The Co-op Wars, Continued...
Very little is known about Theo (Theophilus) Smith, prior to his arrival in Minnesota. Over the years, Smith has employed a number of pseudonyms (including “Randy,” “George James,” and “Edward Louis James,”), which have made his movements even harder to track. In 1980, Smith fled to Chicago, after fatally shooting an African-American DJ named Kyle Steven Ray.
According to Stein, no one outside of Theo’s inner circle knew the real reason behind the sudden move to Chicago. “We were all led to believe that this was because the revolution was really happening in Chicago,” says Stein. “The FBI came to my door to ask about the murder, and I didn’t know what they were talking about.”
After six years on the run, Smith finally surrendered to the authorities in December of 1986. He served a year in the county workhouse, after pleading guilty to manslaughter.(9)
Some believe that Smith would have faced a much harsher sentence if the victim had been white. Others think that Smith may have actually been working for COINTELPRO, the FBI’s domestic surveillance program, and that this explains why he never went to prison. Such speculation is not just paranoia: there have been other, well-documented instances of FBI provocateurs infiltrating Twin Cities activist groups, most notably longtime FBI-informant Michael Fitzpatrick (see: Chapter Nine). Whether Theo Smith was actually working for the government, or was simply a lone troublemaker, may never be known. What is known for sure, is that in 1973, Theophilus Smith suddenly appeared in Wisconsin at the Winding Road Farm.
Smith claimed to have been a former member of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAV). His credentials as a black revolutionary appeared to be impeccable. This gave him tremendous credibility among white leftists living in the Midwest.
Smith quickly developed a devoted core of followers, beginning with Bob Haugen and several co-op activists who were living on the Winding Road commune. It was Smith’s followers who did all of the actual organizing. As Smith’s first lieutenant, Bob Haugen served as the “public face” of the CO. Smith, the ringleader, would remain in the shadows. While hundreds of people passed through the ranks of the Co-op Organization, less than three-dozen would form the central nucleus of the O. And of that three-dozen, only a handful knew of Theo’s real identity. Members of the Organization thought that they were part of a much larger movement based in Oakland, CA, whose disciples were being groomed for future positions in a post-revolutionary society.
The genius of the Co-op Organization was that no one outside of Smith’s inner circle really knew about the cult. New recruits weren’t told that they’d be following Smith’s orders. They were told that “democratic centralism” was more efficient, and that “serious revolutionaries” didn’t spend all their time sitting around getting stoned.
Craig Cox explains:
“There was a lot of defensiveness in the counter-culture, here and across the country, about the New Left view of revolution. The Marxist view of revolution was: you organize the working class, you organize the proletariat, and you take over the means of production. But of course, the New Left / anarchist idea was that you built according to cooperative, mutual aid economics, and that revolution begins with the individual.
“So it was sort of like the difference between a Ghandian viewpoint of revolution and a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint. But of course, at that time, the people who were involved in the counter-culture were all fairly naïve in terms of personal relationships; pretty naïve in terms of radical politics. And even though everybody read a lot, when it came right down to practice, they could easily be swayed by someone like Theo and his core supporters, who would come out, and sort of shame them about their lack of interest in the working class. And their lack of interest in violent revolution. So, I think they were fairly successful in the early period at swaying some of these New Left-style anarchists to come around to their point of view.”
Convinced that the CO cadre was “more disciplined than I am,” these poor frightened hippies would cut their hair. “And they shaved their beards off, and they put on a suit, and they went to work in the real world and tried to take over society from a working class perspective.”
“Looking at it from the outside,” says Cox, “it seemed pretty plausible.”
* * *
Jeff Nygaard worked as a coordinator at the North Country Co-op for 14 years. In the late-1970s, Nygaard also served on the Warehouse Board and the All Co-op Assembly. According to Nygaard, part of the appeal of the CO was that even though they were “nuttier than hell,” their critique of the co-ops rang true:
“The fight was about a vision for the co-ops,” he says. “The question was posed: Are food co-ops about food? Or co-ops? What was the identity of the co-ops? Were co-ops defined by the process of the co-operation? Or were they defined by the food that they were selling? In essence, that’s what the fight was about. How it actually came down was much more complicated.
“At that time,” says Nygaard, “the co-ops were much less formal in terms of structure. In terms of the mission—what drove those organizations—there was much more of a political stance. And many people really thought of them as revolutionary organizations. Rightly, or wrongly. That would be rare now, I would think!
“There was a group of people that called themselves of the Co-op Organization –the CO. And they thought the co-ops were not serving the masses of people, and had an elitist attitude. That was the charge –that the co-ops were elitist; that they were just serving the health food needs of middle class hippies. Which I actually tended to agree with, although I wasn’t in the CO, by any means!
