Mondragón

Tonight I’ve been reading J. K. Gibson-Graham’s Critical Sociology essay “Enabling Ethical Economies: Cooperativism and Class”, about the Mondragón Cooperative System centered in the Basque region of Spain. Until now, I’d known little about cooperatives, and nothing about Mondragón, and had been content to dismiss cooperatives as idealistic ventures unable to survive in the face of corporate capitalist juggernauts: with “Fabian Socialists” (9) Sidney and Beatrice Webb, I assumed that “The taint of utopianism damned worker cooperativism on all sides” (15). So it was kind of an eye-opener for me to discover that a worker’s cooperative could be “Spain’s largest exporter of machine tools and the largest manufacturer of white goods such as refrigerators, stoves, washing-machines and dishwashers” and “the third largest supplier of automotive components in Europe” (Matthews 2, qtd. in Gibson-Graham 26). In light of Curtiss’s recent remarks to me — namely, that “If you can get your students working together on projects, you’ll be imparting a skill that directly inimical to the exploitation of knowledge workers: the ability to organize and cooperate” — this gives me something to think about.

I agree with Curtiss: it’s hard to resist exploitation on an individual level, and I think that today, the revived rhetoric of romantic individualism playing as cool anti-authoritarian uniqueness (see Thomas Frank’s work, especially “Why Johnny Can’t Dissent” and other stuff he’s done for The Baffler) is rendering those who buy into it hip, solipsistic, and powerless. Conscious individuation is achieved within the context of consumer culture — the market — and subjects individuals to the ideology of commodification and the capitalist struggle to get ahead or at least not fall behind. Adam Smith saw the tastes and desires of individuals as constituting the market’s invisible hand which guides the (often presumed to be) irresistible forces of supply and demand. There are other ideologies, of which Mondragón seems to me to be one example.

While the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation has subsidiaries in other locations, it is very much situated within the Basque region, and as such may serve “as a guide to local practices of economic experimentation” (4), according to Gibson-Graham. The “local” is important here because of the way it focuses attention on community relationships and localized practices (see Leslie Salzinger’s focus on such practices in her 1997 Feminist Studies essay “From High Heels to Swathed Bodies: Gendered Meanings Under Production in Mexico’s Export-Processing Industry” 23[3]) and makes visible concrete and particular effects of specific economic interactions (recall here Michael Porter’s writing on the advantages of location in On Competition), rather than locating those actions in some transcendent “space of flows” familiar from the writing of Manuel Castells and others. Clearly, there are productive possibilities here for me to make connections to points John has made in the past about the local nature of class as applied to academic institutions, and to understandings about the local purposes of composition I’ve extrapolated from Sharon Crowley’s writing.

There are other things that interest me in Gibson-Graham’s writing on Mondrag�n, as well: they point to a decreased need for supervisors in the cooperative because of the voluntary and committed nature of the work, resulting in a more streamlined and flexible organization. I might wonder if such an organization might subsequently contain fewer class positions and less clearly defined class positions within any hierarchy it might have. What seems most important to me, though, is the way in which the Mondrag�n cooperative privileges the “Instrumental and subordinate character of capital”, or “people over capital”, so that “capital does not have an independent existence, imperative or logic” (19). This seems to me to be an essential ethic; something I would want to believe in — but then there’s that red flag word “Instrumental”. Yes, computers in my classroom should have no independent existence, imperative, or logic; yes, people over computers — but the view of computers as instrument takes us back towards the opposite of those imperatives.