North Country Cooperators

“Grocery Activism – the Radical History of Food Cooperatives in Minnesota” by Craig Upright, 2020

Minnesota has a long history of cooperatives, from the populist movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s around the Grange to the upsurge that brought the Farmer-Labor Party and the Non-Partisan League into power in the 1930s and 1940s. In fact it had the most cooperatives in the whole U.S. for many years. In the 1960s / 1970s opposition to the Vietnam War among local radicals spurred the development of a ‘new wave’ of co-operatives, based on unpackaged cheap bulk food and organic food in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, which again led the nation in numbers.  The value of this somewhat dry study is it describes the real nature of the cooperative movement in the U.S., which does not have the revolutionary implications claimed by Marxists like Richard Wolff.

Upright got interested in cooperatives in the 1980s and is now an assistant professor in Winona, MN.  He details the first wave of cooperatives that developed in the early to mid-1970s as part of a huge anti-government movement that opposed war, capitalism and the corporatization of food.  A second wave of cooperatives followed, but mostly in smaller Minnesota towns which had a history of earlier co-ops and were familiar with the practice as a form of local self-help.

The defining moment of the urban cooperatives in Minneapolis/St. Paul was ‘the Co-Op Wars’ in 1976 when Maoists from the Co-Op Organization violently took over the People’s Warehouse as a base for ‘the revolution’ which they saw as coming soon.  At the Selby-Dale Cooperative store which they controlled, they sold cigarettes, beer and ordinary canned goods, at a time when very little organic food was canned.  They aimed to make the co-ops ‘serve the working-class’, similar to a 7-11 but cheaper.  They lost that fight, as the People’s Warehouse went broke a few months later after confrontations with the counter-culture food faction.  The latter faction was the majority in the co-operatives and they established their own distributor, DANCe, to replace the People’s Warehouse.  This fight crystallized the nature of the Minnesota cooperatives, which were ultimately part of an alternative cultural movement, not one tied to or able to overthrow the state or capital.  Essentially they became an early sign of ‘ethical’ consumerism, which is now a common selling angle far outside co-ops. 

Upright defines the initial success of the new wave of co-ops to their being the only sources for organic and bulk food at the time.  They promoted small local farmers, healthy and organic fare, less packaging, little processing, fair trade and vegetarian / vegan options which none of the established food retailers carried at the time.  Upright sees the organic tack as the key element undermining the unhealthy processed food sold in chain groceries, which were grown with large oil and capital inputs, drugs, artificial chemical fertilizers and toxic weed killers, expensive labor-killing machinery, exploited labor and toxic preservatives meant to keep them on shelves forever.   This is still true today, though there are plenty of canned organic options available now unlike in 1976.  The U.S. government opposed organic food for many years until they were forced to issue an organic certification in the early 2000s. Earl Butz made fun of organic methods in the 1970s, saying it would lead to mass starvation.  What Butz wanted to hide is that organic methods had been used in agriculture for millennia and world-wide many peasants and small farmers still practiced it. According to Upright, mass attitudes changed with Earth Day in 1971, when the environment became a mass issue in the U.S.

Confrontation Between Co-Op Organization and Co-op Majority

The new wave co-ops were non-profits and at first used volunteer labor - you could buy food but also had to work as a member of a ‘worker cooperative.’  Issues were decided democratically by all the volunteers.  Later in the 1980s skilled managers took over and most co-ops became ‘consumer cooperatives’ but still retained their non-profit status and some aspects of democracy.  Some worker-owned or volunteer-run cooperatives still exist, but they are not the majority.  Now co-op groceries must compete with massive organic food corporations like Whole Foods, but they retain their viability because they are more trusted, not corporate and rooted in local neighborhoods, farms and oppositional politics.  CSAs, buying clubs and farmer’s markets became part of the same cultural/political movement around food and these are now embedded in many communities. 

I mention Richard Wolff because for years he has been advocating a path to socialism through cooperatives – sort of a peaceful, ‘cool’ revolution which would ultimately undermine the high-powered capitalist oligopolies controlling the economy and government.  His repeated citations of the massive Mondragon cooperative in Spain are well-known. Yet it is clear from the long history of cooperatives in the U.S. that they do not lead to socialism.  Benjamin Franklin was one of the first to start one.  At various times they are even promoted by the government as a sector addressing ‘unmet needs’ and given financial and organizational support.  What they actually do is train people to run their own businesses, to work somewhat democratically, to think outside the ‘profit’ box, to build practical skills centering around organization, to fight food insecurity and to break corporate culture’s toxic and unsustainable functioning.  In a real revolutionary upheaval cooperatives would be useful in helping show the way towards workers’ control of the economy, on a local, regional and national basis.  They can be an ally.  But absent that strong a movement and moment?  No.

Upright does a short history of the co-op movement in Minnesota and nationally, citing many of the early U.S. founders of organic agriculture like J.I. Rodale or what he sees as the origins of cooperatives in the English Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society, formed in 1844.  He then focuses on the Minnesota ‘new wave’ co-ops that form the core of his story, highlighting how ‘cooperation among the cooperators’ became a strategy to spread and strengthen the cooperative movement in Minnesota. He uses research, historical documents and first person interviews to flesh it out.  The issue of how the co-ops linked up with organic and local farmers is only touched upon.  Upright seems unaware of Marx’s actual position on agriculture and food quality, which is not the workerist caricature pushed by the Co-Op Organization.  Overall this is a detailed study of what co-operatives actually are, not a fantasy of one kind or another.

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left:  “Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens” and “Occupy the Economy”(both by Wolff); “The Latino Question,” “No Local – Why Small Scale Alternatives Won’t Change the World,” “Anarchism and Its Aspirations,” “Viking Economics,” “Rebel Cities” (Harvey). 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

June 21, 2020   

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