1970, ISBN: 9780813521022

In the 1960s, the cooperative networks of food stores, restaurants, bakeries, bookstores, and housing alternatives were part counterculture, part social experiment, part economic utopia, … Meer...

In the 1960s, the cooperative networks of food stores, restaurants, bakeries, bookstores, and housing alternatives were part counterculture, part social experiment, part economic utopia, and part revolutionary political statement. The co-ops gave activists a place where they could both express themselves and accomplish at least some small-scale changes. By the mid-1970s, dozens of food co-ops and other consumer- and worker-owned enterprises were operating throughout the Twin Cities, and an alternative economic network--with a Peoples' Warehouse at its hub--was beginning to transform the economic landscape of the metropolitan Minneapolis-St. Paul area. However, these co-op activists could not always agree among themselves on their goals. Craig Cox, a journalist who was active in the co-op movement, here provides the first book to look at food co-ops during the 1960s and 1970s. He presents a dramatic story of hope and conflict within the Minneapolis network, one of the largest co-op structures in the country. His "view from the front" of the Co-op War" that ensued between those who wanted personal liberation through the movement and those who wanted a working-class revolution challenges us to re-think possibilities for social and political change. Cox provides not a cynical portrait of sixties idealism, but a moving insight into an era when anything seemed possible. Craig Cox is editor of Business Ethics, a national bimonthly magazine that covers socially responsible business. He has written for a variety of local, regional, and national publications. Media > Book, [PU: Rutgers University Press]<