Umar Vadillo
1. Cooperatives. Cooperatives is not the way of doing things amongst us. It is not part of our Sunnah. Our societies used different institutions of association, which derived from the contract of Shirkat. The most important is the guilds (sinf, in Arabic). The difference between cooperative and guilds are enormous. First the cooperative is a close organization while the guild is open ended, anyone can be part of it. In this respect, a guild is to an open market what a cooperative is to a supermarket. Nobody owns the guild, it is an institution that perpetuates in time as part of the identity of a town. The guilds maintains private ownership amongst the members, unlike the cooperative, but like the cooperative they own strategic means of production in common. Cooperatives today run under shareholding agreements that are not Islamic (voting as a means of deciding is not Islamic, there is not minority owners in Islamic contracts), which the guilds operate integrally under Islamic Law. Historically cooperatives are a product of capitalism (some will say benign capitalism, I say that does exist); the guilds are part of every pre-capitalist society, they are the enemy of the banks (the cannot exist in harmony) and they were seen as a threat to the formation of the modern State (the constitutional government with Central Bank). In every country the guilds were abolished as a prior condition to establish modern States. The Guilds are one of the elements foundational to the elimination of capitalism and the parliamentarian State.We cannot support the cooperatives, but we support the return of the guilds in our struggle to eliminate capitalism, the religion of Riba, from the face of the Earth.
2. Cooperatives and banks. No they do not behave like banks, although a cooperative can be ca bank. Some people want to Islamize cooperativism, just like others have done with the banks. It does not work. Our way is to return to our model and not to islamize the institutions of capitalism. In this way, cooperativism is part of capitalism. The same people say that there is something good in cooperativism, and I say, this is like using a condom with a prostitute, it is better so that you do not catch AIDS, but it does not eliminate the fact that it is haram.
3. Answered in part 1. But I will add that may be of use to us. Without the guilds will be imposible to return to our muamalat. It is the natural way to organize productive activities. Some anticapitalist thinkers of the last centuries saw the guilds as the ultimate instrument to achieve the end "of the working class". Read Rusell and Cole on guild-socialism. They saw the guilds represent a vertical organization of society in which the guilds represent the governance of that particular trade in society as if it were the ministry of "shoe making" for example. That vertical organization was oposed to the horizontal representation of the political parties. So, guilds instead of political parties, that is thought provocking. People like Kropotkin saw in the guilds the formula that can liberate the workers from capitalist exploitation. The anarchist movement arrived to this conclussions just before WWII, then it died along with the traditional European society. We have not recover yet. Only Islam can bring the paradigm of the guilds into fruition within the context of muamalat.
4. Coop, corporations and guilds. Cooperative and corporation not much difference. The guilds are social revolution and the end of capitalism. There is one condition prior to the return of the guilds and that is the return of the public market place (the suq). The Muslims of Malaysia will eventually wake up from the dream of Wawasan 2020 and they will shake off the evil so-called Islamic banks, and their Central banks, and their capitalist sacred Law (the constitution) and the inhuman intolerant anti-Islamic nationalism (that is Malaysia), in the meanwhile they will have to endure the vomiting puritanism of the official Islam cynically charging 150% the weight of the Sunnah unjustifiably amplified over details of small relative importance upon their wives and daughters while they shamelessly live through a abandonment of the deen in respect to the matters of economics and Riba (which they have islamized too) which are matters of much greater importance apparently without remorse. Shame on all of them. The best will rally around our movement for the return of Muamalat which has started with the introduction of the gold Dinar.
Umar Vadillo
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