THE CO-OP WARS
MINNEAPOLIS, MN – When journalist Craig Cox talks about the Co-op Wars, it sounds like he’s describing a work of fiction: a Marxist cult led by a mysterious figure, whose disciples armed themselves with weapons and committed violent assaults. Was this the work of the Weather Underground? No, it’s the story a group of part-time grocery workers.
In the mid-1970’s, Twin Cities food co-ops had become a battleground—quite literally—in a war pitting hippie anarchists against a group of hardcore Marxist-Leninists (the “CO”).
Beginning in 1971, anti-war activists had founded more than two-dozen natural foods co-ops in Minneapolis and St. Paul. These early food co-ops, based on the anarchist principle of mutual aid, were owned and operated entirely by volunteer members –an informal structure, best symbolized by the Mill City Co-op’s decision to allow the customers to ring up their own purchases. It was an alternative system of economics that sought to prefigure a more egalitarian world.
In 1978, Cox, a former executive editor at the Utne Reader and currently editor of the Minneapolis Observer, started researching the Co-op Wars. His resulting 1994 book Storefront Revolution: Food Co-ops and the Counterculture (Rutgers University Press) is considered by many to be the definitive history of the movement.
“I got involved in the Twin Cities co-ops in 1977,” says Cox. “So the war was more-or-less over by that point, but I was intrigued by all the rumors and legends surrounding it. Prior to the food co-ops, I had worked in the housing co-op movement… I was also working on the Scoop newspaper, which was the newspaper for all the co-ops and alternative organizations in the Twin Cities.”
According to Cox, the natural food co-ops “really flourished in the Twin Cities” –more so than in other major cities such as Chicago and New York. This was partly due to the presence of the university, and a vibrant radical community. But mainly, it was because the Twin Cities “had a real surplus of cheap storefront space.” The birth of the co-op movement had neatly coincided with the rise of larger supermarkets. Unable to compete for lower prices, many of the older “mom-and-pop” grocery stores were being forced out of business. This left dozens of empty shops. “So you had well-equipped little stores, with low overhead and very low rent. The refrigeration was there, the produce coolers were there, so it was really easy to set up a co-op in one of these storefronts and make a go of it.”
What had started as small, informal buying clubs quickly developed into a citywide network, with co-ops in every neighborhood.
“Co-ops were self-consciously neighborhood / community-based storefront organizations,” says longtime co-op activist Jeff Nygaard. “There were all these other non-food co-ops, too. All sorts of things, from clothing, to bicycles, to automobiles, to electronics –all kinds of co-ops. You lived it!”
The new business model was reflected in a wide range of local businesses. These “non-food co-ops” included a cooperative hardware store, an apothecary, four construction companies, a bike shop, a print shop, four bookstores, three restaurants, three bakeries, eight theater and dance collectives, daycare facilities, a community credit union, and a worker-owned clothing store. (1)
While the anarchists saw the co-ops as a form of alternative economics, others on the Left accused co-op activists of being nothing but “hippie elitists.” Instead of “playing at revolution” by “selling specialty foods to middle class hippies,” the Marxist-Leninists thought that the co-ops should be used as tools in the class war. The hippies disagreed. This sometimes violent disagreement was what led to the Co-op Wars. Ostensibly a battle over the co-ops’ commitment to “serve the working class” (as symbolized by the sale of sugar and canned foods), what had started as a verbal dispute quickly escalated to beatings and fisticuffs.
By 1976, whatever sympathy co-op activists might have had for the Marxists was completely overshadowed by their hatred of the CO and its increasingly brutal tactics.
“They did really bad P.R.” says Cox. “I mean [the CO] would go and beat people up. And they would go and firebomb cars. They were at war with that faction of the counterculture that they should have been allied with if they wanted to make serious social change.”
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The first salvo in the Co-op Wars occurred in March of 1975, when a pair of organizers from the Beanery Co-op published what came to be known as the “Beanery Paper.” In it, authors Bob Haugen and Rebecca Comeau accused the "bourgeois" leadership of the co-op movement of deliberately conspiring to manipulate the decision-making process, "so as to prevent working class attitudes and control from replacing their own.”(2)
According Haugen and Comeau, such a bourgeois/middle class orientation was typical of college-educated hippies who had abandoned the anti-imperialist movement in favor of escapism and lifestyle politics.(3) Despite the hyperbole, it was a charge that resonated with many co-op activists. “I think that even back then, there were a lot of political liberals,” says Nygaard. “Meaning that some of us had a radical approach,” while the liberals displayed “sort of a white privileged middle class arrogance.”
"The Beanery Paper" was followed by a period of intense debate among the local co-ops, with "Jeb Cabbage" and "Emma Evechild" publishing their own position paper, in which they accused the Beanery faction of promoting "pseudo-Marxist revision full of generalizations.” (4) Nevertheless, Bob Haugen had found plenty of sympathizers within the food co-ops and among the growing number of Marxist study groups.
In April of 1975, the so-called reform movement led by Haugen and his allies—now known as the Co-op Organization, or “CO”—began to actively recruit new members in order to "transform" the co-ops and wrest control away from the governing Policy Review Board.(5)
On May 3rd, 1975, a group of 35 ultra-radicals from the CO armed themselves with metal pipes and stormed the People’s Warehouse, seizing the cash box, and savagely beating anyone who attempted to resist the incursion. This was a major offensive, as the People’s Warehouse served as the primary distribution center for most of the neighborhood co-ops. When a couple of hippies came by the Warehouse to heckle the CO, they were attacked with baseball bats.(6) One of the hippies was later treated for broken bones.
Not content with the People’s Warehouse, the Co-op Organization proceeded to occupy other Twin Cities food co-ops –all in the name of the working class. Among the CO’s stated goals were an to end worker control, greater discipline among co-op workers, accountability to a centralized leadership, an end to “hippie health food,” and a commitment to address real "working class concerns.(7) They did this by attacking other activists, both verbally and physically.
Now known officially as the “Mass Organization” (though everyone else continued to refer to them as the CO) the so-called “Stalinist” faction went on a rampage. Cashiers were assaulted at the Seward Co-op; Mill City Co-op was mobbed by Stalinists while Mill City workers and their supporters formed a human chain to protect the store; men in matching sunglasses lurked outside people’s homes; windows were broken, tires were slashed, and phone lines were cut. According to MinneapolisStar-Tribune, the CO “were believed to have a cache of weapons stored on the South Side of Minneapolis."(8) It’s a wonder that nobody was ever killed.
“That’s a warning sign,” says Alexandra Stein, a former member of the group. “If your worst enemy is other people on the Left, there’s something wrong there.”
Unbeknownst to most of the participants, the forcible takeover of the Twin Cities food co-ops was being secretly orchestrated by a man named Theo Smith. Smith was the anonymous leader of a group that called itself “The Organization” (or simply the O.). Both the Co-op Organization (the CO), and its successor the “Mass Organization,” were aspects of the O. Former members of the O. now describe it is as “a political cult.” Through a combination of Maoist self-criticism, arranged marriages, and 70’s pop psychology, members of the O. sought to transform themselves into perfect “proletarianized” revolutionaries. But according to internal documents that were later obtained by Cox, Theo Smith’s primary interest in the food co-ops wasn’t political at all: he wanted to use them as front organizations in a money making venture.
“He was sort of a counter-cultural scam artist,” says Cox. “Using the co-ops as a base where he could bring in revenue to his operation by selling food.”
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