“The way it was sort of caricatured was the health food people versus the canned goods people. Like, the CO would have a co-op, and they’d sell Coke—which was just anathema!—totally heretical to the health food people.” The two sides became “really antagonistic.” With the battle lines clearly drawn, there was no middle ground: “There was ‘RIGHT,’ and there was ‘WRONG.’”
The CO was also holding Marxist study groups. “People would go to these things,” says Cox, “and for some folks, it was the first time that they ever sat down in a group of committed Marxists. And they were swayed by those folks who were passionate about this stuff. And to some of these counter-culturalists, that whole Marxist path seemed to be the more committed path, the less hippie-ish path… the more serious path towards social change.”
These Marxist study groups were closed to the outside world, making them a fertile breeding ground for cult-like activity.
“You had to be invited,” says Cox. “You couldn’t just show up. [The CO] would go around, and they would target certain opinion leaders amongst the radical community.” These opinion leaders were then invited to participate in “special” semi-secret groups. Once they had a captive audience, the CO “would sit them down and work on them… They were pretty effective early on.”
Among these opinion leaders was future Minneapolis City Councilmember Dean Zimmerman.
"People wanted a dramatic change in our society,” Zimmerman would later tell the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “And this co-op organization with the left-wing dogma exploited that deep, burning desire.”(10)
These days, the radical movement tends to be organized according to anti-authoritarian principles (the “spokesperson” model). The concept of a cadre organization seems totally anachronistic. But such was not the case back in 1973.
“It wasn’t really foreign to our generation of radicals,” says Cox. “Because there were a great many people who studied the Cuban revolution. And a great many people who saw some kind of liberation, some kind of path that made sense to them, in a cadre organization. Part of it was there was a certain defensiveness around living a sort of empty hippie lifestyle. And there were a lot of people who felt like, ‘Well, I want to change the world… but are we really doing it by smoking pot and being vulgar?’
“I think it began to seem a little shallow and undisciplined. And so they would run into people who were very well versed in the whole Marxist-Leninist ideology –and they were cool people! They were people they hung out with. They were people that they saw in the neighborhood. Maybe they had done stuff with them before they went over to Theo’s thing. So they could see that: ‘OK, these people are more disciplined than I am. They seem more committed to making change in the world than I am.’ And I think for some people, it was a fairly attractive alternative.”
Jeff Nygaard concurs: “I got in a bit of trouble, because I actually sort of agreed with some of the arguments of the CO, but I was a ranking guy in the other side! I worked at North Country. And there were a number of us who said ‘We are elitist!’ To take a self-selected group, and to have them agree is not much of a test of democracy. It’s not that hard to get consensus when you kick out everyone who doesn’t agree!”
“The other thing that cannot be escaped from that period,” says Nygaard. “Is that that the core of the co-op movement was white. Totally white. And my analysis of the class make up was that it was pretty middle class. It was a pretty homogenous group. That’s probably why I felt like I fit in. Now my background was working class, but it was kind of a white Minnesota-Scandinavian type of thing, so ethnically I fit in. And with all the talk of ‘revolution’ at the time, coming from Wauseca, it sounded good to me! And only later did I sort of cool off and say ‘Hmmm…what’s missing from this picture?’”
Nygaard thinks that despite their tactics, the CO was onto something: it all came down to a question of who the co-ops were really serving. “I agreed that we needed to diversify our product line. There were many fights about that. There was a fight about whether to have meat, or no meat. There was a fight about sugar. There was a fight about cans... About processed food, or no processed food. And this went on for years. Through good financial times, and bad.”
Nygaard thinks that the narrow focus on health food really misses the point:
“You could have a store like Whole Foods—that’s about as far from democracy as you can get!—and they serve pretty good food, from what I understand. Or you can have a place that’s very democratically run, and they could sell anything they want. They could sell electronics. Co-ops have nothing to do with food, per se.”
According to Cox, “The CO was the first group that borrowed from, and broke-away from, the basic hippie counter-culture.” It was this counter-cultural model that distinguishes it from other far-left groups such as the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) “Those were really Old Left groups. They were still operating from this basic Old Left Marxist paradigm that was very party-oriented."
“What was different about what Theo did with the CO is he sort of hijacked this alternative economics idea that the hippie-anarchists had invented. And he wanted to turn it toward some kind of pretend revolutionary mission. ‘Cause the RCP and the SWP –those guys didn’t have any interest in the co-ops. They were out organizing auto workers. They were organizing other labor unions and doing this labor-based thing. And Theo was still working on these little collectives, these little worker-owned counter-cultural collectives… So it was a different take on it than the old line Marxist parties.”'
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