[3] A pragmatic and hard-working priest, with a great sense of social justice and human dignity, he promoted numerous entities and companies for the good of the workers and the community in what he called the "cooperative experience of Mondragon".

[6] Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta, whose name is often shortened to "Arizmendi", was born on April 22, 1915 in the modest farmhouse called Iturbe, nestled in the Barinaga porch, in the municipality of Markina-Xemein, Biscay.

The boy consequently began to adopt an austere, modest and practical character, close to his pragmatic mother, who, despite being illiterate, appreciated his penchant for reading and literature, and encouraged him, when he turned twelve, to go to the Minor Seminary of Castillo Elejabeitia.

"[7] At the beginning of the civil war in July 1936, Arizmendiarrieta was in the family farmhouse of Barinaga enjoying his annual vacation from the Seminary, and he remained there until he was mobilized by the new Basque Government of José Antonio Aguirre.

[11]In September 1939, he returned again to the Vitoria Seminary, under the tutelage of Professor Rufino Aldabalde, who had created some work groups where he considered that, after the upheaval of the civil war, the social question was the burning task for the new generation of priests.

In March 1940, the sheet changed its name to "Arises", and the Priestly Movement of Vitoria was created, where the social apostolate, especially that of youth and workers, were the two areas of work in which Arizmendiarrieta participated in the months prior to his ordination.

The Perosi mass was sung at the ceremony, as well as the Nun duzu amandrea (Where do you have your grandmother), by the admired president of Euskaltzaindia (Royal Academy of the Basque Language), Resurreccion Maria de Azkue.

After which, and although he intended to go to the University of Leuven in Belgium to study sociology, he was assigned as an Assistant Curate to the parish Mondragon, 30 miles from his own home town, which suffered from unusual levels of unemployment and social tensions as a result of the civil war.

It was listed on the Stock exchange and had a commissary for its employees and its own School of Apprentices, where Arizmendiarrieta began to teach a social training class for one hour a week, as chaplain of the San Juan Bautista parish.

And continuing with his procedure of institutionalizing social projects, he himself drafted its statutes, turning it into a municipal sports society with a Delegated Board that included the main public, ecclesiastical and economic authorities of Mondragon.

Arizmendiarrieta put his working-class ideology into practice through an austere life: without salaries, traveling by train with a third-class ticket or in friends' cars, and moving around Mondragon with his modest bicycle, as the working class did.

They included him as a member of the Governing Board, and to finance his purchase, Arizmendiarrieta negotiated interest-free loans with several companies in exchange for them taking advantage of the cooperative as their own commissary.

He encouraged five of his closest collaborators to create a new company, ULGOR (name derived from the initials of the five founders: Luis Usatorre, Jesus Larrañaga, Alfonso Gorroñogoitia, Jose Maria Ormaetxea and Javier Ortubay).

[18] The authorization for its creation had to be given by the Government in Madrid, and when this was refused, they decided to buy a company in difficulty in Vitoria in October, with its industrial license to manufacture "appliances for domestic use", essentially cooking oil stoves.

[19] In 1957, after the good start represented by ULGOR, Arizmendiarrieta, with the participation of former students of the Professional School, promoted the creation in Mondragon of Talleres Arrasate Industrial Cooperative to revive the company Aranzabal Workshop, which was in bankruptcy.

[1] In August 1958, Arizmendiarrieta went on an excursion of students and professors from the Polytechnic School to the World Exhibition in Brussels, and took advantage of his first trip abroad to visit different automobile, household appliance and machine tool companies in France, Holland, Belgium and Germany.

[23] At the beginning of 1961, Arizmendiarrieta began to structure the idea of a new Professional School with a higher academic level in the Alto Deba Valley, with opening centers in the three main towns, Mondragon, Bergara and Oñati, which together had a population of 50,000 inhabitants.

Its decentralizing approach involved locating engineering related to mechanics, electronics and machine tools in Mondragon, commerce and business administration degrees in Oñati, and chemicals linked to the textile industry in Bergara.

[3] Subsequently, he encouraged the cooperatives of the Alto Deba Valley to contract projects to the research team, and Laboral Kutxa to financially lead the construction of a separate building from the Professional School.

[43] Arizmendiarrieta always had a small and austere office in the Professional School, and he was an inveterate reader of unusual topics for a modest priest, such as books by the Labour Party, or the "red bishops" such as Antonio Pildain and Vicente Enrique y Tarancón, or the new Catholic intellectuals of the ecclesia such as the Spanish Episcopal Conference, Iribarren and Rodríguez de Yrre, or the communist manifesto of Marx and Engels.

[1] He never acted for personal interests, and despite the fact that some class-oriented businessmen from Mondragon were detractors of the popular "priest", and were suspicious of the participation of workers in the capital and management of the new business model, Arizmendiarrieta maintained his ideology of social justice.

And in July 1967, when he was invited to Madrid as a speaker in the debates on the future status of Spanish cooperativism, chaired by the General Director of Social Promotion, the attendees listened to him in silence because his oratory was difficult for them.

[45] He conceived the magazine as "a constant invitation to dialogue, relationship and cooperation for the practical application of the postulates of social justice in the business environment in a climate of freedom and love, indispensable in a work community".

He noted that a study by experts showed that in the United States, the contribution of nature, land, forests, rivers, seas, and mines to the level of development was estimated at one-eighth, and that the labour factor was seven-eighths.

[58] In fact, it was the Catholic labour movements in Germany and Belgium that, taking advantage of the post-war reconstruction situation, had more vigorously demanded workers' access to the company's management, profits, and shareholding, with harsh criticism of the predominance of capital over man.

[62] The teaching work that he carried out in the first Professional School of Zaldispe and the creation of the Sports Youth entity, as well as his participation in Catholic Action, enabled him to get to know many dedicated young people.

Arizmendiarrieta approached several professors of the Professional School for this purpose, one of them being the future founder and director of the Ikerlan Research Center, Manolo Quevedo, "I replied that I would sign, but after obtaining the approval of my wife, because we already had three small daughters.

He began his career in the Locksmith Union Apprentice School and in Catholic Action, and at that time he wrote that the workers saw the church at the service of the state: “The Army, the clergy and the Falange (the fascist party of the head of government, the dictator Franco) are the three claws of the capitalist».

And also in 1969, the Governor intended to "put the arrogant cooperativists of Mondragon under pressure and get them to surrender at his feet, engaged as they are in unspeakable and dangerous desires for emancipation, whose rebellious attitude could infect the rest of the Basque Country.

These critics accepted as positive certain aspects of cooperativism such as the democratic government of the company through the principle of one partner/one vote rather than control by capital, the imputation of the surplus value of work to the community, and solidarity through limited salary ranges that prevented the formation of privileged classes.