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Audio: Carl Davidson on Mondragon and the Solidarity Economy
by Carl Davidson
The presentation explored the genesis and trajectory of the Mondragon experiment, with an eye towards understanding how this model might be deployed to build a green economy in the US.
Carl Davidson, former SDS organizer, currently working with SolidarityEconomy.net and the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, presented the story of the Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque country: started by a Catholic priest looking for a way to build economic power in a poor community with few other options in Franco's Spain, the Mondragon cooperatives are now the largest interlinked network of cooperatively run businesses in the world, with over 80,000 worker owners, and an extensive system of research, education, development, and financial assistance that works for the benefit of the cooperatives. Mondragon is Spain's fourth largest industrial and seventh largest financial group, and, although not perfect by any stretch of the progressive imagination, it is a powerful testimony to the fact that alternatives are not only possible but real: this is a major coroporation which is owned by its workers and run democratically.
