Хосе Мария Аризмедиариэта: Мондрагон кооперативтерінің негізін қалаушы рухани қызметкер

Basque Catholic priest and founder of the Mondragón cooperative movement

José María Arizmendiarrieta Madariaga (Marquina Xemein, Bizkaia, Spain, April 22, 1915 – Mondragon, Gipuzkoa, Spain, November 29, 1976) was a Basque Catholic priest and promoter of the cooperative companies of the Mondragon Corporation, originally located in the Basque Country and currently spread throughout the world. As of 2021, it is the second largest social economy business group in Spain, bringing together ninety eight cooperatives, eight foundations, one mutual, ten coverage entities and seven international delegations, distributed in four areas: finance, industry, distribution and knowledge. Arizmendiarrieta was a seminarian in Vitoria when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, and consequently he was mobilized by the Basque Government. Due to his knowledge of the Basque language, he was assigned to the editor of the new newspaper Eguna, where he remained until Francisco Franco’s troops entered Bilbao. He was arrested by them, and again mobilized for the Military Government of Burgos until the end of the war. After finishing his studies and his priestly ordination, he was assigned in 1941 as curate of the parish to the industrial town of Mondragon, located in the Gipuzkoan Deba Valley, where he remained until his death. A pragmatic and hard working priest, with a great sense of social justice and human dignity, he promoted numerous entities and companies for the good of the workers and the community in what he called the "cooperative experience of Mondragon". Thousands of people visit Mondragon every year to analyze Arizmendiarrieta's self managed cooperative model for job creation and maintenance. He is considered Venerable in the Catholic Church.

Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta, whose name is often shortened to "Arizmendi", was born on April 22, 1915 in the modest farmhouse called Iturbe, nestled in the Barinaga porch, in the municipality of Markina Xemein, Biscay. His parents were José Luis and Tomasa. His father had a reputation as a man of peace among his neighbors. Good natured, cheerful and determined, he had a social life under the wing of fairs and brotherhoods. His mother was a housewife in the spirit of the biblical woman: intelligent, orderly, hard working and self sacrificing. She took care of the children's education and the administration of the farmhouse. Jose Maria was the eldest of four brothers, the other three being Maria, Francisco and Jesus. When he was three years old he suffered a fall in front of the farmhouse, causing a severe head injury, and was taken to the doctor at Markina. The physical damage to his sight was irreparable: he lost his left eye, which was replaced by an artificial one. At the age of four he began to go to the rural school attached to the parish, financed by the farmhouses and the neighbourhood residents. The aftermath of the accident influenced José María's future temperament, as well as the over protection that his mother devoted to him from then on. In the Seminary there were two groups, the youngest and most unreflective, who played football and Basque pelota, and the mature, serious and responsible group who thought about the problems of the world, about peace and war, or social issues such as hunger and missions. Arizmendiarrieta belonged to the latter. One of the most influential priests was Manuel Lekuona, a professor of languages and art. He defended the view that working for the cultivation of the Basque language was an urgent duty of the diocesan priests, to teach catechesis in the vernacular language. In fact, in 1933 several students in the 2nd year of philosophy decided to found the "Third level of the Kardaberaz Society" (Kardaberaz Bazkunaren hirugarren maila), and they endowed it with the motto "Always forward" (Aurrera beti). They all agreed that the best person to draft its statutes was Arizmendiarrieta, who also drew up his founding manifesto, in which he associated the work of the company with the Renaissance ideology. Likewise, he was appointed deputy director of the Society, that is, the de facto manager, since the Director, known as Lekuona, merely supervised. They held an average of three meetings per month, to which were added ordinary and extraordinary meetings. Both Lekuona and Jose Miguel Barandiaran conveyed to the seminarians the value of critical observation, being reluctant to promote mere study. In this way they countered the monastic romanticism of the Seminary, which tended to cloister the priestly vocation, such that according to Arizmendiarrieta, "from so much talking about the temptations of the world, they were absent and unaware of the real temptations: power and comfort. "In September 1939, he returned again to the Vitoria Seminary, under the tutelage of Professor Rufino Aldabalde, who had created some work groups where he considered that, after the upheaval of the civil war, the social question was the burning task for the new generation of priests. The stages of "Kardaberaz" and the work in "Eguna" had finished, and in December Arizmendiarrieta was appointed by Aldabalde director of the group's sheet, which was called "Pax". In March 1940, the sheet changed its name to "Arises", and the Priestly Movement of Vitoria was created, where the social apostolate, especially that of youth and workers, were the two areas of work in which Arizmendiarrieta participated in the months prior to his ordination. This relationship with young apprentices led him to revitalize Catholic Action as a center for social, cultural and religious leisure. In addition, he created in 1942 new sections such as the Sports Youth, the Academy of Sociology, and the Hallelujah magazine, intended for new military recruits. In his quest for community welfare, he started to focus his efforts on vocational training, such as the school provided by the Locksmith Union, a flagship factory of Mondragon. However, his attempts to enhance and expand the school were not welcomed by the management. And Arizmendiarrieta wanted to socialize knowledge and extend the possibility of training to the children of all the workers of the town. He visited the Professional School opened in Vitoria by Pedro Anitua, and decided to do the same, creating a Professional School in precarious conditions in 1943, in the name of Catholic Action, for which he relied on donations and popular subscription. It was a private, non cooperative school, initially governed by a Board of Trustees. During the eleven months of the course, the students had a paid job for four hours in the morning in a local company, and in the afternoon they went to class for six hours. In the year 1946, Arizmendiarrieta made an important qualitative leap in training, by selecting the best eleven young people who had completed their High Level Vocational Cycle studies, to pursue higher studies in Industrial engineering, but enrolled in the University of Zaragoza, located 200 km away. During the day they worked 55 hours a week at the Locksmith Union, and at night they studied under the guidance of teachers from the Professional School. They were examined in person in July, and all passed the five courses. Among them were the five entrepreneurs of what in 1956 was the first cooperative, ULGOR. In addition, the same year and following his thought of "theology of reality", he managed to create an anti tuberculosis dispensary in the small Mondragon Community health center. His body was able to be viewed for two days, and thousands of people paid homage to him. On December 1, the funeral was held, presided over by the Minister of Labor and officiated by 60 priests.

