“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
Celebrate
Summer Solstice!
No comments:
Post a Comment