Marx, Marxism and the cooperative movement

This paper has a dual aim: first, to draw attention to a numberof passages in which Marx explicitly extolled the cooperativemovement and thereby confute the wrong but widely held assumptionthat Marx was inimical to the market and rejected cooperationas a production mode even for the transition period; second,to argue that the continuing neglect of Marxists both of thecooperative movement and of the passages from Marx (and Engels)that present a system of producer cooperatives as a new productionmode can be traced back in part to the late emergence of aneconomic theory of producer cooperatives.