The Mondragon Cooperative

The text discusses the Mondragon Cooperative, a collectivist co-op founded in the Basque Country in northern Spain. The organization seems to stand as an anomaly as a democratic worker coalition, both in its geographic location and despite not being a national effort across Spain. Most interesting to me about Mondragon, is it’s social culture that fosters productivity through a greatly “compressed wage” gap, organization health benefits, and a system in which each worker pays into in order to secure stability and benefits in the long-run. The authors of Introduction to Political Economy note in the chapter that the organization is “democratic” in that the workers take the place of capitalist stockholders and have not only the voice to express

In the revolutionary war the British contracted Hessian soldiers, who were auxiliary mercenaries to fight the Americans. These soldiers were used as supplements to avoid recruiting British nationals to fight a war in the Americas. However, the issue with these soldiers was their lack of investment in the war itself, they were German and did not have a passion for the revolutionary fight nor did they have any true control within the army structure itself. Similarly the Americans collectively had a cooperative bind, a passion for the fight and for the cause which contributed to their victory in the long run. If we examine American capitalist corporations and the Mondragon collective through the same lens we can easily see the cooperative’s success. Employees at McDonald’s can do quite little to effect organizational change and thus lack investment in both the long-term organizational success but also their own upward -mobility within the company. Furthermore, since workers at the corporation do not have much power over the board of directors, they are without adequate representation. These combined issues, arguably lead to low worker morale. Inversely, the Mondragon collective has a board entirely representative of the