Mondragon is the largest group of worker cooperatives in the world. With 92 cooperatives in the industrial, financial, retail, and educational sectors, the group earned €11 billion in revenue last year with more than 70,500 workers. Each of those cooperatives are owned and democratically run by their workers, who vote their leadership into office and share in the profits when their cooperatives do well. In fact, Mondragon works a lot like a federated nation-state made up of smaller city-states. Perhaps that’s why science fiction authors like Ursula Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Cory Doctorow have all used the corporation as a model for the utopian nations in their books. 

Could we eventually create a capitalist paradise where democratically run companies use their profits for the good of their worker citizens? Could that even replace our existing governments?

There are 47 millionaires working for Central States Manufacturing and they’re not all in the C-Suite. Many of them are drivers or machinists—blue-collar workers for the company. This is a blueprint for the future of all companies.

NATO is a pact between countries that if one is attacked, all will defend. Is there a future where eventually the whole world is part of NATO? If so, then all countries would be joined in a pact of not harming each other and defending one another. If one country decided to break the pact and attack another country they’d have the military might of the entire world against them. In this case, NATO would become a “world government” that protects world peace.

The United States and other federal governments should decouple federal governance into several independent government layers that city-states can join ad hoc. Think: A human rights layer, a military layer, an economic layer… A world of city-states could join those federal governments à la carte, rather than be stuck with the whole menu.

Plato, Thomas More, and Aldous Huxley all place utopia on an island—a small city-state that self-governed. For a long time, the city-state was our best and only form of government. But eventually, they went wrong where the state in Plato’s Republic did: they grew, consuming more land and more people and requiring an even bigger body of government to manage them all. Eventually, they were no longer city-states, they became nation-states. Maybe that wasn't a good thing.