Slow Cancellation of the Cooperative Future?: Agonistic Visions for Cooperative Economics

This paper examines what might be described as the slow cancellation of the cooperative movement’s promised future. Drawing on examples from multiple contexts, cooperative institutions increasingly diverge from the emancipatory visions that once animated cooperative thought. In Indonesia, the cooperative model championed by Mohammad Hatta has gradually been absorbed into state apparatuses serving neoliberal development agendas. In Europe, some co-ops survive but adopt managerial practices that dilute their role as schools of democracy. Even thriving co-ops face persistent internal conflicts, splintered visions, and member dissatisfaction. Rather than treating these developments as failures of an inherently harmonious cooperative ideal, this paper reinterprets them through Foucault alongside the post-Marxist framework of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. It argues for radical negativity as a working ontology, viewing adversarial conflicts within and with the state as constitutive of democratic economic institutions. Using an agonistic model of politics, the paper reconceives cooperative economies as sites of ongoing political struggle and resubjectification.