CAN WE JUST COOPERATE? WORKER DEMOCRACY, GLOBAL CAPITALISM, AND THE MONDRAGÓN EXPERIMENT

Abstract

This thesis examines the Mondragón cooperative network in Spain's Basque Country as a lived site of contradiction between cooperative ideals and global capitalist pressures. Drawing on nine days of ethnographic fieldwork, formal interviews, and participant observation conducted in July 2025, the project investigates how cooperative norms are experienced, negotiated, and eroded in everyday working life. Rather than adjudicating between the degeneration and spillover theses, the field's two dominant frameworks, the thesis demonstrates how both dynamics unfold simultaneously and unevenly within Mondragón's institutional reality. Applying Bourdieu's concept of habitus, Raymond Williams' theory of hegemony, and James Scott's moral economy in combination, I argue that cooperative democracy persists not as a static inheritance but as a continuously recalibrated practice under pressure. Tensions across industrial competition, internationalization, market rationality, declining participation, and generational talent drain reveal that Mondragón's significance lies not in its perfection as an alternative to capitalism, but in the ongoing contradictions through which cooperative ideals are reproduced, strained, and redefined.