The following article focuses on the economic conflicts in the local rural communities in Slovenia until World War II and analyses the example of the privatisation of a public good, the relations between labour and capital, and economic solidarity in form of cooperatives as a tool for ensuring social cohesion at the local level. The author presents a viewpoint that the feeling of social justice (moral economy) represented a cohesive element in the analysed local communities. Justice, defined according to the rules of traditional law, provided the relations in the local communities with a status of legitimacy. If the feeling of justice was questioned, then the legitimacy of the social relations and consequently the cohesion of the local communities were uncertain as well.