Sixty years ago, a priest from Vizcaya, along with five students from the professional school he had founded in Mondragón, created a workshop which gave birth to the Fagor Cooperative. In turn, its creation led to the association of more than a hundred cooperatives, consisting of 80,000 workers, which represented the largest cooperativist group in the world – with a presence in more than a hundred countries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
This experience has been studied in universities throughout the world as an example of a model of production capable of presenting a real challenge to the dominant capitalist model.
Today, Fagor has been forced to close due to its enormous debt. Many Marxists celebrate its failure because they never believed in anything other than the centralised management of an economic system. The capitalists of the world also rub their hands and recommend that cooperatives embrace their ways of doing business.
However, the failure of this model company was due to its abandonment of the principles from which it was born: solidarity and self-management. For example, a cooperative driven by solidarity could not participate in a globalised system in which it would become yet another multinational corporation – opening factories in China, Brazil, or Poland as a public limited company and paying wages of exploitation. Neither could a cooperative driven by principles of self-management allow strategic decisions to be made by ‘experts’ rather than workers.
The cooperative movement needs both solidarity and activism. Almost no politician talks about how to close the widening gap between the yields of capitalists and the yields of the workforce. The most recent labour reforms have created a framework that weakens the power of workers in the economic system and leads to the increase in worker poverty. In the modern capitalist corporation, the wage gap between workers and executives is in a ratio of 1 to 500 and growing. In the cooperative world, on the other hand, it is 1 to 5.
We are currently on the path towards a savage business world in which the devaluation of wages is pushed forward by the financial organisations that govern the world. In such a dog eat dog world of brutal competition, the only real opportunities are for the multinational corporations which can buy the riches of the world at bargain prices.
There are European countries where sectors of the economy are largely in the hands of cooperatives, without cooperative laws being in place. And they build international alliances with other cooperatives on the margins of society and legal regulations. In Spain, however, we have seventeen cooperative laws that created an asphyxiating dependence on ‘autonomous’ bureaucracies. That’s how we can explain our high figures of unemployment and how we have mortgaged ourselves off to rescue the banking sector.
Guillermo Rovirosa worked and studied hard to build a company based on its workers. His conclusion was that without cooperativists, the existence of a cooperative is doomed. For the success of a cooperative movement, cooperative humans must first be created, and Fagor seems to have neglected this idea.
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