Two ever-recurring assumptions underlie the generally professed ideology of the productive associations, says Dr. Fuchs:

a) emancipation of labor from the yoke of capital through productive associations, and
b) the securing by the workingmen of the "whole product of their labor" after elimination of the capitalistic entrepreneur in the productive associations.

The productive association, therefore, is assumed as representing an industrial form of the coming economic era; it is "an anticipation of the future." Further, productive associations have always played an extraordinary role in the interpretations of cooperation and a miserable part in actual life. Ninety years of experimentation and thousands of trials in different countries have proved, beyond any possibility of doubt, that productive cooperative associations are doomed to die sooner or later. Those few which survive change their economic character so radically that no sign of the cooperative association can be found in the new body. "The law of transformation" of the productive cooperatives formulated by F. Oppenheimer is perfectly justified by a history of productive associations, says Dr. Fuchs, ¹¹ and this law declares: It is exceptionally seldom that a productive association lives till the blooming season and if it survives till this age it ceases to be a productive association."51

Three "lacks," accordingly, explain such a sad destiny of the productive associations:

a) the lack of capital,
b) the lack of successful marketing, and
c) the lack of discipline

Therefore, for the purposes of economic analysis, the productive association may be taken, in the words of Fuchs, only as being in its statu nascendi.

The cooperative associations of consumers are inherently profitless, Dr. Fuchs says further, while the productive associations, being acquisitive enterprises" (Erwerbsunternehmungen), work for profit, as do other enterprises. The most essential economic feature of the productive cooperative association is that all its owners are employed by the association and all its employees are its owners. If some of the members (owners) of the association do not actually work and remain its shareholders only, or if, on the other hand, not all the persons working for the association are its regular members (owners), but some of them are only wage earners, then, Dr. Fuchs says, there is not any real economic difference between such an association and a regular stock company. The productive cooperative associations, like every other enterprise under certain conditions, has a definite optimum volume of employment and hence cannot be based, obviously, on the principle of unlimited membership: it is, therefore, of necessity, a cooperative with closed membership.