Mitchell, Charles Gide,[1] Paul Lambert,[2] and Beatrice Webb (who coined the term in her book The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain).
In an Owenite village of co-operation or a commune, the residents would be both the producers and consumers of its products.
However, for a cooperative, the producers and consumers of its products become two different groups of people, and thus, there are two different sets of people who could be defined as its 'users'.
In this debate, cooperative federalists are those who support consumers' cooperatives, and those who favor producers cooperatives have been pejoratively labelled ‘individualist' cooperativists by the federalists.
They argued that profits (or surpluses) from these CWSes should be paid as dividends to the member cooperatives, rather than to their workers.