“The dream of the 90s is alive in Minneapolis”. Someone said this to me once and I’ve said it with partial irony many more times. It’s true though- we have good biking infrastructure, parks with crustpunks in them, and so, so many cafes and restaurants to buy your Vegetable Slop at. Let’s rank just a few of these fine locations:
Hard Times Cafe on West Bank. Look, the food sucks. Not all of it- the vegan biscuits and gravy are shockingly good, and the seitan gyro is pretty edible as well. Most of the pastries have the texture of drywall, the coffee has way too many grounds in it, but I really do love this place. One of the most important locations in the formation of UE 1105- many important organizing and strategizing conversations were had here.
Modern Times. The food here is pretty fantastic, though the prices are higher than other places on this list. I wish the hot sauces were a little more standardized- each table has its own bottle, I can never remember which I want, and I don’t know who to ask for a different one. It upsets me that the tables out front do not encourage smoking. I do not smoke anymore, so it’s okay for me to have a cigarette every now and then, since I quit.
Seward Cafe. Full disclosure- I’ve never actually had any food from here beyond like, a scone or something. But my friend works there and they have good shows, occasionally. The foodshare people work out of it, which is sweet. Definitely the most “community oriented” with all the challenges that poses. I have a soft spot for it since my friends played there on tour before I ever came to Minneapolis or had met those friends beyond knowing they lived in the house that had shows that Pharmakon and Aaron Dilloway played at that I had to leave early because my other friend got scared.
Mayday Cafe- What if Hard Times was in Powderhorn and accepted card for purchases over 5 dollars? Well this place exists, and it’s now worker owned as well! Woke is mandatory here- in interchanges across the counter, all parties must use they-them pronouns. I’ve never had any of the food here besides the pastries, which were fine. It’s a nice place to run into people- when I was working for SEIU I had a couple one on ones there and would always run into a coworker while talking to an organizer.
There are other slop-plates in the city too, and hopefully in the future I can do a more in depth post and review. We might also consider whether the vegetarian combo at Dilla’s ethiopian would constitute this, or if a veggie entree at one of the many near eastern delis might as well, however the answer to this is far to vital to coalitional politics for someone with as dulled political analysis as me to attempt to answer. Vegetable slop is an aesthetic signifier of a certain kind of ex-punk, co op oriented urbanite. This is tangential to the main subject of this post- my personal favorite tidbit of Minnesota history, the Co-Op Wars of the 1970s. Everyone loves to comment on leftist infighting, but rarely does it reach the level of physical violence, and when it does you can normally expect a group of cultic Maoists to be involved (yes, I am thinking here of “DSA will never win! Social Democracy is Fascism’s Twin!” and the physical disruption of a DSA meeting by the Kansas City Red Guards). The problem is, though, often those Maoists are very much in the right! The battle for control over the Minnesota food co-op system in the 70s is one of the prime examples of this. Split between back-to-the-land, Whole Earth Catalog hippies and new-left Maoists lead by an ex SNCC organizer who appeared somewhat out of nowhere to found the “CO”, the situation would eventually escalate into physical intimidation and the burning down of storefronts.
The Co-op wars are quite well documented. You can find an excellent hour-long PBS documentary, plentiful documents published internally by the CO, and ongoing documentation of the wars and adjacent struggles in the archives of former midwest new left zines, such as Hundred Flowers (easy to tell which side they would land on- let one hundred flowers bloom) and North Country Anvil. Probably substantially more, but these are the two I’ve come across recently.
This ‘stack is not about the wars themselves though, but rather the result. The hippies, of course, won. The Maoists lacked popular support, were unable to really integrate with the broader working class community, and were eventually pushed out of the more established co-ops. They didn’t go away, however. Rather the CO would turn inward and continue on as a small, increasingly cultish organization, eventually getting into the science of early childhood development. There are some fascinating documents related to this here. Multiple members would go on to apologize for their action and acknowledge the cult-like status of the group. Meanwhile, the Minnesota food co-op system is surprisingly robust. Off the top of my head in the metro area, I can name almost a dozen- the three Mississippi Market locations in St. Paul, the tiny Hampden Park Co-Op over by a bunch of annoying breweries, East Side Co Op up in Northeast, the two Seward Co-Op locations, the two Wedges, and the 3 Lakewinds out in the western suburbs. There are probably more, and throughout the rest of the state you’ll also find more than you might expect. Compared to the 3 I grew up with in the similarly sized triangle region of North Carolina, or Chicago’s Dill Pickle, this is quite a lot!
They are also now a very, very different type of co op than the movement originated as. The great hope of the co-op movement from the new left was that it would provide a little enclave of worker ownership. Now, the cooperative owners are the consumers, who the workers can be if they buy in, but are not necessarily. They’re also all staffed by waged employees, some union and some not, and function as high end grocery stores. That dream is dead, collapsed by the transition from worker to consumer ownership and the gradual buying out of every local distribution network and warehouse by UNFI and supervalue. The font at East Side co-op looks exactly the same as Weaver Street down in Carrboro, NC. It’s now firmly homogenized. At the end of the PBS documentary, some of the ex-hippies acknowledge their ambivalent position- they won, but they also very much lost.
