Capitalism with a collectivist twist? Our writer went into the mountains to see it.

Episode transcript

Erika Page: The more I report, the more certainty I have that there is some humanity left out there. And not just some, but actually a lot, and it isn’t powerless. 

[MUSIC]

Clay Collins: That’s Erika Page, a Christian Science Monitor writer currently based in Madrid.

Erika has already joined us here on the “Why We Wrote This” podcast three times. She spoke about how she handled the Monitor’s Points of Progress franchise back when that was part of her work. She talked about her reporting from Uruguay on how democracy and discourse function well there. And she got us up to speed on the Swedish concept of lagom, the just enough life, one of my favorite episodes. 

I’m Clay Collins. Erika’s back this week. Hey, Erika!

Page: Hi, thanks for having me back.

Collins: So the reason you’re mic’d up for us again is to talk about your recent reporting from Mondragón up in the Basque region of Spain.

Your story is headlined, “In this Spanish town, capitalism actually works for the workers.” It struck me in reading what you wrote about this network of cooperative business enterprises that this was yet another story from you on what I guess you’d call better ways of doing things. That’s a relative term and it’s a subjective term, but it’s almost loosely a series that you’re doing on success models, right?

Is that a kind of story that attracts your attention?

Page: I love that you say that, Clay, because it’s not necessarily something that I’ve set out to do intentionally. But I guess I do tend to be drawn to stories that show what happens when a group of people are willing to think a little differently from the status quo. And then when people think differently, new ways of doing things emerge, and that’s definitely something that I saw over and over again when writing Points of Progress.

It was part of Uruguay’s history, which was actually filled with conflict and division before this culture of political civility began to take hold. And then you have Sweden, which is trying to figure out how this traditional value of lagom, or just enoughness, as you say – which goes against so much of modern economic thinking – 

Collins: Right!

Page: … can, can survive in the modern day.

And lots of people have interesting thoughts about what the world could look like, but it takes a lot of courage to actually try something out in practice. Imperfections and all, and to me that’s what this Mondragón story is about. They don’t claim to have solved capitalism, but they’ve put a model into place that their workers and also the people who live in these surrounding towns can actually feel good about.

And that says a lot in and of itself. And my sense is that’s part of what the Monitor is all about. It’s this looking for where creativity and ingenuity and humanity are in operation because once you start to look for these things, you kind of start to see them everywhere.

Collins: Right. Now, Mondragón is not an entirely new story. You can find others have reported on it. You can see that in Google. But how did you think about carrying the story forward and how did you make it a Monitor story?

Page: I’d heard about Mondragón as this model of cooperative business. And while I, for a long time, had been interested in how it worked, I’d never given it tons of thought. And then two things kind of converged at the same time.

One, I began to see more and more talk about how little faith Americans, and young Americans, in particular – and also people all around the world – have today in our economic system. And then, two, the Monitor began this series focused on trust, given this crisis of trust in so many realms of society. And so I began thinking, you know, “OK, what is it that would make someone want to trust an economy in the first place?”

Page: And I think part of that has to do with feeling heard, feeling like the economic system that you’re participating in – for most people, that’s eight hours a day, day in, day out – that it’s actually giving something back, that it’s working in your favor. And it struck me that Mondragón might be uniquely positioned to say something of interest about how to build that type of trust.

Collins: Hmm. 

Page: And obviously I’m not the only person who’s thought that and when I got to Mondragón on that first day of reporting the first people I met were not workers at Mondragón, but was a group of Belgian entrepreneurs who had come all the way to Spain specifically to learn about Mondragón’s cooperative model and they were super excited to be there and it it was just this clear immediate picture of what happens when you do something differently, and it draws the attention of people around the world, and then it starts to ripple outwards?

Collins: Tell us a little about going up to that region, which for most people evokes mountains and maybe political separatism. What were your impressions when you rolled in from Madrid? What did it look like – and what was the vibe there?

Page: From Madrid, it’s about four and a half hours. And you realize you’re in the Basque country because all of a sudden you’re surrounded by lush forest and mountains on, on all sides. And so I drove down this hillside and into the valley of the city of Mondragón.

And this town is Just nestled in this green, lush, mountain landscape. And you can tell that it’s an industrial city. 

Page: I mean, there’s definitely an industrial energy to it. You go to a lot of other small towns in the north of Spain, and I’ve been to a fair number of them, and they feel either abandoned or like they’re on the cusp of being abandoned, and I think part of that has to do with the fact that even if there was industry in these places decades ago, it’s been hollowed out.

And so these aren’t places anymore where young people have opportunity. And that’s not the case in Mondragón, and you know, Mondragón being a cooperative, the worker members would never vote to move production to China or wherever it may be. And so these are still really vibrant communities. And you feel that the industry that’s there has lifted the quality of life for the people that live here in a way that, well, of course, some young people are going to move to big cities.

