Worker-owner in Mondragon coop factory
The Mondragon Cooperatives and 21st Century Socialism:
A Review of Five Books with Radical Critiques and New Ideas
From Mondragon to America:
Experiments in Community Economic Development
By Greg MacLeod
UCCB Press, 1997
The Myth of Mondragon:
Cooperatives, Politics and Working-Class Life in a Basque Town
By Sharryn Kasmir
State University of New York Press, 1996
Values at Work:
Employee Participation Meets Market Pressure at Mondragon
By George Cheney
Cornell University Press, 1999
Cooperation Works!
How People Are Using Cooperative Action
to Rebuild Communities and Revitalize the Economy
By E.G. Nadeau & David J. Thompson
Lone Oak Press, 1996
After Capitalism
By David Schweickart
Rowman & Littlefield, 2002
Reviewed by Carl Davidson
Something important for both socialist theory and working-class alternatives has been steadily growing in Spain’s Basque country over the past 50 years, and is now spreading slowly across Spain, Europe and the rest of the globe.
It’s an experiment, at once radical and practical, in how the working-class can become the masters of their workplaces and surrounding communities, growing steadily and successfully competing with the capitalism of the old order and laying the foundations of something new—it’s known as the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC).
Just what that ‘something new’ adds up to is often contested. Some see the experiment as a major new advance in a centuries-old cooperative tradition, while a few go further and see it as a contribution to a new socialism for our time. A few others see it both as clever refinement of capitalism and as a reformist diversion likely to fail. Still others see it as a ‘third way’ full of utopian promise simply to be replicated anywhere in whatever way makes sense to those concerned.
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