There's a social experiment in Mondragón in the Basque region of Spain. Can you describe it?

Mondragón is basically a very large worker-owned cooperative with many different industries in it, including some fairly sophisticated manufacturing. It's economically quite successful, but since it's inserted into a capitalist economy, it's no more committed to sustainable growth than any other part of the capitalist economy is.

Internally, it's not worker-controlled -- it's manager-controlled. So it's a mixture of what's sometimes called industrial democracy -- which means ownership, at least in principle, by the work force -- along with elements of hierarchic domination and control (as opposed to worker management).

I mentioned earlier that businesses are about as close to strict totalitarian structures as any human institutions are. Something like Mondragón is considerably less so.