Co-operating with Ghosts

Posted on December 19th, 2006 filed in Corporations, History, Media Analysis, Politics, Valleys, Wales

Heed the whispered warnings of ghosts, listen to their advice and co-operate with them. They tell us about the past and foretell our future.

In the photograph there is a misty view across the Cynon Valley, from Cwmbach looking down the hill near St Margaret’s Church, towards Aberaman and Aberdare. The photographer has failed to capture a ghost, so instead offers to sketch some notes.

In Cwmbach the first Co-Operative Society in Wales was formed in 1860. On this little Welsh hill there was a magnificent Co-Operative store that lay at the heart of a vibrant Welsh community ‘growing-up’ in the era of industrialisation.

Borrow a Welsh Mam today

Find a Welsh Mam and ask her about the local Co-Op of yesteryear. Beg or borrow a Welsh Mam if necessary. Cwmbach Co-Op fifty or so years ago… had wooden floors. Hard to imagine it, or compare it with today’s showy supermarket shops, but in Cwmbach Co-Op there was a cash desk facing you at the back end and there were large wooden (possibly oak) counters running either side of the shop. Above a rail for money to be magically flown back to the cash desk. The Welsh Mam remembers “the big machine on the right” for cutting hams and meat. On the left, tea, sugar, biscuits. Everything was unpacked, in bulk, in bins, to be weighed and put in brown paper bags. No milk, the milk man had the milk; no newspapers, the news round was owned by one person; no alcohol, you bought that in a pub (remember those?). On Monday we would pay money into a Co-Op share book and use this during the week.

In the days when the local newspaper reported news, the Aberdare Leader (as the local newspaper was then called) reported in March 31, 1977 on the demolition of the historic Co-Operative Cwmbach store. There is a photograph printed in the Leader in that issue of the Co-Op building in the same location as photographed above. The roof on the building is tileless – ready to be demolished. It is a sturdy building that dates from the hey-day of Chapel-building in Cynon Valley, and so it looked like an old Chapel. There was indeed a Chapel adjacent to the Co-Op Cwmbach store.

Aberdare Leader reported it briefly :

“Gadlys photographer Glyn Davies, who took this photograph of the last days of the first Co-operative shop in Wales, in Bridge Street, Cwmbach, has a very special interest in the historic building; he himself was once the manager there. The shop is no longer – it was demolished this month to make way for a new housing scheme. The Bridge Road Shop, once the central premises of the Cwmbach and Aberaman Co-Operative, was established in 1860.”

Radical Roots

The co-operative movement was rooted in the industrial revolution and the reality of working people’s lives. The idea was plain, simple and radical : people should work together according to democratic principles helping to organise important aspects of their own lives, such as the provision of food at fair prices. In other words, working together for the very basic needs of a community.

A working class can avoid the exploitation of capital through co-operation as a class. This is a basic and fundamental truth, a rock that lies embedded in the history of this little village in the Cynon Valley. It may now be an obscured, a devalued, and a partly-hidden rock but it is nonetheless the foundation upon which an equitable, a just and sustainable working community is built.

Those who do not know history are destined to repeat it

Listen carefully to the gregarious ghost from Cwmbach and we may find hints about our history. The ugly white building with the green logo in the photograph is the home of American corporation Walmart’s colonial outpost, a shopping factory called ‘ASDA Aberdare’. Walmart is the biggest corporation in the world. Further north lies – lies is very apt – Tesco Aberdare, a corporation so powerful that it dictates the news to the local newspaper monopoly.

Communities across the Cynon Valley suffer because a few corporations enjoy a monopoly position and are able to compete unfairly with local, independent shops. Local shops thus close and shopping becomes concentrated in an ever-decreasing number of locations. Of course, none of this is new!

Shopping becomes industrialised and de-humanised, and it is rationalised as the factory-process is applied to the humble local shop. The new supermarkets are thinly-disguised warehouses that exist as part of an industrial production and distribution process.

The corporate supermarkets alienate the de-skilled supermarket worker and those who are forced – since they have no local shops to choose otherwise – to use them. The more alienated the experience the more the corporation resorts to enchantment (see George Ritzer et al.) and distraction. This exploitation is sold to working people as “choice” when in fact it is completely the reverse. The skeletal remains of derelict shops in every single village in Cynon Valley are a visible reminder that the exploitation of working people has gained a new momentum in these heady days of turbo-charged neo-liberalist or ‘new’ capitalism.

But alas we digress, and we should return to the plain simple facts.

Those who repeat history are destined to know it

We should repeat our history for our own sakes. In the early days of the industrial revolution, capitalism shaped society, brutalised and exploited a new working class. Our forebears were not passive victims of the new industrial capitalism, however, but active participants who themselves sought to shape and transform society, which they did with an awareness that they were acting as a ‘class’ or group of people with a common economic interest. We can bury bourgeois exploitation today if we re-learn and re-discover the tried and tested ways of co-operating. There are many more ghosts in our past to show us the way.