What is a cooperative if not having some control over our work and over the means of production? Isn’t building up worker ownership of capital a way of slowly building up socialism? The idea of worker cooperatives is seductive to workers and radicals because we all believe on some level that our jobs would be better if we ran things ourselves. How is it that Marxist economists, leftist revolutionaries, unions, financial newspapers and the longest-reigning fascist in the 20th century can all support the same thing? Class struggle… or surrender 86).ĭecades later, in 2013, Mondragon was awarded for “Boldness in Business” by the Financial Times, joining Amazon, Apple, and FIAT. In 1965, amidst an upswell of labor and student unrest, Franco’s Minister of Labor traveled to the Basque Country to award a “Gold Medal for Merit in Work” to the founder and then-director of the Mondragon Cooperative, José María Arizmendiarrieta (see The Myth of Mondragon by Sharryn Kasmir, p. Franco’s regime actually supported Mondragon’s development, more than happy to let a group of workers develop light industry in an underdeveloped region of Spain. He was intolerant of anything that might pose a threat like the 1936 revolution had.Īnd yet, it was during the Francoist period that Mondragon was founded and grew to a rather large size. Franco’s regime crushed unions - particularly the radical CNT - leading to a near complete collapse in class-struggle organizing. Franco and his secret police were notoriously brutal anti-communists labor organizers were regularly arrested, tortured, and murdered. Spain in the 1950’s was still under the grip of General Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator installed by the European ruling class and Nazi Germany after the failed Spanish Revolution of 1936. Mondragon was first set up in the late 1950s as a small operation manufacturing paraffin heaters today it has 257 companies in several countries.
In 2009, Mondragon entered into an agreement with the United Steelworkers (USW) to found worker cooperatives in the United States. Mondragon is one of the largest worker cooperatives in the world, with over 80,000 members as of 2019. One of the “success stories” often pointed to by proponents of coops is the Mondragon Corporation, based in the Basque Country of northeastern Spain. Worker cooperatives, on the other hand, retreat from the class struggle and actually entice workers into participating in the capitalist system. By withholding labor, workers can interfere with the capitalist logic of profit maximization and advance workers’ interests and demands. The working class’ power comes from our ability to halt the flow of capitalists’ profits within their own companies.
Workers collectively owning and operating a business removes the oppression and discipline imposed by the employer and puts the profits directly in the workers’ hands - or so the argument goes.īut we argue that worker cooperatives are often an off-ramp from organizing against the boss, and that even a mass cooperative movement can never pose a legitimate challenge to the employing class. The Democratic Socialists of America’s Libertarian Socialist Caucus’s platform statement from 2018 stated that “worker control over workplaces can only be advanced through the creation and support of worker-owned firms” in conjunction with unions and community councils. Worker co-ops have long been popular in left-leaning circles. Wolff contended that whereas labor unions bargain a better deal for workers from the employer, worker co-ops are the end goal because they are “the way in which workers don’t have to bargain with anybody else.” In a recent episode of his podcast Democracy at Work, Marxist economist Richard Wolff argued that worker co-ops and unions should be working together to create better working conditions and prospects for worker liberation. Carmen Molinari, Lexi Owens, and Robert Fontana argue that worker cooperatives are not the institutions for fighting capitalism that many on the left take them to be.
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