Arizmendiarrieta promoted an open organizational model without distinction of race, belief, social class or gender, which was both participatory and interdependent. And it had some common elements, but also others specific to each sector of activity.

In July 1955 the houses of the "Mondragon Home Association" had already been completed, and Arizmendiarrieta promoted the creation of the San José Consumer Cooperative among his neighbors in the assembly of partners. It was about creating a community alternative to the exclusive company stores, such as that of the Locksmith Union. He organized everything personally: he participated in the list of founding members, collected the necessary documentation to formalize the statutes, looked for theoretical references about cooperativism to familiarize the members with this business model, took care of the steps to acquire premises in the town that served as a store, and drafted the statutes of the company. They included him as a member of the Governing Board, and to finance his purchase, Arizmendiarrieta negotiated interest free loans with several companies in exchange for them taking advantage of the cooperative as their own commissary. The authorization for its creation had to be given by the Government in Madrid, and when this was refused, they decided to buy a company in difficulty in Vitoria in October, with its industrial license to manufacture "appliances for domestic use", essentially cooking oil stoves. In April 1956 Arizmendiarrieta blessed the pavilion where the new company Talleres ULGOR was located in Mondragon, where in addition to continuing to manufacture the previous stoves, they launched a new product: an oil stove copied to the millimeter from an English model unknown in Spain. Likewise, in the summer they obtained a license to manufacture selenium plates under the patent of a German company. Arizmendiarrieta relied on talented young people he knew from the School, under the premise that "to create cooperatives you have to train cooperative members". On the other hand, the new businesses were promoted with a double logic: that they did not previously exist in the Alto Deba Valley, to avoid entering into competition with them, and that they were linked to their professional knowledge acquired in the Locksmith Union and the Professional School. Thus, Usatorre and Larrañaga took charge of the electrical appliances, Ormaetxea of the foundry, and Gorroñogoitia of the electronics. In August they took advantage of the summer holidays to move the machinery and dies from the Vitoria plant to Mondragon, and in November the workshop was officially opened.

