This list is worth studying in some detail, but not here. Taken together, if these principles were to be applied seriously everywhere, they would form a political economy entirely different from capitalism as generally practiced. They make a coherent set of axioms that would lead to a new set of laws, practices, goals, and results.
How this has worked out in Mondragón is open to interpretation. The system has been enmeshed in the world economy all along, and it had to make adjustments when the European Union formed, as well as continuous adaptations to the markets and countries it existed in. There are those who say it could not succeed outside of its Basque context, that Basque culture makes it possible; this seems unlikely, but there are many who don’t want to consider that an alternative to capitalism, more humane, what you might even call a Catholic political economy, not only is possible, but has existed and thrived for a century, and is still going strong.
There have also been moments of crisis, as when recessions struck just at the moment that certain critical cooperatives had expanded, or when a manager absconded with an immense amount of money, causing severe cash flow problems. Still, the place makes a good living for its people, and creates a culture that is mostly loved by those who perform it. There is solidarity and esprit de corps, and even in a world of intense competition, it makes a profit most years, enough for over a hundred thousand people to make a living from it and to give back to the general culture.
There are other such enclaves around the world, and systems that while not as distinctive and whole, are yet somewhat like it. They survive, sometimes they thrive. The question is, to put it in the dominant vocabulary of our time, could they scale? Are they a way out, a way forward, a step along that way?
We think so. For us, the project is to spread the system throughout Spain. For everyone else, maybe the world. But this is our contribution. We give you Mondragón.
59
I was in my apartment in Sierra Madre, which is a little town lined by tall palm trees, wedged between Pasadena and Azusa, set right at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, which tower over that part of LA like a brown corrugated wall, pretty ugly if you ask me. It was kind of a blessing when the smog got so thick you couldn’t see it, which could happen even from only three miles away. None of the ring of mountains backing LA are good-looking. But they do form quite the wall, as we found out that day.
Luckily I was an active kayaker before I broke my arm, and I still had my kayak. My apartment was a granny flat over a garage, its separate entrance something I valued a lot, as I didn’t have to bother my landlord going in and out, and he usually never saw me and thus never got a chance to scam on me. It was kind of a mercy rental on his part, or so I thought before his intentions became clear, as I couldn’t afford Hollywood anymore, no doubt obvious when I gave him my clichéd young-aspiring-actress-currently-waitressing shtick. And he let me store my big stuff in his garage below my studio, which was really just a storage shed with a bathroom in it, tacked onto the flat roof of his garage. So when the atmospheric river hit, I was one of the few people in the city with watercraft on hand.
It rained hard all that first night, the timing was part of the problem— by the time everyone woke up things were already bad, and it just went downhill from there. Literally so for the water, and therefore everything else. But it wasn’t your ordinary flood, or maybe it was, I don’t really know, but in our case, the water came roaring down off the side of the San Gabriels onto us. It was terrifying to see what the dawn revealed that day. The mountains are ten thousand feet high over Sierra Madre, and they were catching all that rain, which was falling as hard as in a hurricane or something, and then it was all rushing down those vertical ravines onto the streets that poked up into the ravines, now all of them whitewater rapids brown with mud, and filled with boulders and shrubs and pieces of all the houses that were coming apart farther up the street.
I looked out my front door and saw cars floating down the street on a brown wave about three feet high that covered everything. I could see the water was already coming into my landlord’s house, and rushing hard toward the 210. Everywhere I looked was a big sheet of brown water! I shouted to my landlord but he had already left without informing me, very typical. In fact I couldn’t see anyone anywhere except for a family on top of their SUV, getting taken for a sideways ride and looking desperate.
I got down my outside stairs and sloshed through brown water to the garage side door. Inside I found the power had gone out, of course, so it was a struggle to get the big garage door open. I managed to pull it up from the inside, and a sloosh of water flowed into the garage, a little wave about a foot high. But there was my kayak and I grabbed it and the paddle off the wall, wriggled into the skirt and got into the kayak and took off into the street.
That was a crazy moment, realizing the streets were all flooded and my kayak was the only way for me to get around. So much water! And brown as hot chocolate. And it was still raining cats and dogs too, so it was hard to see
