COOPERATIVIZATION ON THE MONDRAGÓN MODEL: ALTERNATIVE TO GLOBALIZING CAPITALISM

COOPERATIVIZATION ON THE MONDRAGÓN MODEL: ALTERNATIVE TO GLOBALIZING CAPITALISM

Our goal is more than simple options for individual improvement. It is more. If the co-operative enterprise does not serve for more, the world of work has the right to spit in our faces.

REFLEXIVE STATEMENT

This paper originated in our visit to the Mondragón worker co-ops in July, nineteen eighty-nine. Soviet Communism had just collapsed. While that "solution" was worse than the problem, we still felt capitalist exploitation was intolerable for a free people. Mondragón (and similar networks) offered hope for a workable alternative both to capitalism and to authoritarian socialism. So in nineteen ninety we wrote "Worker Ownership on the Mondragón Model: Prospects for Global Workplace Democracy." In nineteen ninety-two we joined Frank Lindenfeld and others on the Grassroots Economic Organizing collective. Since then we have been editor/activists in the U.S. worker co-op movement. We put that initial nineteen ninety version of this article on GEO's website. The alter-globalization movement has since arisen, declaring "another world is possible." So this new, fully re-thought piece for Humanity & Society argues that cooperativization can take us far toward a much better world than the one we have now. But it calls for a new kind of movement and a new kind of organizer.