But a cause more fundamental perhaps than all other causes of the
failure of cooperation in the United States is to be found in the
difficulties of successful entrepreneurship. In the labor movement in
the United States there has been a failure, generally speaking, to
appreciate the significance of management and the importance which must
be imputed to it. Glib talk often commands an undeserved confidence and
misleads the wage earner. Thus by 1888, three or four years after it had
begun, the cooperative movement had passed the full cycle of life and
succumbed. The failure, as said, was hastened by external causes and
discrimination. But the experiments had been foredoomed anyway,--through
the incompatibility of producers' cooperation with trade unionism. The
cooperators, in their eagerness to get a market, frequently undersold
the private employer expecting to recoup their present losses in future
profits. In consequence, the privately employed wage earners had to bear
reductions in their wages. A labor movement which endeavors to practice
producers' cooperation and trade unionism at the same time is actually
driving in opposite directions.
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