How amazing may be the effects of simple cooperation may be learned from an examination of the titanic works of the Asiatics, the Egyptians, the Etruscans, etc., of ancient days . . . The change to cooperation is the first change undergone by the actual labor process when subjected to the dominion of capital. This change occurs spontaneously. If therefore, the capitalist method of production appears. Simple cooperation remains the dominant form of cooperation in those branches of production in which capital is at work upon a large scale, but where neither the division of labor, nor machinery, as yet plays an important part.
Cooperation is always a basic element of capitalist production.
While it constitutes the germ of more complex forms, it continues to exist side by side with these in its simple or rudimentary shape as above described.