Mondragon

In Working Toward Zion, Mondragon is the book’s flagship real-world example of a worker-owned cooperative system that embodies many of the principles of the United Order. The book holds it up — alongside Grameen and Value Added Ventures — as a contemporary instance proving the United Order is an “unfinished experiment, not a sealed history,” and as evidence that capitalism, socialism, and the United Order are three genuinely distinct frameworks rather than capitalism with charity added on.

The book details how Mondragon works: it is a complex of legally independent cooperatives coordinated through a central cooperative bank, whose “Contract of Association” mandates compliance with core rules (one-person, one-vote governance) on pain of having credit cut off. Workers pay a substantial entry contribution into an individual capital account; rather than wages, every worker from shop floor to management draws a monthly anticipio against that account, with surplus earnings credited back at year-end. An Entrepreneurial Division functions like John Taylor’s old Board of Trade — evaluating business plans from worker-cooperators and providing financing, market research, and a “godfather” to shepherd new start-up cooperatives, solving the twin problems of inadequate funding and incomplete management know-how. Salary differentials are capped (roughly six-to-one), and the system has seen only one strike in its history.

Kyle flags the puzzle the book raises — its founder Don José María Arizmendiarrieta trained leaders as practical engineers rather than abstract social theorists, and efforts to replicate the model elsewhere have largely failed (“there have been no ‘other Mondragons’”). Kyle’s note beside this: “Figure out who has tried to replicate Mondragon.” The book ultimately asks whether Latter-day Saints, armed with revelation of the United Order principles, could “show the way” to a fuller realization than Mondragon, certain ESOPs, or the Israeli kibbutzim have achieved.

Context: The Mondragon Corporation is a federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque town of Mondragón, Spain, founded in 1956 by the Catholic priest José María Arizmendiarrieta. It is one of the largest worker-cooperative groups in the world, spanning manufacturing, finance, retail, and education.

Where this appears

• Working Toward Zion — Mondragon as the book’s central example of a cooperative system realizing United Order principles; detailed treatment of its bank, capital accounts, Entrepreneurial Division, and the unsolved question of why it can’t be replicated.