Voluntary association

A voluntary group or union (also sometimes called a voluntary organization, common-interest association, association, or society) is a group of individuals who enter into an agreement, usually as volunteers, to form a body (or organization) to accomplish a purpose. Common examples include trade associations, trade unions, learned societies, professional associations, and environmental groups.

Quotes

• Abolish competition and replace it with association.
  • Friedrich Engels, Principles of Communism (1847)

• Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
  • Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights – Freedom of assembly and association

• "Unincorporated association" [means] two or more persons bound together for one or more common purposes, not being business purposes, by mutual undertakings, each having mutual duties and obligations, in an organisation which has rules which identify in whom control of it and its funds rests and upon what terms and which can be joined or left at will.
  • Lord Justice Lawton in the English trust law case Conservative and Unionist Central Office v Burrell (1981)
  • The definition was for tax purposes, but was expressed to be of general application.

• Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
  • Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [1]

• No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
  • Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [2]

• In place of the bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, shall we have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
  • Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Section 2, paragraph 72 (last paragraph).

• Association, applied to land, shares the economic advantage of large-scale landed property, and first brings to realization the original tendency inherent in land-division, namely, equality. In the same way association re-establishes, now on a rational basis, no longer mediated by serfdom, overlordship and the silly mysticism of property [alberne Eigentumsmystik], the intimate ties of man with the earth, for the earth ceases to be an object of huckstering, and through free labor and free enjoyment becomes once more a true personal property of man.
  • Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, M. Milligan, trans. (1988), pp. 65-66.

• Men are to a great extent creatures of habit, and grow to love associations; under reasonably good conditions, he would remain where he commences, if he wished to, and, if he did not, who has any natural right to force him into relations distasteful to him? Under the present order of affairs, persons do unite with societies and remain good, disinterested members for life, where the right to retire is always conceded.
  • Lucy Parsons, The Principles of Anarchism, lecture printed without date of publication sometime in the 1890s