I have been an advocate for cooperative economics of various kinds for some time, and for many reasons – not the least of which is that I think a culture of life will be more easily built on cooperative rather than individualist foundations in the modern world.
While it is often easy to talk about the idea, to debate its merits and problems, figuring out how to implement it is the difficulty.
I was recently reading up on the history and principles of the Mondragon, the successful group of worker-owned and run cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain, and I was both amazed and inspired at the tenacity of its founders. Starting with very little, they simply “put the word out” that they were looking for loans. In a community with high unemployment they were eventually able to raise what in today’s dollars would be about 2 million dollars.
Might a group of interested Catholics, much like those who founded the Mondragon, be able to accomplish something similar today? We may be in a recession but the conditions can hardly be worse than those faced by Fr. Arizmendiarreta in post-war Spain under Franco.
In the US, there are organizations such as the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives that offer business planning grants and loans, giving priority to cooperatives that are likely to spawn more cooperatives. They are specifically interested in projects that might be shot down by banks or other lenders, because they might involve hiring society’s throwaways or outcasts as workers or some other potentially unprofitable act of faith in our fellow human beings.
There are other similar resources around the Web, and so I won’t list them all here. But I do want to get the ball rolling; having heard the arguments and seen the evidence that cooperatives can work, is it not time for Catholics to seriously consider what it means to be “in” but not “of” the world?
The cooperative model is organically Catholic: greater worker ownership has been called for by several Popes over the last 120 years, the most successful cooperative in the world was founded by a Jesuit priest, cooperatives naturally foster community and a view of each worker as a human being instead of a cog in a machine.
It is possible that one might profit less from a successful cooperative than from a successful autocracy. But the call made by the Church to Catholics is different than that which is made by the world to men. There is nothing intrinsically immoral about a traditionally structured firm, where there are owners at the top, managers, then wage workers. But if there is a better alternative that more directly embodies and further promotes the Catholic vision of man and society, the common good and the universal destination of goods, how long can it be ignored?
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