Mondragon: `an extremely important endeavor' (was: RE: Noam Chomsky)

From: Damien Broderick (thespike@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Jan 07 2003 - 23:48:04 MST


Doug Thayer:

> Chomsky is against Mondragon. Google for "chomsky mondragon". Something
> about hierarchical management structures.

This is often said. Here are some of Chomsky's own words (FWIW):

http://www.zmag.org/forums/chomforumacrh.htm

< You're right to take this [Mondragon] very seriously, in my opinion. It
is a very substantial experiment in participant-owned economy, including
production, finance, commerce and retail; and in terms of standard economic
measures, it's been quite successful. There have also been problems. To
what extent these derive from implantation within a state capitalist economy
of the standard kind (e.g., the pressure to shift production to low-wage
high-repression areas where workers will not be owners, violating the
original principle that kept this to below 10% of the workforce) or to
inherent factors of institutional structure (such as separation of
professional management from workforce) is not so easy to determine, and
merits careful thought. There is a lot of literature on the topic. A
couple of fairly recent books are David Ellerman, _The Democratic
Worker-Owned Firm_, and William & Kathleen Whyte, _Making Mondragon_. There
was a review a year or two ago by Mike Long in Libertarian Labor Review that
I thought was quite well-informed, perceptive, and interesting (it was,
incidentally, critical of my own criticism of Mondragon for hierarchic
managerial structures); my understanding is that he might be a little less
optimistic about the prospects himself, right now.

Whatever one's assessment, this is an extremely important endeavor, in my
opinion, and should be carefully studied. >

Damien Broderick



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