Assignment:
RESPOND TO ONE OF THE FOLLOWING SETS OF QUESTIONS
OPTION ONE: Please respond to the following:
1) What are the characteristics of the Mondragon cooperatives that you find most different from businesses with more familiar organizational forms?
2) What assumptions seem to underlie the Mondragon?
3) What do you think about these characteristics and assumptions?
OPTION TWO: The chapters on Che's thinking about work reflect his sense of urgency that the basic nature of work needed to be transformed, especially the relationship between work and the means of survival/life. Consider the equation from Session 7: Work = Pay/money = Survival (or better) This transformation was, Che believed, an essential part of the movement toward the New Man/New Society. As part of this process, he believed very strongly in the vital role of voluntary - unpaid - work. He himself worked in the evenings and on weekends on construction projects and harvesting sugarcane.
1) Summarize Che's arguments
a) in favor of voluntary work and
b) his ideas about wages.
2) What do you think of his arguments?
(NOT what do you think about Cuba, about socialism in general or any other topics which are interesting but not the point of the assignment).
Readings:
Designing A Humanitarian Culture: An Analysis of The Cuban Experiment
By Maria E. Malott