The Co-op Wars, Continued...
“There were always tales,” says Cox, “and weird mythical legends about who was running the CO and what their mission was –even when I first got involved with the housing co-ops back in ’74-75. But I didn’t really find out about Theo and confirm that he was THE GUY until this ex-CO member named Bob Malles showed up on my doorstep in 1993."
“I had already finished the first draft of my book. I left it a mystery, because I didn’t know about Theo. I couldn’t find anything –I couldn’t find the people in the CO who were willing to talk. But apparently word got around to Bob Malles.” According to Cox, Malles was “a pretty hardcore member of the CO. He had sort of gotten out of the cult by then… so he showed up on my doorstep with all of these papers. We sat down and went through them, and I interviewed him, and it was all right there! All the documentation was there about [Theo Smith’s] involvement."
“There was stuff about Theo’s control over people’s behavior. There were letters and memos to people saying ‘You need to leave this guy and go and live with this guy.’ …There were documents about his front groups; he had a computer company in Illinois, and a daycare center up here in Minneapolis… All that stuff became clearer after Bob Malles came up and emptied-out his cardboard boxes full of documents. It was fairly eye opening. So it was very late in the game that I found out about Theo.”
Cox’s findings were later confirmed by Alexandra Stein, and other former members of the O.
“Certainly, Theo as an individual was a nut case,” says Stein. “There’s no doubt in my mind about that. And the effect that he had was to mortally wound the Left here for many years.”
* * *
After the takeover of the People’s Warehouse, the anarchists fought back, forming a new distribution network called DANCe (Distribution Alliance of the North Country). The name was derived from the famous quote attributed to Emma Goldman: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.” The name seemed to sum up the anarchists’ position: we’re not going to let a bunch of dour revolutionaries rain on our parade.
With the DANCe warehouse serving all of the remaining Twin Cities food co-ops, and a new All Co-op Assembly doing outreach to co-ops throughout the state and parts of North Dakota, the CO became the target of a consumer boycott. While the CO maintained control over the People’s Warehouse, they couldn’t force people to shop there. And the CO’s attempts to reorganize the Selby Co-op and the Bryant-Central Co-op met with limited success.
“What tended to happen in those situations,” says Cox, “is that [the CO] would come, and they would take over, and then no one would shop there anymore. They would just go to a different store! I remember, they took over Powderhorn, which is this itty bitty little store! And the people who were volunteering there just said ‘OK’ –and they left. So there were CO cadre sitting at Powderhorn, and nobody came to shop!”
The end result was a series of failed businesses where once there had been a network of thriving community co-ops. In the case of Powderhorn, the CO simply shut it down.
“Of course,” says Cox, “there was all this legal action: everyone had to prove who’s store it was. Few of these co-ops had any sort of legal ownership; they were all-volunteer co-ops. There weren’t any legal owners –they sort of had a board of directors. So there were lots of court cases and lots of legal work that needed to be done to establish who owned what.”
According to Nygaard, the co-ops were forced to adopt a more traditional structure: “That’s partly why the co-ops are much more formal now, in a legal sense. Because literally push-came-to-shove, and it ended up in the courts: who controls this co-op? Who has the right to change the locks?”
“In pretty much every situation,” says Cox, “the original organization and the original group of people reasserted their ownership, and the CO went away.”
Increasingly desperate, the CO sought to exploit the racial sensitivities of their lily-white constituency. As the Peoples' Warehouse began hemorrhaging money, the CO tried to use the African-American community to drive a wedge between the DANCEe co-ops and their supporters. Knowing that the hippies were extremely sensitive to charges of racism, the CO chose a black man named Moe Burton to serve as the public face of the Bryant-Central Co-op.(11) This plan backfired when the CO’s chief organizer Bob Haugen—acting on Theo’s direct orders—confronted Burton, and tried to beat him up.(12) Shortly thereafter, Burton’s truck was firebombed.
With food literally rotting on the shelves, the People’s Warehouse was nearly bankrupt. While the CO cadre worked for free, Smith’s lieutenants were making cash withdrawals from the bank account. In July, the courts awarded control of the warehouse to the original Policy Review Board. The CO’s bid for control had ended in complete and utter failure: none of their businesses survived, and the warehouse was sold.
“But in a cult organization like what Theo put together, it isn’t at all about goals,” says Cox. “It’s about what Theo wants.”
EPILOGUE
The Co-op Wars had already ended by the time that Alexandra Stein arrived in Minneapolis. But the CO was still around, having shortened their name to the O.
“I didn’t know about any of that until I got out [of the Organization],” says Stein. “And then what astounded me when I got out, and started hearing about the Co-op Wars, was the level of intense bitterness and trauma. 30 years later, people are still traumatized by this experience.”
“That was the big thing with the CO,” says Nygaard. “They were a really screwed-up organization, but their charges of elitism and racism and lack of class consciousness –I absolutely agreed with a lot of what they said! And we changed some things in the co-ops. There are people who will deny this, but we changed because of that struggle. The DANCe faction prevailed, but things were never the same after that.”
In 1982, the All Co-op Assembly was officially disbanded. The anarchists had triumphed, only to see their ideals betrayed. The co-ops had begun hiring professional managers, abandoning the tradition of worker-owners and working members. Decisions were no longer strictly democratic. Instead, power was increasingly concentrated in the hands of the board of directors. At the same time, the number of Twin Cities food co-ops shrank from 25 to six.(13) Of those six remaining co-ops, only North Country was still a collective.
“I still shop at co-ops,” says Jeff Nygaard. “But I don’t see them as having any revolutionary potential at this point –if they ever did.”
“We had a suggestion book in the co-op for many years, and somebody wrote in it ‘Cut out the politics. Just sell food.’ –Which all of us thought was just absurd! Because you can't separate any commodity from politics. Certainly not food!
“Its sort of like a liberal-democratic approach… That’s why you have co-ops today that offer classes, and what they offer are cooking classes and vegetarian food classes. There are no classes about co-operative organization. There are no classes about consensus decision-making. There are no classes on the mechanics of democracy or community-building… all of the classes that the they are offering are about food. And sure, they’re organized in a co-operative way, but so is Land’O’Lakes! Archer, Daniels, Midland is a goddamned co-op! -price-fixers for the world."
(
In 1996, ADM agreed to pay $100 million in criminal penalties after pleading guilty to price fixing.)
Nygaard pauses for a moment, and stares off into space. “My little capsule of what happened with the co-ops is that the radicals and the liberals fought. And the liberals won.”
© 2006 by Erik Farseth |
