Ch. 17 A Large Scale Cooperative Network
“What if the residents of communities truly owned the economic base and infrastructure of their communities?” – Cornelius Blanding, Federation of Southern Cooperatives. In the 1950's, in the Basque region of the Pyrenees mountains of Spain, there was a town of about 7,000 people called Mondragon. This town was still in the grip of the poverty, hunger and isolation that resulted from the Spanish Civil War. With no jobs available, and no capitalists who were interested in investing in a town with seemingly nothing to offer, a handful of ordinary people chose to take matters into their own hands. With the guidance of a Catholic priest named José María Arizmendiarrieta, who possessed a strong sense of social justice and human dignity, a small group of his young students created a worker-owned cooperative in Mondragon whose first product was paraffin heaters. The cooperative was founded as a way to invest in and create jobs for the community. Happily, over ...