#cooperativism

Announcement

The Take (documentary)

Mutualism and Cooperativism: The Better Way Beyond Capitalism and Communism

Mondragon provides us with a successful, working model. It’s not throwing out capitalism, it’s creating a better form of it. It is still private individuals who own capital, but more of us become owners. Companies are still getting wealthy, but that wealth is put to better use. Rather than create a few rich people only to tax them on the back end, we allow everyone to get richer on the front end.

What founders do come to study the model might put it into practice, but if they only create one cooperative that benefits 100 workers, Lorenzo says they miss the point. They need to create a network of them to fund new startups, create new jobs, provide social services, and transfer workers between companies. It is the combination of cooperatives that makes the whole thing self-sustaining, not the individual ones. 

When I published an essay about employee ownership, one person commented: “Why the hell should anybody still start a company and want to become an entrepreneur when he needs to give stocks to every employee he hires? This is completely stupid. If you want to become rich, become an entrepreneur.” Mondragon is a different mindset. “We feel that our collective ‘us’ is more important than ‘me,’ but they are more independent, individualistic people,” Lorenzo says. “So it takes some time to really convince people that this system is worthwhile. They see sometimes that we are a compromise for a full life, so we have to think in new ways, adapt our system.”

For this to work, of course, the employees need to learn how to run their businesses, some of which are multi-billion-dollar global enterprises. That’s why Mondragon puts extraordinary amounts of time and resources into worker training, which it considers the sine qua non of co-op success.