Seven years ago, an event in Tokyo on the life and work of Jose María #Arizmendiarrieta. Pictured are Ishizuka Hideo, the foremost #Mondragon scholar in Japan and translator of Azurmendi´s books, and three young researchers: Saito Shingo, Ishizawa Kayako, and Kumakura Yurie.

Etxe horretan norbait semea politizatzen ibili dela iruditzen zait. cc-cp @naroaelortza #arizmendiarrieta #sozialismoa #ESE #Joanesgintza

Late notice, I realize, but if you are free tomorrow and interested in Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta's life and work: https://arizmendigathering.blog/

#mondragón #arizmendiarrieta

"Socialize know-how to democratize power" as #arizmendiarrieta said.

Simple example: a researcher wants to interview a cooperative group. The contact person there asks the group to select two people to be interviewed together, as an opportunity for peer learning. The people are regular members, chosen by rotation, so many people get the chance to learn and to speak for the organization.

El cooperativismo no persigue cambiar de manos la propiedad o gestión de la empresa, sino su naturaleza y función social.

#Arizmendiarrieta

Finished Peter Salmon's biography of Jacques #Derrida. Writing the biography of a philosopher is a huge task, if you really get into the philosophy itself. (Azurmendi's intellectual biography of #Arizmendiarrieta does this.) The other way is to write what is basically a well-informed, expanded Wikipedia entry that describes the philosophy but leaves it out, like music in the biography of a musician. (Robin Kelley's bio of #Monk is better in this regard.) Upshot: good but superficial book.

"...our task today is the establishment of a new social order, [so] cooperativists and cooperatives must center their attention on that which most deeply and effectively contributes to that task. Social progress is not accomplished by saturating people with consumer goods, but by providing them goods which serve production, or better, serve for reproduction..."

#cooperativism
#Arizmendiarrieta

"We find ourselves in a stage of history in which technical progress has prodigiously multiplied human productivity. We now have available to us the means to fully satisfy our aspirations. If those aspirations remain unsatisfied for the immense majority, it is not for lack of means, but due to a defective social organization that no longer corresponds to the level of the technical means in our possession."

#Arizmendiarrieta
#longtimegone

[Arizmendiarrieta] writes elsewhere, “cooperativism requires the play and constant mobilization of spiritual values... It is clear to us that our cooperative enterprises owe much more to the generosity, loyalty, comradeship, the sense of responsibility, the capacity for sacrifice and disinterest, in a word, the spirit of the members, than to their duly accounted economic and labor contributions.”

#arizmendiarrieta #elhombrecooperativo

" Cooperation must serve us as an escape not just from the multitudinous contest, but also from tiny structures or smallholdings of activity that inherently impede the optimal results of human effort."

#Arizmendiarrieta

@tbeckett @kavbojka @Matt_Noyes General announcement: anyone who would like a PDF of the intro and first two chapters of The Cooperative Man, please send an email to steve@interpreters.coop. It's 169 pages in letter size, with A4 also available. I may also have an epub copy somewhere. #arizmendiarrieta #arizmendi #mondragon

To pose equality as a goal is to hand it over to the pedagogues of progress, who widen endlessly the distance they promise that they will abolish. Equality is a presupposition, an initial axiom -- or it is nothing.

— Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and his Poor
#arizmendiarrieta #education

2) The emancipation of a class or a people must begin with a more or less massive process of development of the capacity of its members. There is no improving the fate of the masses without the masses themselves.

Other structures of work, other systems of organization, without risks of abuse or more or less concealed tyrannies, are inconceivable if each of us, the members comprising the community, is not better prepared to attend to a multitude of complex problems.
EHC p240
#arizmendiarrieta

1) "To know is to be able to do and in order to democratize power we must first socialize knowledge. We accomplish nothing by proclaiming the rights of people if they turn out to be incapable of running their own lives, if in order to act they have no alternative but to rely on an indispensable few."
EHC p240
#arizmendiarrieta

@tbeckett @kavbojka

The best source is Joxe Azurmendi's El Hombre Cooperativo, but the English translation, being done by our own @Steve is not completed. (Funds are needed to support the work - 868 pages!) The Spanish version is online for free here: https://arizmendiarrieta.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/elhombre.pdf

Another good book is Fernando Molina's biography, available here (Spanish) http://www.euskomedia.org/PDFAnlt/mono/arizmendiarrieta/bio.pdf

It is hard to isolate this point which runs through his thought.

#arizmendiarrieta

@ZaneSelvans Great book. One of my favorite books on coops is being translated by @Steve : El Hombre Cooperativo by Joxe Azurmendi.
#arizmendiarrieta #mondragon