsceviche] or “red cooperatives” [cooperative rosse], organizations that were “destroying the bourgeoisie who had created all the existing enterprises” (Pantaleoni 1922, viii). — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 430

Categorization

• QUESTION: What was the actual size and activity of these 800 CGdL cooperatives compared to private firms? Useful to establish whether elite fear matched reality.
• XREF: connects to: Italian economic elites saw worker cooperatives as a revolutionary threat to the bourgeoisie; Capitalist rationalization attempts to co-opt worker militancy through co-operative management schemes; Worker cooperatives failed from capital scarcity and capitalist supplier discrimination — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 641

Broader Connections

• Italian economic elites saw worker cooperatives as a revolutionary threat to the bourgeoisie #exemplifies (1.00)
• Capitalist rationalization attempts to co-opt worker militancy through co-operative management schemes #complicates (0.85)
• Worker cooperatives failed from capital scarcity and capitalist supplier discrimination #qualifies (0.80) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 641