The Violent Battles Of The 1970s Counterculture: The Co-Op Wars | Full Documentary

In the 1970s, young people in Minnesota radicalized by the Vietnam War created a unique alternative economy featuring dozens of food cooperatives, or co-ops as they're more commonly known now, but a shadowy revolutionary group used conflicts over class and race to try to seize the movement. The ensuing clash pitted friends and comrades in a sometimes violent conflict over the future of the counterculture known as the co-op wars.
00:00:00 The Co-Op Wars - in-fighting, violence, and the evolution of the revolution
00:02:44 The hippy commune that started the co-op movement in Minnesota
00:07:22 The West Bank's new food experiment: The People's Pantry
00:10:00 The creation of Minneapolis's first co-op
00:12:08 The co-op movement explodes in Minnesota
00:16:00 The mysterious figure who infiltrated the counterculture movement
00:19:00 Racial issues in the revolution and bourgeois guilt
00:22:51 Mobilizing the working class through co-ops and infiltrating the hippies
00:24:34 The C.O., Moe Burton, and the beginning of the co-op wars
00:29:01 Seizing control of the People's Warehouse
00:36:55 The legal and social battle for the People's Warehouse
00:41:52 Threats, violence, and the co-op wars
00:48:05 The end of the co-op wars and the C.O.
00:51:18 38 years later...
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#hippy #CounterCulture #minnesota #coop

[@JeffPDX]

For years I tried to figure out the exact meaning of the North Country "If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution" Emma Goldman shirt. An acronym pun from the Co-op War was not one of my guesses. Thanks for a documentary I've been waiting decades for someone to make. I hope you get a good deal on the cable streamer adaptation rights.

[@AnMuiren]

We had many of these same conflicting dynamics in the Greater Cincinnati Northern Kentucky region in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I was just a teen and found a place with different iterations of the Cincinnati Food Conspiracy, our Free Clinic, the FreeStore, New Morning our first of several attempts at creating a regional vision of the Free School movement. Crazy times, often scary, but I am grateful to have been present and involved.

[@tracylealandis4182]

Yes!!! And you probably made a big difference!!! 🤓🤓🤓

[@ozarkswebdesign6366]

After the shortages of last year, I predict a comeback of co-ops along with more CSA's but some of it will be in rural areas where the farmers actually are. For three weeks, I was driving by hundreds of head of beef cattle, only to find empty meat shelves at the store. Crazy. Rep. Thomas Massie's PRIME Act would have helped that.

[@alima93]

Very interesting doc. Wish they spent more time explaining why the CO felt the need to rapidly heighten contradictions. What were the conditions at the time that made them feel that sense of urgency to bring about the revolution. We definitely feel it now: we have climate change, a pandemic exacerbated by capitalism, sharpening racial contradictions, etc. But it would have been nice to understand the conditions back then to get a better understanding of the CO's rationale.

[@tracylealandis4182]

There was a lot of dogma going down but they really were trying to think thru the class issues and they were met with a lot of resistance.....Nobody likes me saying that....But they were.....And then the weird energy came into play and everything, as you can see, got to be a mess.....

[@tracylealandis4182]

Also, even tho we couldn't pull out our phone and check on Twitter and TikTok for what was going on in Vietnam, and we were clearly focused on our own little world, Saigon was falling, people were hanging off the helicopters, etc.......I'm quite sure that as a group we were pretty psychologically unsettled at that time........

[@nothingmuch8865]

That we had hippie kiddos going from "full granola" to "full deplorable" over a divisive line of politics seems par for the course. The upper classes find great satisfaction LARPing as revolutionaries lashing out against mommy and daddy while creating ill to the lives they deem unworthy. Boomers are antiquated life forms for whom nostalgia is the most valued currency, upper middle class twits who had to manufacture trouble to feel meaning in their lives.

[@danielpirone8028]

Very interesting - thanks for sharing!

[@WillowRoark]

We'll figure it out one of these days... of how far we'll go.

[@SerfsUp1313]

Goddamn. They had so many people so much potential to really make a difference. American individualism really rots us from the inside out. Some day will learn.

[@patrickholt2270]

It seems very arbitrary to me, and somewhat commodity fetishist, to label organic and wholefoods as bourgeois when if anything they are peasant and artisan. Actively preferring agribusiness commodity forms where purchasing them shares profits with the big food corporations. PepsiCo for eff sake. The British Co-operative movement does organic and wholefoods, and fairtrade goods, along with standard stuff, both corporate brands and Co-op brand (since the Co-operative movement is big enough to have an integrated supply chain including Co-op farms, processing and delivery, along with Co-op banks, Co-op Insurance, Co-op Funeral service etc). So there's no politicisation of product range. You can do party building elsewhere, and co-ops can materially contribute in terms of resources and labour time, but any co-op's primary purpose is to model and pioneer common ownership and to create benefit for working class customers and co-owners. If you mess up the business trying to make it a party instead of an economic enterprise, then you weaken the working class, as well as the putative party. The other thing is just that the leaven of sectarians is sectarianism rather than class unity. If your historical model is splitters and putchists, then it cannot be surprising if the class is never formed into its own party, which is the necessary precondition for smashing the state. Here infantile leftists, whether nominally claiming to be Stalinists or Trotskyists, are alike. All for premature Blanquism which just wastes previous organising, demoralises and divides the movement, brings socialism into disprepute, and alienates ordinary workers.

[@markpatterson3723]

So all these people ended up in the Democratic Party?

[@tracylealandis4182]

Probably not many Republicans from that group.....Dean Zimmerman who is in the movie served on the Minneapolis City Council representing the Green Party.....Annie Young served for many years on the Park Board but I don't think that was a party thing.....

[@markpatterson3723]

@@tracylealandis4182 I ended up answering my own question. Most of these people abandoned socialism & became liberals later in life.

[@JeffPDX]

I wish they did, the DFL could use the vigor. Alas, she fell into the Right Wing POW/MIA myth and was sporting their gear.

[@voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang885]

@@tracylealandis4182 Annie Young was also in the Green Party

[@voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang885]

The MN DFL was "created" by Hubert H. Humphrey to drive out the Communists from the Farmer-Labor Party.

[@Baraborn]

22:50 Wow! It's just like a woman to choose selfishness and not see the 'forest through the trees'.

[@tracylealandis3569]

I tried to find the "woman to choose selfishness" that you were referring to at 22:50 and all I see is guys.....curious what are you referring to?