No.
So we sat there and drank.
Well, Sophie said, at least he died saving the world.
No! Jeff said. No! It was a mistake!
Even then he didn’t cry, though his face went red and he looked furiously distraught. We huddled in a mass around him and sobbed or didn’t. These feelings come on you or they don’t, the timing is weird. Lots of people dissociate in moments like that, and it only hits them later. Sometimes so much later you can’t believe it, I know this myself— for me, once it was literally twenty-one years between the death involved and me feeling it. Twenty-one years, I swear. But on this night most of us cried, all but Jeff. We were distraught.
After that we pulled ourselves together and cleaned up the place and discussed plans more quietly. Nothing to be done. Finally we gave up and went to bed, reluctantly, as it seemed too normal, it seemed like giving up on any chance of things changing or the world going back in time. Just had to give up and go to bed; we were going to have to deal with a lot of shit the next day. And there was no point in drinking any more. It wasn’t going to do any good. Our leader had made a simple but deadly mistake. The world would go on, but for us it would never be the same.
58
The usual view of liberation theology locates it in South America in the latter part of the twentieth century. The phrase was invented to describe this Latin American phenomenon, so it’s fair enough to think that’s what it refers to.
But in Spain we think there was an earlier example of a young idealistic Catholic priest, helping his people in defiance of the church hierarchy. No doubt it has happened many times without anyone noticing it outside the community affected. Of course the situation with young priests has gone wrong so many times. But maybe more times, the young idealistic man, trying to do good in the world, intense, devout, isolated, put out there in a community of poor people, people suffering in so many ways, just trying to make ends meet, to hold it all together, and their church supposed to be part of that effort— when some of these young men get confronted with that situation, in all their belief and their desire to help, their trust in the church, quite a many of them must have fallen in love with their people and worked furiously their whole lives to do everything they could to serve them.
In this particular case in Spain, the young priest was named José María Arizmendiarrieta. Born and raised in the Basque part of Spain, he took arms in the Spanish civil war on the Republican side, then got captured by Franco’s soldiers. It’s said that he then had a sort of Dostoyevsky moment, in that he was condemned to execution and scheduled to be shot, but in his case was spared by a bureaucratic oversight, as they failed to show up and get him on the day in question, no one knows why. Let’s say God had a plan for him.
After that he took holy orders, perhaps feeling his life was meant for something, and he was sent to Mondragón in 1941, when he was twenty-six years old, as part of an attempt by the Franco regime to pacify the Basque people, who were still rebellious in the aftermath of the Republic’s defeat.
At first his congregation was not impressed by him. He had only one eye as a result of the war, he read verses in a monotone, he seemed distant and tentative. One can wonder if he was shell-shocked, or a bit on the spectrum as we would say now. It took him a few years of quiet listening to his people to come to a determination of how he might help them best. Before the war the area had supported some light industry which had not returned. Father José María wondered if they could start something up again, and as part of that, he helped them to organize a polytechnic school, now known as Mondragón University. Soon after opening, it provided enough engineering support to bootstrap the expertise to begin a few manufacturing businesses again, starting with paraffin burners. And on his suggestion, and with his help, these were organized from the start as employee-owned cooperatives. This mode of organization was in the Basque tradition of regional solidarity, a manifestation of that precapitalist, even pre-feudal gift economy of the ancient Basque, which goes back as far as can be determined, into the time before written history.
Whatever the explanation, these cooperatives thrived in Mondragón, and a complex of them has been growing there ever since. Eventually they included the town’s banks and credit unions, also its university and insurance company. These worker-owned enterprises became a kind of co-op of co-ops, which now forms the tenth largest corporation in Spain, with assets in the billions of euros and yearly profits in the millions. The profits don’t get shifted out as shares to shareholders, but are rather divided three ways, with a third distributed among the employee-owners, a third devoted to capital improvements, and a third given to charities chosen by the employees. The wage ratio between management’s top salary and the minimum level of pay is set at three to one, or sometimes five to one, or at most nine to one. All the businesses and enterprises adhere to the cooperative principles formalized later by the larger worldwide cooperative movement, of which Mondragón is somewhat the jewel in the crown: open admission, democratic organization, the sovereignty of labor, the instrumental and subordinate
