Co-ops rant!

The last couple of weeks have had some ups and downs for the co-ops/social enterprise chunk of my life and work.
On one hand, there's been the brilliant news, which I'd heard about months ago but finally happened, that Zaytoun's fairly traded (organic, extra virgin) Palestinian olive oil has received full Fairtrade Foundation accreditation and is now therefore the first olive oil to bear the widely-recognised Fairtrade logo (a French/Moroccan outfit is also looking to get certified but it's unlikely their product will be in the shops until at least the end of this year). This is of course fantastic news for the Palestinian farmers' co-ops producing the oil, for Zaytoun and Equal Exchange who have worked so hard to market the oil and get accreditation, and for pioneers like Olive Co-op who have been selling it for the last 5 years.
On the flipside, I've had some depressing encounters with the hierarchies of the co-operative and social enterprise sectors as well.
These have largely taken the shape of trying to disentangle the jargon-laden, increasingly corporate bullshit churned out by some of the 'support agencies' and 'representative bodies' out there. Some of the stuff I've had to try and comprehend this week has been totally impenetrable, even to me, and I did social theory classes at MA level, so I've worked my way through a lot of totally opaque and atrociously written crap before.
The social enterprise support sector just seems to be more and more a gravy train for white men in suits to get nicely-paid jobs telling people with no money and tiny businesses in a credit crunch about how to be entrepreneurs, while being firmly locked into a bureaucratic mindset and fat-cat mentality themselves.
My other gripe is with some of the PR leeches who lurk round the edges of the sector. Without naming names, I thought I had managed to find someone sensible within a co-operative sector organisation who was willing to enter into a bit of debate about whether the expansion of co-ops in a recession was, willy-nilly, a good thing. Now, I've spent nearly 10 years working in co-ops, am still a member of one, and have a considerable commitment to the sector. I certainly have no interest in doing a hatchet job on them.
But I'm finding increasing amounts of credit crunch propaganda - from 'support' and 'advice' organisations whose main function is to suck up government funding like vast cash-Hoovers, and not from actual people running actual enterprises in what might be termed the 'real' world – about how bloody marvellous co-ops are, how they are the stable, sustainable soft-capitalist economic model that encourages responsible economic behaviour and would have bolstered the economy against the current crisis.
So, when the person I thought I was getting somewhere with went off on leave, I got handed over to the organisation's PR consultants instead, and any notion of realistic, sensible, real-world debate vanished, and I got yet another bit of pointless flannel attributed to the organisation's ennobled Chair, about how wonderful co-ops are and how they are the Way, the Truth and the Light.
And I'm sorry, but this does the sector no good at all. A failing enterprise is a failing enterprise, and while being a co-op might make companies more economically and socially sustainable, this is only true if they have real markets and decent marketing and good internal controls.
To promote the idea that anyone, anywhere, wanting to do anything somehow can just by being a social enterprise is totally irresponsible. Firstly it has the ability to create a lot of pissed off, skint people if their businesses do fail. Secondly in creating those people it has a massive potential to 'tarnish the brand,' devaluing the idea of social enterprise and co-ops and making them synonymous with dud enterprises. And thirdly damaging people who should never have been persuaded by ivory-tower consultants that they should run businesses in the first place.