The objective of the "Labour Bank" (Laboral Kutxa, a credit cooperative financial entity) was to cover the industrial and service cooperatives in their investments and growth, and in turn, channel their profits and the savings of their members. The first office was opened in October 1959, and in addition to its financial function, it activated the Social Welfare service to cover the 314 members of ULGOR and the other industrial cooperative "Talleres Arrasate". Its function was, on the one hand, to provide a mixed coverage system that included benefits from the Public Social Security System through the Self Employed Regime to which the cooperative members were affiliated, and on the other, to enable access to Lagun Aro's own benefits, such as coverage for illness, unemployment in the event that a cooperative was in difficulty, retirement, widowhood, and complementary health care. As in Laboral Kutxa, the cooperatives were members of Lagun Aro.

At the beginning of 1961, Arizmendiarrieta began to structure the idea of a new Professional School with a higher academic level in the Alto Deba Valley, with opening centers in the three main towns, Mondragon, Bergara and Oñati, which together had a population of 50,000 inhabitants. As an indispensable condition for the development of industrial cooperatives, he wanted students well trained by the best teachers in workshops and laboratories who were close to the levels of research and development of the leading European countries. And this would facilitate the interrelation with companies.

In the Laboral Kutxa's Annual report of 1961, Arizmendiarrieta explained his ideas on intra and inter cooperative cooperation as an element of solidarity to achieve personal and collective advancement. He proposed an adequate process of capitalization by indirect means, and at the same time an indispensable formula of development through industrial concentration. The directors of ULGOR led and developed the idea, which resulted in the constitution of a co brand group called Ularco, which included the industrial cooperatives of the Alto Deba Valley. Initially, it would be made up of the industrial companies ULGOR, Arrasate, Copreci and Ederlan, constituting a federal union of cooperatives, with a similar orientation to groups of capitalist companies, with the difference that in these the power was vertical and configured by the arithmetic majority of the capital, while in the Ularco Group the power was rooted in a pact of cession of sovereignty. One of the greatest achievements of collective solidarity of Arizmendiarrieta with the creation of the Group in 1964 was to implement the "reconversion of results" between all the partners of the different cooperative companies, when ULGOR achieved 30% of profits on sales and in Ederlan it was just 3%. The new business group stated in the second article of its regulations that its corporate purpose was to guarantee "the budgets of the modern company with the appropriate technical, financial and commercial deployment".

Arizmendiarrieta developed the project to create an industrial cooperative for the students of the Professional School with a double purpose. On the one hand, it would provide students with limited economic resources the possibility of paying for their High Level Vocational Cycle studies. And on the other, it would promote dual training through theoretical and practical classes at the School, and the experience of working in a real company. In November 1965, he began the procedures for the administrative recognition of the company Alecoop (Cooperative School Labor Activity), which became official in April 1966. The industrial purpose of the company was the manufacture and sale of auxiliary tools for mechanical workshops and electrical installations for industrial assemblies, according to commissions or own study projects. The students would work in a cooperative regime for half a day, which had to be compatible with the school demands of the partners.

In February 1966, Arizmendiarrieta spent a week in France visiting laboratories and factories in Paris, Dijon and Grenoble. And in September he made another tour of Germany, visiting different commercial, credit, consumer, and industrial cooperatives in Bonn, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, Hamburg and Berlin. In both cases, he came back with the idea that Mondragon could also reach the degree of harmonic development that he had seen, for which it was necessary to become competitive in increasingly larger areas. All this served to reinforce his permanent discourse of cooperation. The cooperatives were integrated into Regional Groups such as Ularco, based on their geographical proximity, and it was not until December 1984 that the reorganization pre congress was undertaken with a more business and less sociological focus, creating the Mondragon Cooperative Group. The process culminated in the first two Congresses of 1987 and 1989, approving the basic principles of what is currently the Mondragon Corporation.

Arizmendiarrieta, in his quest for social justice and human dignity, was not a visionary who created business models by intuition. He had extensive historical, business and ideological knowledge based on many years of observation and reading. His uniqueness was that, with a lot of pragmatism, he knew how to help implement his theoretical ideas in concrete creations.