A lot of them are excited to continue living here and raising their families here.

Collins: Erika, how did you approach sourcing this story, just in terms of who you’d find on the ground, who you’d call in advance to get some context for your reporting?

Page: For every story, I think that can differ, but in this case, I started by reaching out to economists. I was really curious about where to place this cooperative model in the current understanding about capitalism and how it operates and its weaknesses and where the cooperative model might be able to fill in some of those gaps and maybe doesn’t live up to other standards in the capitalist system. 

Collins: These story types you cover call for sort of more than the standard caveating, because they’re so nuanced. And that’s important. Reporters have been tracking a bit of souring on capitalism lately. It’s not just, you know, Yes Magazine on breaking up with it as a system. It’s also more mainstream reports. You know, one paper called it, a dawning recognition of the free market’s shortcomings. So when you go into a story like this, how do you capture a spectrum of perspectives and keep an issue story from becoming too binary – too sort of one side, other side? 

Page: One thing I love is when, in a certain story, there’s no obvious camp to throw what’s happening into. And I think that was the case here when you get to spend a little bit more time in the gray zones, kind of that muddy space, I think that’s where the really interesting ideas come out of. And in the case of Mondragón, no one was quite sure if the whole thing was anti-capitalist, if it was capitalist, but kind of a kind, a kinder version, if it was semi-capitalist or what.

And to me, that’s, that’s the beauty of it. It didn’t really matter how you label it. People just saw that it was a good idea because it was working. And so they kept doing it. And so that’s the kind of solution that when you speak to somebody on the left, And they say, sounds great, because it’s empowering workers and it’s creating egalitarian communities.

And then you speak to someone on the right and they say, wonderful, because you’re in a sense, you’re creating more capitalists, people who are deeply [invested] in their work because they actually own a piece of it. And so being able to leave some of that ideological baggage behind frees up space for that sort of solution.

And I spoke to economists on both sides of what you would consider the political ideological spectrum. And that was the response that I got from people. And so then I was able to go to Mondragón with this curiosity you know, it seems like all of the experts think this is an excellent idea on the ground. What does this actually mean in people’s daily lives?

Collins: Wow: What does it mean when everyone wins? We got at this some when you were on here talking about the Points of Progress franchise that we both know and love, but what do you think about when you’re performing what amount to credibility checks on what, you know, seem to be episodes of progress?

In this case, you’re talking about now, it’s fairly unambiguous, but is this also where the Monitor values lens comes into play? 

Page: I’m not sure you always do know 100 percent that something is scientifically proven progress. Some things that perhaps once seemed like progress may not end up working out, or the efforts can be co-opted. For Points of Progress, the Monitor tries to keep the bar pretty high, right, in terms of tangible, measurable impact. But I do think there can still be really interesting explorations of cases where it’s unclear how something is going to turn out. And then as journalists, it’s our job to get the fullest picture possible about why something might be progress for some and not others. But I do think when you’re looking at the world through this lens of – take trust – how is trust operating here? How is it not operating here? And where is the desire for trust bringing up new ideas or new perspectives that leads you to places where you’re more likely to see this sincere search for progress.

Collins: That really gets at the universality and [at how] the answer, as you said earlier, is often in these muddy zones and not on one side or another. So, Erika, what are you working on next?

Page: I have a few trips that I’m hoping will work out, but I find that what I’m looking for more broadly speaking, doesn’t really change that much from place to place from the exact country or city where I’m reporting. I’m always looking for stories about the big ideas, the belief systems that affect all of us regular people and then often finding the reverse where regular people who didn’t know they actually had any kind of agency in the world discover that they do and I like being surprised and even when I’m not reporting on these “progress-y” stories as you say even when I’m talking with people about really awful things going on in the world from the violence in the Middle East to the farmers Just trying to survive the next day in India.

The more I report, the more certainty I have that there is some humanity left out there. And not just some, but actually a lot, and it isn’t powerless. There are countless people right now dedicating themselves to figuring out these terribly sticky situations, and even if it seems desperately slow from our standpoint, that’s important, I think, not to lose sight of, and it keeps me going at least.

Collins: Well, thank you so much for serially looking into these big ideas and then coming on here to talk about them. It’s always a pleasure.

Page: Thank you, Clay.

Collins: And thank you for listening. You can find more, including our show notes with a link to the story that we discussed in this podcast, and also to Erika’s other work, including previous appearances on this show at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Mackenzie Farkus. Jingnan Peng is also a producer on this program. Our sound engineers were Noel Flatt and Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt, produced by the Christian Science Monitor, copyright 2024.