Anarchy Works.pdf - Infoshop.org

economy
Anorchy Works
meeting of reclaimed businesses, attended by fifteen hundred
people. Maria, one collective member, said of her experience:
''Three years ago, if someone had told me we'd be able to run this
place I'd never have believed them ... I believed we needed bosses
to tell us what to do; now I realize that together we can do it better
than them:' 32
In Euskal Herria, the Basque country occupied by the states of
Spain and France, a large complex of cooperative, worker-owned
businesses has arisen, centered around the small city of Mondragon.
Starting with twenty three workers in one cooperative in 1956, the
Mondragon cooperatives included nineteen thousand, five hundred
workers in over one hundred cooperatives by 1986, surviving
despite the heavy recession in Spain at the time and with a survival
rate many times better than the average for capitalist firms.
Mondragon has had a rich experience over many years
in manufacturing products as varied as furniture,
kitchen equipment, machine tools, and electronic
components and in printing, shipbuilding, and metal
smelting. Mondragon has created hybrid cooperatives
composed of both consumers and workers and of
farmers and workers. The complex has developed its
own social security cooperative and a cooperative
bank that is growing more rapidly than any other
bank in the Basque provinces.33
The highest authority in the Mondragon cooperatives is the
32 Natasha Gordon and Paul Chatterton, Taking Back Control: A Journey
through Argentina 's Popular Uprising, Leeds (UK): University of Leeds,
2004, p. 45.
33 William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte, Making Mondragon: The
Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex, Ithaca, New
York: ILR Press, 1988, p. 5.
general assembly, with each worker-member getting one vote; the
specific management of the cooperative is carried out by an elected
governing council, which is advised by a management council and a
social council.
There are also many criticisms of the Mondragon complex. To
anarchists it comes as no surprise that a democratic structure can
house an elite group, and according to Mondragon's critics this is
exactly what has happened as the cooperative complex seeks-and
achieves-success within a capitalist economy. Although their
accomplishment is Impressive and gives lie to the assumption that
large industries must be organized hierarchically, the compulsion
to be profitable and competitive has pushed the cooperatives to
manage their own exploitation. For example, after decades of
sticking by their egalitarian founding principles regarding pay
scales, eventually the Mondragon cooperatives decided to increase
the salaries of the managerial and technical experts relative to
the manual workers. Their reason was that they had a hard time
retaining people who could receive much higher pay for their skills
in a corporation. This problem indicates a need to mix manual and
intellectual tasks to avoid creating an elite of experts; and to build
an economy in which people are producing not for profit but for
other members of the network, so that money loses its importance
and people work out of a sense of community and solidarity.
People in today's high-tech societies are trained to believe
that examples from the past or from the "under-developed" world
have no value for our situation today. Many people who consider
themselves educated sociologists and economists dismiss the
Mondragon example by classifying Basque culture as exceptional.
But there are other examples of the efficacy of egalitarian
workplaces, even in the heart of capitalism.
Gore Associates, based in Delaware, is the billion dollar hightech
firm that produces waterproof Gore-Tex fabric, special
insulation for computer cables, and parts for the medical,
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