The Mondragon Cooperative Network
The Mondragon cooperative network is divided into four areas, Finance, Industry, Retail, and Knowledge. It includes 96 independent self-governing cooperatives with over 81,000 workers, 14 research and development centers, 141 production plants in 37 countries, and commercial businesses in 53 counties. It is the largest business group in the region, and the 7th largest in all of Spain. It has a working capital of over 8 billion euros. Mondragon is considered to be the largest and most successful example of worker-owned industrial cooperatives in the world. (Mondragon, About Us)
Compared to capitalist firms, the Mondragon cooperative provides greater opportunities for workers to participate in decision making and enjoys a more equitable pay structure. Compared to other cooperatives, the Mondragon support network is far more robust and developed, especially the cooperative bank that provides cooperatives in the network with extensive research assistance on technology, products, markets, in-depth training in cooperative principles of management, substantial financial support, and an entrepreneurial division that researches new production and marketing possibilities and encourages the set-up of new cooperatives. Mondragon, in addition, has created a network of educational institutions to train its employees and provide a quality education for the children of its employees. For example, Escuela Politecnica, a college created by and financed by the Mondragon Cooperative Network, offers an education comparable to three years of the four-year undergraduate college program in the United States. They specifically offer degrees that will directly benefit the cooperative network, i.e., business and engineering degrees, post graduate program where the students work with the coops in developing new products, an advanced school of industrial design, and a school that provides intensive instruction in English, French, German, and the Basque Language of Euskera.
The Mondragon Cooperatives Network is managed by a President and a General Council which is comprised of nine vice-presidents (one per group or division) and the directors of the six Mondragon Central Departments. The management bodies are accountable to two representative bodies, the Cooperative Congress and a Cooperative Standing Committee. The Cooperative Congress is made up of representatives elected by the workers from all the cooperatives in the Corporation (in direct proportion to their size) and is the basic policy-making body for Mondragon as a whole. The Standing Committee consists of 17 people elected from the Cooperative Congress. The Standing Committee appoints the President of the Mondragon Cooperative Network (the CEO), and they must approve the President’s choices for the General Council. Basically, the Standing Committee serves as an internal board of director.
Mondragon is not unionized nor do they have outside stockholders, and surplus capital is distributed into each members capital account in the Caja Laboral (the coop bank) where it is held as private savings, but it is made available for investment in the coop group. Essentially, each worker and manager is an invested member in the firm and has one vote in what is a representative system of governance and management. (Whyte)
Mondragon may be the beginnings of a real alternative to vampire capitalism and the corporate Leviathans, but the Mondragon Cooperative Network does have some flaws in its organization. Over the years there has been an unmistakable drift towards greater managerial domination of decision making, and though Mondragon maintains a representative democratic process, de-facto power has become increasingly centralized in the hands of technocratic business managers who manage the cooperative’s money. There is also a significant trend towards greater wage disparities within the cooperative, and Mondragon vested members increasingly stand out as a privileged sector in the regional work force. Also, while Mondragon cooperatives are more responsive to community needs than their capitalist counterparts, when profits conflict with community interests, Mondragon’s cooperatives increasingly favor money over public interest and the commonwealth of their community, region, and nation. Also, today well over half the capital of their cooperative bank is invested in non-cooperative ventures, and many Mondragon cooperatives have entered in partnership with multinational corporations and have opened non-cooperative factories in Third World countries. These firms are not worker-owed, and the employees do not enjoy the same rights or privileges given coop members. Instead, they are wage laborers. Today, only about one half of the Mondragon businesses are cooperative, and only one-third of the employees are members. (Kasmir)
Where do we go from here? In the book, Learn or Die: The New American Revolution and the excerpts that I have shared with you, we have revealed the horror story behind the labyrinth of lies that hide the truth. Vampire capitalism is real, and it is a cancerous growth that in the end will kill us all and consume the planet if we don’t come up with an alternative vision. In Part One of The New American Revolution, we revealed our political revolution, a political democracy where we the people of the United States directly participate in our government through the initiative, referendum, and recall process at every level of government. Direct and participatory democracy becomes the university of our lives where with every vote, every debate, every decision, and every issue we grow, we learn to come together, and we make decisions on those issues and policies that affect all our lives. We see the world from all our points of view, from all our experiences, and we create a collective mind that reflects each and every one of our unique points of view. That is the goal, but we are only halfway there because when we go to work, we live most of our waking hours in an authoritarian state called our job.
Up to this point, we have looked at the traditional attempt to reform capitalism, and we have seen that all the attempts at reform that we surveyed have flaws that have pretty much left us where we started from, with a fatal disease. The following excerpts from Part Two of Learn or Die: The New American Revolution will advocate an alternative that finally banishes vampire capitalism and destroys the cancer at the heart of our system and replaces it with an economic system that does not suck the life blood out of each and every one of us but nourishes us all and democratizes our economy so that it is an economy by the people. Essentially, we are turning capitalism on its head.
Cites:
1. About Us, Mondragon, https://www.mondragon-corporation,com/en/about-us/
2. Kasmir, Sharryn, “The Mondragon Cooperatives: Successes and Challenges,” Global Dialogue: Magazine of the International Sociological Association https://www.globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/the-mondragon-cooperative-successes-and-challenges/
Reference:
1. Whyte, William Foote and Kathleen King Whyte, Making Mondragon: Growth and Dynamics of The Worker Cooperative Complex, second edition, ILR Press, An Imprint of Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London
Author's Note - This the first in a series of excerpts on The Prelude To An Economy By The People. The excerpts will focus on the flaws of previous attempts at reform of the economic system. On our way to a new paradigm we will focus on (1) The New Deal, (2) Nationalization of the French economy during the Mitterrand Era. (3) German Codetermination, and The Mondragon Cooperative Network.
Author's Note - I have made Learn or Die: The New American Revolution available to you through Smashwords in a Freedom for Free Edition where you can pay what you want for the book or nothing at all. It is free. I'm doing this because after 50 years of research and study I believe I have found the way for all of us.
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