Arizmendiarrieta knew well the cooperative precedents of the Basque Country. In fact, the spirit of cooperation has long been deeply rooted among farmers, popularly known as "Auzolan" (Community Work). It is the performance of free work by neighbours that benefits everyone; through a neighborhood assembly, the place, method and people (one member for each farm) who are going to carry it out are decided, mainly the opening and/or maintenance of public roads, churches, hermitages or public buildings, or as and when a neighbor needs it. On the other hand, in the 20th century the first consumer cooperative, promoted by the nationalist union ELA/STV, was created in Bilbao in 1919, followed by others in Vizcaya. These cooperatives were also open to non members. And they operated according to the cooperative principles of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, founded in 1844 in England, and currently maintained by the ICA – International Co operative Alliance. In the Vitoria Congress in 1933, the union agreed to strengthen the cooperative movement, and the first production and credit cooperatives were also created. Also, in 1920 the socialist union UGT helped several affiliates, workers of companies in crisis, to achieve self employment by creating the ALFA cooperative in Eibar. It began manufacturing weapons, and from 1925 also sewing machines. It was the largest industrial cooperative of the time and its managing director, Toribio Echevarria, was admired and loved by Arizmendiarrieta for his professionalism and integrity.

Since the thirteenth century, the Deba Valley and its seven towns have been linked to forges and metallurgy. Thus, in the 15th century, a large part of the 1,900 inhabitants of Mondragon dedicated themselves to obtaining steel billets, which on the one hand, they sold and exported for the manufacture of weapons, and on the other, they transformed by hand into nails and ironwork. The forges were complex installations that allowed the energy of the water to activate the machinery necessary to produce iron and steel until the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, when blast furnaces were introduced. When Arizmendiarrieta arrived in the depressed post war Mondragon in 1941, the largest company was the "Locksmith S. A. ", created in 1906 from the merger of the companies "Vergarajauregui, Resusta y Cia", from 1869, and "The Guipuzcoan Locksmith", from 1901. It had 850 employees at its foundry and machining plants in Mondragon and Bergara, was listed on the Stock exchange of Madrid, and was the driving force behind several smaller locksmith companies. In mid 1948 it had 2,000 workers. The second most important company in Mondragon was the "Modern Locksmith ELMA", with more than 300 employees. In all the towns of the Deba Valley there were numerous small industrial companies, among which two medium sized ones stood out. In Bergara there was "La Algodonera San Antonio, S. A. ", created in 1846, which had 500 employees and was dedicated to the production of large scale textiles. In Oñati there was "Hijos de Juan de Garay, S. A. ", created in 1864, and dedicated to the production of welded steel tubes, with 400 employees.

Arizmendiarrieta always had a small and austere office in the Professional School, and he was an inveterate reader of unusual topics for a modest priest, such as books by the Labour Party, or the "red bishops" such as Antonio Pildain and Vicente Enrique y Tarancón, or the new Catholic intellectuals of the ecclesia such as the Spanish Episcopal Conference, Iribarren and Rodríguez de Yrre, or the communist manifesto of Marx and Engels. In his search for a religious solution to social questions, he began to elaborate his own thoughts, which were a conjunction of the classical and social Catholic sources of the Seminary and the new socialist and personalist theories. He bought books by thinkers with the gifts needed to make a real world impact, such as the active Catholic priest Hans Küng, or Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, Ortega y Gasset, Jacques Leclerq and the Labor leaders, and gave copies to his disciples.

