The Humanitarian Impulse is alive and well – exemplified in Mondragon

I haven’t posted enough about Mondragon and the shining example it offers about the potential of workers’ cooperatives. A young American, Ellie Griffin, from Utah state recently published The Elysian Manifesto

Once we wrote constitutions and built governments, the work was done and our future became fixed. The pamphlets stopped. The illuminated ideas ceased. We no longer amend our constitution or reinvent our governments. You wouldn’t see something like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers published today—something that would “decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice.” Instead, we cover all of the ways our systems are failing without imagining what better ones could be.

Journalism is no longer about thinking up solutions, it’s about reporting on the problems. Even our fiction is dystopian. Our science fiction writers can only imagine a future plagued by AI apocalypse, government surveillance, computer chips in our brains, and space colonies that take us away from the polluted world we created. If even our best literary minds cannot imagine a better future, how are we supposed to create it?

That’s why I’ve created the Elysian League—a utopian garden where we can study philosophy and debate politics and rethink capitalism and enjoy contemplative leisure and be part of a new Enlightenment. It’s a place where we can think through a more beautiful future through essays and literature and discourse. And I’m just optimistic enough to believe that’s enough of a start to building one. The Elysian League is the Enlightenment social club made modern, and this Manifesto is my entry into the utopian canon

Her blog is a celebration of Mondragon with such posts as

• https://www.elysian.press/p/the-cooperatist-manifesto-of-mondragon?hide_intro_popup=true

• https://www.elysian.press/p/social-companies-like-mondragon

For readers wanting to know more about cooperatives I strongly recommend

• Democracy at Work Richard Wolff (2012)

• Owning our Future – the emerging ownership revolution Marjorie Kelly (2012)

• The Case for Community Wealth-building J Guinan and M O’Neill (2020)

• Design of a Worker Cooperatives Society – an alternative beyond capitalism and 

socialism and the transition roward it Geert Reuten (2023)

The Routledge Handbook of Cooperative Economics and Management ed JN Warren et al 

(2025)