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The article discusses the case of the Mondragon cooperatives around the world to examine the feasibility of worker-owned cooperatives as a business model as of January 2016. Also cited are the move by the United Steel Workers (USW) union to partner with Mondragon Corp. in 2009 to evaluate the feasibility of unionized co-operatives, and the various subsidiaries and partnerships by Mondragon, including the supermarket chain Eroski.

This article develops an approach to the anthropology of labor that seeks to transcend the North/South and working class/poor oppositions that have long framed our understanding of social inequality. Drawing upon David Harvey's understanding of the ways in which capitalism always creates its own Other through dispossession, as well as historical case studies of struggles against dispossession, we emphasize the mutability of class relations in both the global North and South, and point to the complex interconnections of the social movements of waged and unwaged laborers across the globe. This focus on the connections between peoples who are differently marked by processes of dispossession, we argue, simultaneously enriches our understanding of social inequality and furthers the project of decolonizing anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]