Arizmendiarrieta lived his entire life in personal austerity, as a young man out of family necessity and, after the emergence of the cooperatives, out of personal conviction. He lived with the limited salary of curate of the parish. He never received anything from the cooperatives or the entities that he promoted and he worked in a small office of the Professional School. He did not drink, and ate very little. In Mondragon he traveled by bicycle like the workers, until several cooperative leaders "stole" it, replacing it later with a velosolex (bicycle with a small motor). And for trips outside, he would ask friends for favors or take the cheapest tickets. Despite being the promoter of numerous cooperatives, and often the drafter of the projects and statutes, which he personally defended before the different administrations, he gave up holding any position. In the few individual distinctions that he accepted, he included in them those who had helped him achieve his aims, just as he did in the openings of new pavilions and companies. In 1965 the Minister of Labor arrived to award him the gold medal for Merit at Work, and in the speeches, the President of the Mondragon Education League highlighted the desire of the curate to detach his work from any personal interest, "He is still as poor as when he arrived 25 years ago, and just like then, his mother continues to send him beans and potatoes from the farmhouse." To conclude, he said, "He has created a mentality, a way of doing things. People have turned to him for everything, and he always has a free moment, a word of encouragement, an idea to solve a problem." The honoree's answer did not surprise anyone. He had no merit, he always spoke in the plural, losing his individuality in the anonymous work of the hundreds of people who had worked with him in the activities for which he was awarded: “I say without modesty that these merits that have been attributed to me for official purposes are due to each and every one of those who have worked during these past years”. Other actions of Arizmendiarrieta were the organization of a library for youth, the organization of study circles for older people, and the foundation in June 1943, under his direction, of a Social or Sociology Academy with the inspiration of Catholic Action. The objective of his circles or meetings was "to train future worker leaders." In addition to his teaching at the Professional School, Arizmendiarrieta taught more than two thousand study circles, some for religious and human formation; others for social formation. This is equivalent to saying that he gave at least one conference every 2.7 days, for fifteen consecutive years, not discounting holidays and vacations. In any case, the Professional School was his favorite place of catholic and social apostolate. Every day at two in the afternoon he gave his 20 minute talk in the auditorium to professors and students of the 2nd year of Master's and Technical Engineering. The topics were diverse and unknown to the audience, such as Russian kolkhoz peasant cooperatives, Yugoslav self management or German co management. In addition to the content, his talks were difficult to understand, due to his monotonous tone and difficult language. Aware of this, he used short quotes that were easy to remember such as "Knowledge is Power", "knowledge must be socialized to democratize power", "it is easier to educate a young person than to reform a man", or "give a fish to a man and he will eat that day; teach him to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life". In the sermons at his daily mass in the parish he also used short quotations to compensate for his difficult oratory. Once, the parishioners asked the bishopric to replace him because they did not understand him, but the bishop did not agree to do this, valuing his social work more. And in July 1967, when he was invited to Madrid as a speaker in the debates on the future status of Spanish cooperativism, chaired by the General Director of Social Promotion, the attendees listened to him in silence because his oratory was difficult for them. To alleviate the situation, the director told them "Keep in mind that Father Arizmendiarrieta thinks in Basque, and translates it into Spanish." The argument of the profitability of investments made in education appears many times in Arizmendiarrieta's writings. And his insistence on community responsibility for education has two roots. One is his personal experience of the insufficiency of the State, and the other is his general idea that society should tend to self management in all its forms, solving its own problems on its own. But he advocated dual training, so as not to leave the entire burden of the cost of studies to the community, but rather the student himself had to assume a part. In addition, Arizmendiarrieta was opposed to the division of life into two periods, one of study (at the expense of those who work), and another of work. He thought that study and work, rather than consecutive stages, should constitute combined activities that would last. The young person should combine study and work, and the mature person should have the right and duty to combine work and study.

Arizmendiarrieta created in September 1960 the cooperative magazine that he always edited, "TU Work and Union", initially called "Cooperation". He said that "Work is the firm basis for development and promotion, the Union is the lever that multiplies the forces of all, and Cooperation is for us a system of solidarity, to make work the appropriate instrument for advancement, personal and collective." Therefore, he insisted on collecting these concepts in the Statutes of the cooperatives. He repeatedly explained that work dignifies people, and that different levels of development in regions and countries depend on work. He noted that a study by experts showed that in the United States, the contribution of nature, land, forests, rivers, seas, and mines to the level of development was estimated at one eighth, and that the labour factor was seven eighths. The Deba Valley itself, where Mondragon is located, is not notable for its natural wealth, but its development is driven and created by the work of its inhabitants. As for the union, it was seen as a sign of solidarity in a democracy, so cooperatives should be democratic, with each member having only one vote. At the same time, unity demanded the responsibility of all, because unity is the strength of the weak, and solidarity is a powerful lever that multiplies strength.

