Transferability of Successful Cooperativist Actions: The Case of Albacete's Cooperatives

The Integrated Project INCLUD-ED (FP6 of the European Commission) identified Successful Actions (SAs) in diverse social domains. In the field of employment, the successful case of the cooperatives of Mondragon in the Basque Country was analyzed. The Mondragon Corporation (MC) has proven to be a non-capitalist alternative to the traditional organizational and governance models of capitalist firms, combining democratic principles, values of solidarity and strong competitiveness that allow it to achieve both efficiency and equity. In this organization, five successful cooperativist actions (SCAs) were identified and considered crucial in explaining these accomplishments. In order to analyze the transferability of the SCAs, some of them have been recreated in the poorest and most marginalized neighborhoods of Spain: La Estrella and La Milagrosa in Albacete. In 2011, a cooperative was created on the basis of developing the SCAs to provide decent, stable and sustainable employment to people from these neighborhoods. This paper aims to explain the success of the transferability of the latter to the cooperative in La Estrella and La Milagrosa and the ways in which this successful actions approach is contributing to overcome inequalities while contributing to generate alternatives to the capitalism. This work is developed in the framework of the international network of research on cooperativism coordinated by Erik Olin Wright and Ramon Flecha.