One of the major events of the ICA Centennial Congress [1895-1995] is the launching of a book by Dr Rita Rhodes entitled The International Co-operative Alliance During War and Peace. This is a provocative piece of literature chronicling the history of the ICA from 1910 to 1950.
Based extensively on ICA archive materials, and running to some 100,000 words, the book charts the ICA's course through the two world wars and the cold war that posed the greatest threats to its existence. In this book, Dr Rhodes plainly suggests reasons for the continued unity of the Alliance while other international organisations such as the trade unions, youth and women fractured.
Three of the reasons advanced by Dr Rhodes were that the organisation's constitution was characterised by ideological consistency; the second reason was the ICA's ideology, including adherence to co-operative or Rochdale principles, advocacy of a co-operative social ownership, political neutrality, and an active pro-peace policy, and thirdly the location of the secretariat in a country that was not invaded, but was also home to its largest voluntary co-operative movement.
This reasoning has, however, provoked a lot of thought from Dr Suren Saxena who has a long history with the Alliance. As much as he agrees with Dr Rhodes on the location of the ICA in London as one of the reasons for the continuity of the Alliance, he is sceptical about the notion of ideological consistency. He says of this: "There is one case at least where fudge appears more pronounced in ICA policy towards its members than ideological consistency. I am referring to ICA's relations with Centrosoyus."
He recalls the difficulties that the Alliance went through during the cold war period. He says that after the Russian revolution of 1917, Lenin declared the existing co-operatives as organisations of bourgeois capitalist societies and claimed that the new co-operatives which had been set up in the Soviet Union would be part of a revolutionary workers' state. Dr Saxena says it was common knowledge that Centrosoyus was hardly a democratic autonomous organisation guided by the needs and decisions of members. Rather it was the government 5-year plans which decided the tasks for the co-operative movements. Centrosoyus at that time had no independent existence and it therefore should have been expelled from the ICA, but it was not.
It is my contention that ICA's adherence to co-operative principles was less than firm in the case of Centrosoyus. This is the first case where ICA's ideological consistency can be seriously doubted.
He further argues that, although the Alliance had peace as one of its objectives, the Soviet block had created its satellite peace organisations which were dominated by the communists and did not seem to have genuine faith in advancing the cause of peace.
Geoffrey Chipolyonga, 1995