a Basque polytechnic school (Mondragon University)
"it provided enough engineering support to bootstrap the expertise to begin a few manufacturing businesses again, starting with paraffin burners"
"these were organized from the start as employee-owned cooperatives. This mode of organization was in the Basque tradition of regional solidarity, a manifestation of that precapitalist, even pre-feudal gift economy of the ancient Basque, which goes back as far as can be determined, into the time before written history"
"these cooperatives thrived in Mondragón, and a complex of them has been growing there ever since. Eventually they included the town's banks and credit unions, also its university and insurance company. These worker-owned enterprises became a kind of co-op of co-ops, which now forms the tenth largest corporation in Spain, with assets in the billions of euros and yearly profits in the millions. The profits don't get shifted out as shares to shareholders, but are rather divided three ways, with a third distributed among the employee-owners, a third devoted to capital improvements, and a third given to charities chosen by the employees. The wage ration between management's top salary and the minimum level of pay is set at three to one, or sometimes five to one, or at most nine to one. All the businesses and enterprises adhere to the cooperative principles formalized later by the larger worldwide cooperative movement, of which Mondragón is somewhat the jewel in the crown: open admission, democratic organization, the sovereignty of labor, the instrumental and subordinate nature of capital, participatory management, payment solidarity, inter-cooperation, social transformation, universality, and education"
"Taken together, if these principles were to be applied seriously everywhere, they would form a political economy entirely different from capitalism as generally practiced. They make a coherent set of axioms that would lead to a new set of laws, practices, goals, and results" (272-3)