The Cooperatist Manifesto that inspired Mondragon

Father José María Arizmendiarrieta didn’t just imagine a better economic system, he built it.

A century after Karl Marx argued for a more fair and just society, José María Arizmendiarrieta started building one.

By 1941, the newly ordained Spanish priest saw the capitalist order sweeping across the world and found it unjust, the owners were becoming rich by the work of the laborers, while the laborers remained poor and destitute, unable to rise up from their lot. 

Marx thought we needed to put the state in charge of the economy, at first, before the people could take hold of it themselves, but Arizmendiarrieta thought we shouldn’t get the state involved at all. State control of the economy had turned out disastrous in the hands of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, and Mao Zedong was following a similar blueprint in China. 

By the 1950s, Spain was under the control of the nationalist dictator Franco—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, and almost in rebuke of Marxism: “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.”

From where he stood, capitalism was creating much more wealth and prosperity than socialism was. 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, it just indiscriminately favorited the owners. 

Arizmendiarrieta just thought we needed more owners. We needed the workers to be the owners. 

“We do not aspire to economic development as an end,” he said, “but as a means.”

Or as Germán Lorenzo, global public affairs for Mondragon, would put it nearly 80 years later: “Profit is like air, we need air to breathe.”