Two Beginnings in 1956

Abstract

In 1956 two things began that would shape how much of the world thinks about the people who own their work. They began about nine thousand kilometres apart, in places that had nothing to do with each other, and they began from opposite ends of the same question. In California, a lawyer named Louis Kelso designed a financial device so that the employees of a group of newspapers could buy them from their retiring founders. It was a solution to a problem of succession, and it carried a theory of capital. In the Basque Country of northern Spain, on 14 April 1956, a priest named José María Arizmendiarrieta blessed the first stone of a workshop founded by five young men he had taught. It was called Ulgor, from the names of its founders, and it was a cooperative: owned and governed by the people who worked in it. It was a solution to a problem of livelihood in a poor valley, and it carried a theory of community.