Book Description

Excerpt from The Decline and Rise of the Consumer: A Philosophy of Consumer Cooperation Shortly after I published A Free Society, the Editor of the Christian Century, Mr. Charles Clayton Morrison, invited me to discuss consumer cooperation in that bravest and most forthright of religious periodicals. "What is needed," he wrote, "is that consumer collectivism should get itself stated in terms of a fundamental philosophy. . . Your distinction between consumer and producer, which derives from the fact that consumption is a natural function involving values and ends, whereas production is an acquired function derived from necessity . . . together with your proposal to organize this consumption function into the structure of the social order . . . will come nearer to satisfying the religious mind, which is seeking social expression, than the orthodox socialistic conception." Out of the articles composed for the Christian Century grew this survey of the principles and practice of consumer cooperation and exposition of the philosophy of life which underlies them, nurtured by the interest of Mr. Morrison and the urging of Mr. E. R. Bowen, Secretary of the Cooperative League of the United States of America. Fundamentally, the philosophy is as simple and obvious as Columbus' egg, and as surprising. Its point of departure is the fact that first and last human beings arc not employers and employees, capitalists and laborers, carpenters or clerks or undertakers or farmers or physicians or miners or machinists, but human beings, simply living men of flesh and blood. As living men of flesh and blood we are organic individuals; we are persons. In our feeling of ourselves, in our living, we do not split off into vocations or professions. We do not define ourselves by special functions or by this or that separate and distinct set of social or institutional relationships, each tending to overrule and exclude the others. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.