Mondragon Corporation
The Mondragon Corporation is a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain.
It was founded in the town of Mondragón in 1956 by Father José María Arizmendiarrieta and a group of his students at a technical college he founded. Its first product was paraffin heaters.
It is the seventh-largest Spanish company in terms of asset turnover and the leading business group in the Basque Country. At the end of 2016, it employed 74,117 people in 257 companies and organizations in four areas of activity: finance, industry, retail and knowledge.[4] By 2019, 81,507 people were employed.[3]
Mondragon cooperatives operate in accordance with the Statement on the Co-operative Identity maintained by the International Co-operative Alliance.
Mondragon in fiction[edit]
Works of Kim Stanley Robinson[edit]
In 2312, a science fiction novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, the Mondragon Corporation has evolved into a planned economy system called the Mondragon Accord.[51] The Mondragon Accord is controlled by means of a network of AIs running on quantum computers, and rules large parts of the Solar System, including Mercury and most of the moons of the gas giants; only part of Earth, and its colonies in space, retain remnants of capitalist economies, while Mars has withdrawn from the Accord in the century preceding the story. The Mondragon Corporation already appeared in Robinson's earlier Mars trilogy, as one of the Terran groups involved in the colonization and terraforming of Mars; the coop is also portrayed as the inspiration of both the bogdanovist movement [52] and the libertarian-leaning Praxis Corporation[53] two of the main forces leading the revolution for the independence of Mars. In Robinson's book The Ministry for the Future, the Mondragon Corporation is introduced in chapter 58 as a model for a future, post-capitalist, cooperative economy.[54]