From competition to collaboration to cooperation?

This chapter reviews the key issues that have been raised in terms of a deeper analysis of the relations between competition, collaboration and cooperation. Competition has long been associated with and indeed regarded as what drives capitalism where the hope of winning provides the necessary incentive to ensure the optimum and efficient allocation of resources amongst competing ends. Under the classical conception of perfect competition, there should be nothing that prevents the free play of supply and demand from setting the price that allocates scarce goods and services optimally between competing ends. The cooperative and democratic logics of freedom with equality do not simply vanish just because there is also competition. The paradoxical features of the contemporary scene as the politics of the far right wing rises in the ruins of an older consensus, is a: curious combination of libertarianism, moralism, authoritarianism, nationalism, hatred of the state, Christian conservatism, and racism.