 Hi, Professor Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts. And we're here today to talk about the origins of the cooperative movement, really the origins of the labor movement in general, in the age of revolt, or the age of the democratic revolutions. And these were something new. There had been popular revolts going back to, well, going back to before Moses. Moses led one of the very few successful slave rebellions in human history. There were rebellions after him. The Goths rebelled against Caesar. The Jews rebelled against Rome. Then they rebelled again against Rome. There were many uprisings of angry serfs during feudalism. But the age of the democratic revolutions that began with the English Civil War in the 1640s and continued with the American Revolution 1776, the French Revolution 1789, the rebellion, the Revolution in Haiti, the slave rebellion in 1793, and continued through the abolitionist movement in Britain and then the United States. This was something new. The age of democratic revolution involved a challenge, a fundamental challenge to the idea that people's status should be ascribed according to their birth. We still have that type of status. I believe right now in 2011, 36 members of the House of Representatives in the United States are children of people who served in the House of Representatives. In England, we have an official ruling family. They just had a wedding. And Prince William, who will presumably eventually become king, just on the fact that he was born the son of a king. Well, his father isn't king yet, but his father presumably will eventually become king when his mother dies. Why is Prince William a really rich person? And why will he have this position of king of England? Because he's born that way. The age of democratic revolution challenges that. Democratic revolutionaries, the level is during the English Civil War and diggers, the sons of liberty in the United States, the songs Kulat in France, these were all people arguing that you should have status, you should have power and wealth on the basis of your work. Work is dignified. It's worthy. It's important. And it should be rewarded. And those who do not work should not eat. That's a slogan from the labor movement. And the idea here is that those who work should be the ones who control things. They should be making the decisions about what happens to the products of their labor. We can have discussions about what counts as work. I would say that what I'm doing now, well, it's sort of work. It's fun, but it's still work. And what parents do when they're raising children might be fun, but it's also work. I would have a very broad concept of what counts as work, but there's no question. The idea of the democratic revolutionaries was that those who do not work should not rule. Rulers should be workers. Workers should be rulers. Labor is valuable and important and should be the source of all social status and power. From the democratic revolutions, we had the rise of something new, economics, as a profession. And economics was built around the idea of the labor theory of value as a source of prices. Suddenly, with Adam Smith, with Kesne, with others in the 18th century, we actually with Hume and Locke before him, we had an idea of priced formation and the price of things depends on the labor that goes into them. It doesn't matter whether the stuff is made by the child of a king or the child of a pauper. It's the labor that goes into things that gives things their value. In the democratic revolutions, which culminated in the anti-slavery movement, there was the idea that labor is valuable and laborers should rule. This goes into the labor movement and it goes into the work of cooperative movement. The campaign to give workers control, not just of their products of their labor, but of the labor themselves. So we'll talk more about this next time. Thank you. Have a nice day. Bye-bye.