One of my professors once noted that in the wake of WW2 and the fear of totalitarianism, interest in subject formation became pretty taboo. I think this taboo is starting to decay, and it probably needs to. What distinguishes “culty Maoists” from other left-sects is that they really don’t shy away from this. The struggle-session can almost feel like group psychoanalysis performed on the margins and outside the trappings of the therapeutic couch. The investment in childhood education and knowledge-formation of the post co-op CO rings of this as well. At its worst and all too frequently, it metastasizes into a full blown cult of personality around a predatory leader. But brushing this aside is, I think, linked to the failure of the co op movement and many of the attempts to form an “off the grid” alternative presented by the hippy to anti-globalization lineage of the american left. The dismissal of psychoanalytic techniques in favor of Worksheet Therapy and CBT mirrors the shying away from questions of how we come to be formed as subjects rather than being already as we are and always will be- even the Foucauldian perspective would only look at how this happens via highly impersonal and accidental processes. “How can we intentionally affect each other and be affected in turn” became a bit of a third rail with the cold war- this would, after all, be a serious violation of boundaries- the most sacred of which is the boundary formed around the self that we possess. If others can transgress it, then what can’t they?
However much we try to ignore this, however, we do effect each other. This takes place interpersonally (I would not be the same as I am now without the relationships in my life, and vice-versa for those who have been impacted by me) and institutionally (I am recognized as a subject with certain rights and responsibilities by the state and form an attachment to that ideal of a subject). This dismissal, in turn, mirrors the drive towards localization and backing out from “large scale” struggles that much of the hippy-descended new left would continue to fight for. If we can just wall off our distribution network, our ways of getting food, our ways of buying land- we can hold the excesses of capitalism at bay and fortify and maybe, eventually, expand. This does not work. The co op system slowly conglomerates, workers at them are more and more marginalized (with some power being regained with unionization when it occurs) and the warehouses and distribution networks are all bought out. The Maoists, to their credit, seem to have fully understood this- not only would the co ops only “be revolutionary” if they were embedded in working class communities and sold goods at prices the working class could afford, this is also the only way they could feasibly survive- by acknowledging and working through their place in a large metro-area which would fill with more fortune 500 headquarters per capita than almost anywhere else, rather than attempting to carve out an exception. I don’t think this is delinkable from their investment in subject-formation, regardless of how awry and culty that interest has repeatedly gone.
But Freud is back in style. It’s been chic to critique limited understandings of autonomy-as-individualism and “boundaries” for a few years, and the hippy/anti-globalization movement is increasingly cast as reactionary and white. Almost every competent organizer I know has picked up psychoanalysis over the past few years. The vibe has shifted in tandem with the increasingly un-compartmentalizable fear of climate collapse. Sometimes I feel a real wish for the localism movement to have been able to provide solutions.
It really does feel like this miscalculation very much lives on in Minneapolis, defining the zombified dream of the 90s. I don’t want to cast any real aspersion onto the city- I have had only a limited time here and all information is secondhand. I have begun to feel at home here, although I can’t identify the trees in the woods in the same way I might be able to in the piedmont region of the southeastern united states (a friend and I were joking it would make for a good dating bio to note which trees I can and can’t tell apart- I can tell a white oak from a red oak, but I do not think I can tell you exactly what a pin oak looks like without a guide; with needles visible I can distinguish a loblolly from a longleaf but little else with pine trees, I will embarrassingly confuse beech and river birch more than I would like to admit when the latter’s bark isn’t flaking enough; I can normally figure out if something’s an ash by process of elimination- it branches opposite is neither Maple, Dogwood, Caprifoliaceae, nor Horse Chestnut, and only MADCAP HORSE trees branch opposite, but anytime I have to count leaflets I’m in dangerous territory. I know most cedars and poplars very well- their bark shavings and twiglets work for firestarter better than other trees.) And, most importantly, (now we’re fully off topic, but this is really what the whole post was building up to) it’s where I really learned how to work on my own bike, pictured below! Over the past 6 months I’ve basically manually swapped out everything besides the frame- handlebars, chain, tensioners, freewheel, wheels, braking cables, etc and really feel like I understand it better (with copious help from my friend Noah)! It looks a lot different than when I got it from my friend Adam in exchange for some beers. This is really my first DIY project since building my own room at the warehouse back in Chicago, which I guess was nothing to sneeze at either.
Had me singing this by the end https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5ecMgcTpmdw&pp=ygUPR29kYXJkIG1hbyBzb25n
I like the digression on trees (+1), but no mention of potential worker solidarities across rural/urban divide in food systems context (-1)