Responsibility as emancipation in cooperative thought and in Mondragon

This chapter addresses a central ideological element of the Mondragon Cooperative Experience as a network of worker cooperatives. Worker cooperative enterprise is generally viewed as an organizational form that expands and strengthens working people’s rights. However, over the last century and a half or more, many cooperative thinkers have emphasized different notions of responsibility at least as much as they have emphasized rights. This paper recounts one of the chief meanings of “responsibility” in cooperative thought, responsibility-as-emancipation. It reviews philosophers’ and practitioners’ views on this concept, first from the cooperative movement generally and then specifically among the founders of the Mondragon Cooperative Experience.