from P2P Foundation. Unfortunately, cooperatives, in the legal sense, function like any other profit seeking body of people. The main difference between a coop and a corporation is that the former is guided more by humanitarian set of principles. This, of course, makes it difficult for them to compete with strictly profit oriented enterprises. Hence coops must compromise those principles if they are to survive, and inevitably they must also act like their profit-seeking rivals.
A true alternative would be to design an economy to serve the needs of people (as a society) as democratically determined by them.