One billion co-owners. 10% of all jobs on the planet. Banks, factories, dairy farms and football clubs owned not by Wall Street shareholders but by ordinary people. Why we hear almost nothing about them — and why MILAGPT chose exactly this form.
Ask an Uzbek entrepreneur which companies rule the world, and they'll name Apple, Google, Aramco, Chinese banks. They'll name the shareholder giants, where profit goes to investors. And they almost certainly won't remember that, alongside the capitalist world, a different economy has been working for 180 years — one where the owner is the customer, the worker or the farmer. Not "sort of social", but fully market-based, profitable, and sometimes bigger than multinational corporations. It simply doesn't shout about itself, because it has no shareholders who need to be sold a growth story.
Let's travel around the world and look at these companies. The numbers are real, with sources. They're more impressive than any manifesto.
It all began in the English town of Rochdale. The weavers of the local mills lived in poverty: meagre wages, while prices for flour, sugar and butter were sky-high. In 1844, 28 weavers decided to pool their money — one pound each, 28 pounds of capital in total — and open their own shop, where they would sell good-quality food to themselves at a fair price. On December 21, 1844 they opened a shop with butter, sugar, flour, oatmeal and a few candles.
It sounds like a village story. But these 28 people wrote the principles of cooperation by which cooperatives all over the planet live today: voluntary and open membership; democratic control (one member — one vote, regardless of capital invested); members' economic participation; autonomy; education; cooperation among cooperatives; concern for the community. The International Cooperative Alliance enshrined these principles in 1937 and updated them in 1995 — but the DNA has stayed Rochdale's.
The key idea of Rochdale: your vote comes from membership, not from the size of your wallet. One person — one vote. This is both the strength and the historical weakness of cooperatives — we'll come back to it at the end.
The most underrated fact: some of the largest banks in Europe and North America are cooperatives. They're owned not by stock-market speculators but by millions of member-customers.
One of the largest banks in Europe, historically grown out of farmers' mutual-aid funds. Crédit Agricole Group's revenue for 2024 was €38.1 billion, up 4.3%. At its core are regional banks owned by local customers.
France's third-largest banking group, entirely cooperative. Net banking income for 2024 was €19.3 billion, net profit over €4.5 billion. Every customer of a local bank is its co-owner.
A cooperative bank with roots in Raiffeisen's farmers' credit funds. Record net profit for 2024 — €5.16 billion (+18% on 2023), loan portfolio — €447 billion.
The largest cooperative financial group in North America. Net revenue for 2024 — C$14.66 billion (+16.6%); surplus before member payouts — C$3.36 billion. Owned by millions of Canadian members.
The Austro-German Raiffeisen model (19th-century rural credit cooperatives) and Britain's Nationwide (the world's largest building society, owned by its members) continue the same logic: a bank that serves its members, not outside investors.
Retail has been the cooperatives' native element since Rochdale.
Add Switzerland's Coop (the country's second retailer) and Britain's The Co-op, with its network of shops, funeral services, insurance and legal services owned by millions of Britons — and it becomes clear: in Europe, cooperative retail isn't a niche, it's a backbone of the system.
The most powerful story is India's Amul. It isn't a company in the usual sense, but a federation of Gujarat dairy cooperatives (GCMMF). Its owners are 3.6 million small farmers from 18,600 villages. Not a corporation, not the state — millions of peasants, many of whom keep two or three cows. The Amul brand's turnover for 2023–24 reached about $10 billion, and the brand itself is recognised as the strongest dairy brand in the world. Amul literally transformed a poor agricultural province — the cooperative became a tool that lifted millions out of poverty.
Amul proves something hard to believe: 3.6 million poor farmers, by joining together, built a ten-billion-dollar company — and each one remained its co-owner.
In the USA there's Land O'Lakes (dairy and farm supply) and Ocean Spray — a cooperative of cranberry growers whose juice the whole world knows. In Japan — Zen-Noh, a giant federation of agricultural cooperatives, one of the largest agricultural players on the planet. The pattern is the same everywhere: scattered farmers on their own are the weak side in negotiations; united in a cooperative, they're a global player.
Spain's Mondragon in the Basque Country is the world's largest federation of worker cooperatives. Here the workers themselves are co-owners: from the person at the machine to the top manager. In 2024 — 70,085 employees and sales of €11.2 billion with a net profit of €632 million. It's Spain's fifth-largest private employer — finance, industry, retail (the Eroski chain), education. The pay gap between the lowest and highest positions is capped by the internal charter — something corporations only talk about.
And now — the direction this article is, in essence, written for. What if you combine the Rochdale idea with a digital platform? You get a platform cooperative: an online service owned by the people who work on it.
A photo bank owned by the photographers themselves. By 2023 — 1,800+ member artists from 80+ countries. The key point: the cooperative pays authors about half of revenue in royalties — versus the pennies paid by ordinary stock sites.
The drivers' answer to the Uber and Lyft corporations. The service is owned by the drivers themselves; the cooperative takes 15% per ride versus 25–40% at Uber/Lyft, and the profit goes back to the drivers as dividends. The first 2,500 drivers received ownership certificates at launch in 2021.
In the same line are Germany's marketplace Fairmondo, the American cleaning platform Up & Go (all revenue goes to the cleaner-owners, the platform takes ~5% for upkeep) and Canada's ride-sharing Eva. The idea is one: a digital platform doesn't have to pump out rent for distant investors — it can belong to those who create the value.
And finally — forms that touch the heart. The Green Bay Packers are the only NFL club owned by its fans: 538,967 shareholders own the team, and nobody receives dividends — this is about love, not profit. Spain's FC Barcelona (over 140,000 socios) and Real Madrid (about 98,000 members) belong to their fan-members, who elect the club president. One socio — one vote. Pure Rochdale, only in a stadium.
Let's put it all together. According to the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA):
One billion co-owners. A tenth of all jobs on the planet. The turnover of the top three hundred — almost three trillion dollars. This isn't a marginal alternative to capitalism — it's the world's second-largest economy, which simply works quietly.
Cooperatives have always had one historical weakness — the very one born in Rochdale. "One member — one vote" and honest accounting of shares meant slow governance, paper registers, expensive recalculation of stakes, and meetings it's hard to gather a million people for. That's why for centuries the form remained powerful but "slow to get moving". Today this weakness is gone: the TON blockchain makes the register of shares transparent and instant, and AI takes over the accounting, the voting and the operations. The old form has finally got a digital skeleton.
And there's one more thing Rochdale didn't have. At MILAGPT a share can not only be bought with money — it can be earned through contribution and work: those who build, write, sell and bring in people grow their stake in the cooperative. At the same time, those who invest capital are valuable too and receive their due. The combination — work and capital in one register, on the blockchain, governed by AI — is the meaning of MILAGPT. We're not inventing a new ideology. We're taking a form that is 180 years old and owned by a billion people, and removing the one thing that has always held it back.
Launches of new verticals, the release of the MILA token, new articles and invitations to take part — on the founder's channel.
This is the first article of the MILAGPT "Blog" section. Here we take apart the ideas we're building the cooperative on — and sometimes share news. · ← All articles · Home
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