Mondragon, Cooperatives, Politics, and Working Class life in a Basque Town
* Book: The Myth of Mondragon: Cooperatives, politics, and working class life in a Basque town. By Sharryn Kasmir. State University of New York Press.
Description
"The Mondragon cooperatives are seen as the leading alternative model to standard industrial organization; they are considered to be the most successful example of democratic decision making and worker ownership. However, the author argues that the vast scholarly and popular literature on Mondragon idealizes the cooperatives by falsely portraying them as apolitical institutions and by ignoring the experiences of shop floor workers.
She shows how this creation of an idealized image of the cooperatives is part of a new global ideology that promotes cooperative labor-management relations in order to discredit labor unions and working-class organizations; this constitutes what she calls the "myth" of Mondragon." (https://libcom.org/library/myth-mondragon-cooperatives-politics-working-class-life-basque-town)
Review
Sráid Marx:
"The myth arises, says the author, by de-contextualising the cooperative from its social and political environment and from its historical origins and development. The workers of Mondragon are not more class conscious but less. She quotes approvingly the view, expressed in a separate study of a particular group of workers’ class position, that political and ideological dimensions are often more significant for actual class position than are strict property relations. When we adopt this perspective things look quite different. The author presents general arguments around the question of workers’ cooperatives and a particular analysis of Mondragon. She does so ‘from a working-class perspective.’
I am not knowledgeable enough to make judgements on the particular arguments about the Basque country but I will comment on the evidence for her claims that she presents and the general arguments presented on workers’ ownership within capitalism.
In my view her first mistake is to identify workers cooperatives as part of a spectrum of labour-management cooperation, ranging from quality circles, team organisation, works councils and employee share ownership programmes all the way to workers’ ownership. All are designed not only to make workers obey management but to make them want to obey. They involve various mechanisms of labour management cooperation and compare unfavourably with the conflict model that involves militant trade unions facing up to management and representing the workers.
Her mistake is to see workers’ ownership as a model of capital-labour cooperation. Far from a mechanism for cooperation with management and capitalists it is a model for workers cooperating with each other and in which capitalists, at least within the firm, do not exist. Its logic is to extend cooperation among the working class and in so doing create the grounds on which a new socialist society can be built and there are no capitalists anywhere.
Of course there is still a management within the cooperative and the model involves various mechanisms for shop-floor worker and management cooperation but it is the workers themselves who can appoint, and if so devised, replace management because it is the workers who are the owners. Management is accountable to the owners who are the workers. In a capitalist firm workers are accountable to management.
Of course Kasmir is aware of this but at places within her book she presents the management of Mondragon as virtually a separate class from workers on the shop floor. As an anthropologist she is sensitive to the differences between the daily lives of workers and managers even where the income differences are relatively small compared to most capitalist enterprises. She sees these relatively small but significant differences in income reflected outside the workplace also reflected in knowledge, responsibility and power within the cooperative. She notes that it is the cooperative’s managers who are most enthusiastic about the cooperative and that it is they who invariably welcome visitors and present the views of the cooperative’s members to outsiders.
It is undoubtedly true that workers are sensitive to even relatively small differences in income, especially in contexts in which equality is held as a primary virtue and objective. It was just such dissonance between claims and reality that led to such cynicism among workers in the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe. While workers were supposed to be in power and equality reigned, in the reality that everyone lived and saw the bureaucracy maintained exclusive power and defended all the material privileges that went with it.
It is not the case however that Mondragon is a little bit of Stalinism in the Basque country or economy of the Spanish State. There is no attempt made to claim this in the book. In fact the book records that repeated attempts by management to increase the allowed differential between management and shop floor pay have been repeatedly voted down by workers. Workers have the power to limit the pay of management. What capitalist firm allows that? Read the financial press and it is full of complaints that even capitalist shareholders have difficulty doing this in big corporations. How many votes did the Stalinist bureaucracies in Eastern Europe ever allow themselves to lose? Unlike in these states the Mondragon cooperative does not outlaw political activity and the author records the actions of a small group of politicised workers who campaigned actively against the management proposal and succeeded.
The author however also reports that workers do not feel the strong identification with the cooperative that might be assumed. She demonstrates this through a survey in which she is able to compare the attitudes of workers in a factory within the Mondragon Group to those in a similar privately owned one. These results have been referred to on a number of occasions by people on the Left as justification for opposition to cooperatives, here for example." (http://irishmarxism.net/2014/01/19/arguments-against-workers-cooperatives-the-myth-of-mondragon-part-1/)