Arizmendiarrieta sought the dignity of workers through the reform of the company, inspired by the postulates of Christian Social doctrine. As early as 1933, the program of the Basque trade union ELA / STV established that the rights of the worker were not limited to a fair wage, so he demanded his participation in the company, making him share in the profits by issuing shares in the capital, as well as recognising him as a co manager of the company. After the Civil war of 1936 unions were banned, but the Christian Social doctrine was present in Catholic workers' organizations, gaining further development in the 1960s. In fact, it was the Catholic labour movements in Germany and Belgium that, taking advantage of the post war reconstruction situation, had more vigorously demanded workers' access to the company's management, profits, and shareholding, with harsh criticism of the predominance of capital over man. In 1956, after fifteen unsuccessful years proposing changes to the leadership of the Locksmith Union, Arizmendiarrieta made the momentous decision to encourage a group of professionally well trained young people to leave their well established jobs in the Locksmith Union to create a cooperative. He set out to realize his ideas on the primacy of work over capital, on self management, and on democracy. Of course, Arizmendiarrieta's relations with some employers worsened markedly, and difficulties arose even in relation to the Professional School, where until then the collaboration had been optimal and generous. After the initial success of the cooperatives, in the following years he wrote that one of the noblest and most spiritual tasks that could be undertaken was to awaken in the people the consciousness of their own potential. It was necessary for the workers to be able to be revitalised with the hope of a true emancipation of their own through work and Christian peace. Henceforth, he stopped alluding explicitly to the reform of the company.

Arizmendiarrieta's working method was based on teaming up with young people he trusted. The teaching work that he carried out in the first Professional School of Zaldispe and the creation of the Sports Youth entity, as well as his participation in Catholic Action, enabled him to get to know many dedicated young people. Thus, in 1946 he selected eleven young people to continue their Industrial engineering studies on their own, but enrolled in the University of Zaragoza, about 200 km. away, and in 1955 five of them who were already outstanding professionals in the Locksmith Union, were encouraged to create the first industrial cooperative, named ULGOR. His success in the creation of new organizations from 1941 to 1955 made the young people involved more secure, paying the mortgage on the houses of newlyweds, so that they would abandon secure jobs in the best company in Mondragon, and embark on an adventure with an uncertain future, but confident in their mentor. In 1959 ULGOR was growing successfully and had established itself in the market. From the beginning, the partners had elected the electronic engineer Alfonso Gorroñogoitia as president of the Governing Council, and in turn the Council had appointed the chemical engineer José María Ormaetxea as managing director. But Arizmendiarrieta had in mind the idea of creating a cooperative credit entity, and after drafting the project and the statutes of the Labour Bank on his own, he managed to get the ministries to approve its creation. To manage it, he sought honesty above all else, and proposed to Ormaetxea that he should be his director, going from managing director of a large company to a modest office on Ferrerías street, where he began working with another employee. Ormaetxea pointed out that "I accepted, despite being completely unaware of the banking business, and barely knowing how to interpret a balance sheet". Likewise, Arizmendiarrieta convinced Gorroñogoitia to combine the two presidencies, given his high position in the Governing and Social Councils of ULGOR. In 1970 other criticisms arose from the new Basque Left, linked to the various ETA groups, and their successive splits. They considered that a leading technocratic class had emerged in the cooperatives, directly including Arizmendiarrieta, who called himself a cooperativist but prevented the liberation of the Basque working class. And that, in fact, was one of the reasons why the Ministry of Labor in Madrid had distributed Medals of Merit for Labor to cooperative members. In 1972 there were controversies of this nature in Alecop and in the "Basque School" (Ikastola) of Mondragon. And in June 1974, a cooperative strike took place for the first time at the ULGOR and Fagor Electronic plants, as a result of new job evaluation regulations. After unpleasant incidents, the strike ended with the expulsion of 24 partners, approved in the General Assembly. Several years later they were given the option of readmission, which some of them accepted. Cooperativism was also criticised for its lack of sensitivity to the Basque question. – In 1992 a monument was inaugurated in his honor in the native district of Barinaga in Markina Xemein. – In 1997 Arizmendi Bakery opened in San Francisco, California, named after Arizmendiarrieta. – On May 6, 2009, the diocesan phase of his canonization process concluded. – On 14 December, 2015, Arizmendiarrieta was decreed to be of heroic virtue by Pope Francis and became Venerable in the Catholic Church.