The Sunday Long Read - The Cooperatist

13/4/25

The Cooperatist

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Some years ago, when my documentary Inside Child Poverty was released, a right-wing radio Shock Jock asked me in an interview whether I was a Socialist or a Communist. I told him (thinking I was being clever) that I was a “Cooperatist.”

“What’s that?” he barked.

“Someone who believes that not all competition is healthy and we can often achieve better outcomes on common goals by working together.”

“So you are on the Left! ” he insisted.

“I’m not sure how meaningful those terms are meaningful in our country anymore”, I said, “with both of the major parties entrenched in the politics and economics of selfishness that is called Neoliberalism, which is about as far away as you can get from the WE focused society in which I would like us to live.”

“You’re a Socialist then!” he said triumphantly. “We’ll leave it there. Thank you. Time for the News!” There was a “click” on the end of the phone, and that was that.

While I’m certainly comfortable for anyone to stick the Socialist label on me if they must, I’d reject the Communist one as I don’t think the State controlling absolutely everything is such a wonderful idea, largely because of the risk of dictatorship. However I certainly think the State should be actively involved in those areas of the marketplace that effect the well- being of everyone, such as food production and distribution, housing, health, and education to name a few.

Now here’s where I get my comeuppance, because “Coopartist” - which is a word I thought I’d invented - was of course coined by someone far brighter than I, and who not only invented the word but put it into action.

I’m talking about Father José María Arizmendiarrieta whose name came up in my conversation this week with the renowned political economist Prof Richard Wolff, and which I posted yesterday .

In 1941, José was a newly ordained Spanish priest who saw the capitalist order sweeping across the world and thought it was unjust. The owners were becoming rich by the work of the labourers, while the labourers remained poor and unable to rise up from their lot.

Following Karl Marx there were those who thought the solution to worker misery was to put the State in charge of the economy, but José Arizmendiarrieta thought State control had turned out disastrously in the Soviet Union under the regime of Joseph Stalin, and in the 1950s, with Spain under the control of the nationalist dictator Franco, José argued they didn’t need the government to take over the economy, they needed to take it over themselves.

“The worst illusion we can suffer is to become intoxicated with simple words,” Arizmendiarrieta said. “It is time for facts and actions and not for so many theories whose practical realization scarcely resembles the fundamental principles they are based on.”

In his parish of Arrasate-Mondragón, Unión Cerrajera was the largest company in town, employing nearly all the region’s workers. The locksmith factory was generating plenty of wealth for the owners but very little for the workers.

José thought there was nothing wrong with making a profit per se, it was how that profit was distributed that mattered, and the workers should be involved in ownership of business and share in the profits. So he preached these cooporatist ideas from his pulpit and published magazines demanding profits be shared among workers. But he didn’t just pontificate about a new world order or publish his ideas in a manifesto, instead he tried them out in real time and evolved them by experimentation.

“Theory is necessary, but it is not enough,” he said, “we build the road as we travel.”

In 1940s the people of Arrasate-Mondragón clearly needed money, which meant they needed better paying jobs, and José thought that if every worker shared in the profits, and not just the owners, then that might do the trick. So he exerted his influence as the parish priest and proposed to the management at Unión Cerrajera that, in the name of social justice, they should advance towards a different model of relationship with their workers which would see a fairer return to their employees by being involved in the ownership of the factory.

They refused, and when the owners of Unión Cerrajera cut benefits to the workers in 1949, they went on strike. They demanded worker protections, such as occupational health and safety, holidays, an aid fund and entitlement for manual workers to have an ‘English Saturday,’ i.e. to finish work at midday on Saturday. But the owners resisted and when, in1954, Unión Cerrajera shareholders announced they would be increasing their share capital, it was the final straw.

José took a small group of young men who he had help get an engineering education, bought a company with authorization to “build appliances for domestic use” and they began to manufacture home appliances, stoves and car parts.

They didn’t have the money to buy the company, of course, but members from the community rose up around them, contributing what they had in hopes that their children might one day be able to work in the company. They needed around 12 million pesetas, equivalent to about €3.7 million at today’s money and in six months 115 potential members signed up, each contributing about 90,000 pesetas and the company, Ulgor, was launched.

Early on, the founders agreed that the company’s profit would be divided into three parts: One part would be invested back into the business in the form of buying capital (land, buildings, machinery, etc.), one part would go to the business leaders, and one part would go to the workers. Workers would participate in the running of the company by vote.

This was a sharp departure from how Unión Cerrajera operated,which still believed the success of the company came from the superiority of its well-bred shareholders.

Arizmendiarrieta started a vocational school and trained every worker to become an entrepreneur, not just those at the top. As a result, Ulgor workers knew how the business worked, and were trusted to participate in the running of it.

“Everyone is an owner and everyone is an entrepreneur, without discrimination, in good and bad times, contributing with the available capital and the needed work,” José Arizmendiarrieta said.

The harder they worked, the more money they made, and the more people they were able to hire. They worked not just for the benefit of themselves but for the benefit of the greater community. It wasn’t easy, to be an Ulgor worker meant pulling one’s weight.

“One cannot sit at someone else’s table indefinitely, without ever contributing anything,” Arizmendiarrieta said. “Each person has a benefit from society and one must offer to serve and give to society in kind.”

Demand for jobs at Ulgor skyrocketed. Workers wanted to get away from the absolute submission they had to endure in traditional companies and find alternatives and within six years the number of cooperative members had swelled to around 1,250, accounting for approximately 10% of the 13,000 jobs in the manufacturing industry in the whole their local region Comarca.

Shortly after Ulgor was founded in 1956, a group of students at Arizmendiarrieta’s vocational school purchased another company, Fagor, that made dies for industrial processes, and that’s when the Franco administration clapped down, creating a new regulation that excluded cooperative workers from receiving social security benefits.

This would have been a blow to the workers, rendering them unable to retire, but the founders of both companies quickly pooled their profits to fund a third company: Lagun Aro which would use the money to provide retirement benefits for the workers at both companies and in 1959 they also founded Caja Laboral Popular —a bank!

Ulgor and Fagor deposited their money into the bank, so did the local community, and within a few years, it was earning enough interest to start funding new endeavours and grow existing ones.

With a school that would train new entrepreneurs, a bank that would fund them, and a collection of cooperatives in which workers shared ownership of the company and earned benefits in the process, by 1962 young workers from around the region were applying for jobs at the cooperative in their hundreds.

Within 10 years of opening their first business, the group had founded 36 cooperatives and were earning €18 million in revenues. They had surpassed the Unión Cerrajera as the largest employer in the region, with workers earning better wages and enjoying better worker protections. They were owners of their own companies, participators in the running of them, and active members of the country’s first democracy.

Arrizmendiarrieta didn’t write a manifesto, he built a living one. And after Franco died in 1975, the Mondragon founders were able to help the Basque Country and Spain transition away from their dictatorship to democracy.

What happened to attendance at José Arizmendiarrieta church however was interesting.

When the Priest set out to improve economic inequality in the 1940s, 95% of Arrasate-Mondragón attended Catholic mass, their community was poor and lived very austere lives. But by the time the founders of those first Mondragón cooperatives began retiring, only 5% of the well off community attended mass.

So I can’t tell you if the Pope was pleased with Father José or not.

What I can tell you is that political leaders who profess their belief in the Christian Gospel of Love yet perpetuate the politics and economics of selfishness that is called Neoliberalism- which allows employers to exploit their employees and for 1 in 5 of our children to grow up in poverty- is something that beggars my cooperatist belief.

We are all in this life together. I think we should work together to make it better for all of us.