The Ministry for the Future

58

The usual view of liberation theology locates it in South America in the latter part of the twentieth century. The phrase was invented to describe this Latin American phenomenon, so it’s fair enough to think that’s what it refers to.

But in Spain we think there was an earlier example of a young idealistic Catholic priest, helping his people in defiance of the church hierarchy. No doubt it has happened many times without anyone noticing it outside the community affected. Of course the situation with young priests has gone wrong so many times. But maybe more times, the young idealistic man, trying to do good in the world, intense, devout, isolated, put out there in a community of poor people, people suffering in so many ways, just trying to make ends meet, to hold it all together, and their church supposed to be part of that effort—when some of these young men get confronted with that situation, in all their belief and their desire to help, their trust in the church, quite a many of them must have fallen in love with their people and worked furiously their whole lives to do everything they could to serve them.

In this particular case in Spain, the young priest was named José María Arizmendiarrieta. Born and raised in the Basque part of Spain, he took arms in the Spanish civil war on the Republican side, then got captured by Franco’s soldiers. It’s said that he then had a sort of Dostoyevsky moment, in that he was condemned to execution and scheduled to be shot, but in his case was spared by a bureaucratic oversight, as they failed to show up and get him on the day in question, no one knows why. Let’s say God had a plan for him.

After that he took holy orders, perhaps feeling his life was meant for something, and he was sent to Mondragón in 1941, when he was twenty-six years old, as part of an attempt by the Franco regime to pacify the Basque people, who were still rebellious in the aftermath of the Republic’s defeat.

At first his congregation was not impressed by him. He had only one eye as a result of the war, he read verses in a monotone, he seemed distant and tentative. One can wonder if he was shell-shocked, or a bit on the spectrum as we would say now. It took him a few years of quiet listening to his people to come to a determination of how he might help them best. Before the war the area had supported some light industry which had not returned. Father José María wondered if they could start something up again, and as part of that, he helped them to organize a polytechnic school, now known as Mondragón University. Soon after opening, it provided enough engineering support to bootstrap the expertise to begin a few manufacturing businesses again, starting with paraffin burners. And on his suggestion, and with his help, these were organized from the start as employee-owned cooperatives. This mode of organization was in the Basque tradition of regional solidarity, a manifestation of that precapitalist, even pre-feudal gift economy of the ancient Basque, which goes back as far as can be determined, into the time before written history.

Whatever the explanation, these cooperatives thrived in Mondragón, and a complex of them has been growing there ever since. Eventually they included the town’s banks and credit unions, also its university and insurance company. These worker-owned enterprises became a kind of co-op of co-ops, which now forms the tenth largest corporation in Spain, with assets in the billions of euros and yearly profits in the millions. The profits don’t get shifted out as shares to shareholders, but are rather divided three ways, with a third distributed among the employee-owners, a third devoted to capital improvements, and a third given to charities chosen by the employees. The wage ratio between management’s top salary and the minimum level of pay is set at three to one, or sometimes five to one, or at most nine to one. All the businesses and enterprises adhere to the cooperative principles formalized later by the larger worldwide cooperative movement, of which Mondragón is somewhat the jewel in the crown: open admission, democratic organization, the sovereignty of labor, the instrumental and subordinate nature of capital, participatory management, payment solidarity, inter-cooperation, social transformation, universality, and education.

This list is worth studying in some detail, but not here. Taken together, if these principles were to be applied seriously everywhere, they would form a political economy entirely different from capitalism as generally practiced. They make a coherent set of axioms that would lead to a new set of laws, practices, goals, and results.

How this has worked out in Mondragón is open to interpretation. The system has been enmeshed in the world economy all along, and it had to make adjustments when the European Union formed, as well as continuous adaptations to the markets and countries it existed in. There are those who say it could not succeed outside of its Basque context, that Basque culture makes it possible; this seems unlikely, but there are many who don’t want to consider that an alternative to capitalism, more humane, what you might even call a Catholic political economy, not only is possible, but has existed and thrived for a century, and is still going strong.

There have also been moments of crisis, as when recessions struck just at the moment that certain critical cooperatives had expanded, or when a manager absconded with an immense amount of money, causing severe cash flow problems. Still, the place makes a good living for its people, and creates a culture that is mostly loved by those who perform it. There is solidarity and esprit de corps, and even in a world of intense competition, it makes a profit most years, enough for over a hundred thousand people to make a living from it and to give back to the general culture.

There are other such enclaves around the world, and systems that while not as distinctive and whole, are yet somewhat like it. They survive, sometimes they thrive. The question is, to put it in the dominant vocabulary of our time, could they scale? Are they a way out, a way forward, a step along that way?

We think so. For us, the project is to spread the system throughout Spain. For everyone else, maybe the world. But this is our contribution. We give you Mondragón.