Actually Bobert, I come from a part of the US that has historically been one of the hot spots for cooperatives, dating back a whole lot further than the "New Wave" cooperative movement resurgence of the 1960s, that rose alongside the New Left. I'm still a member of one of the original 60s food coops here in St. Paul, but I've also been a member of quite a few failed coops as well.

The New Wave movement had it's roots in the 30s Farmer Laborer party/movement in MN, the socialist movements of North Dakota, and the other worker organized cooperatives popular around the country for decades prior to the 60s, including African American farmers organizing into food coops in the Reconstruction era.

Around here, we had the Coopers of the 1880s, along with the Knights of Labor, the Workingmen's Union, and then by the 20s and 30s, many working folks around here sort of opted out of the AFL movement, stuck with the Wobblies, the miners, and did our own more socialist leaning sorts of cooperative organizing. It was the Minneapolis Coopers though, who formed the first food coop in Minnesota--the Minneapolis Cooperative Mercantile Company, based upon the Rochdale model. In addition to food and groceries, it also sold dry goods. They also founded a coop building and loan, to help finance the mortgages of coopers who worked in the neighborhood where the barrel factories were, founded coop laundries, coop neighborhood improvement associations to provid library books, loaner tools, etc. Eventually they branched out into other neighborhoods and cooperatives--a shoe store, tobacconist shop, and of course, the accident insurance coop.

They were damn serious about it all too. Unlike their capitalist cooper counterparts, they banned alcohol and smoking from the shop floor, their meetings, etc. These were serious lifestyle pioneers as well, insisting upon discipline among the ranks in order to survive and create a new model for living and working. In the time it takes to crack an Ole and Lena joke, cooperatives were formed by city workers, cigarmakers, musicians, painters, shirtmakers, and printers. In fact, some of my 60s hippie friends were involved in the New Wave printing coop movement locally. Then the Knights came in and formed even more coops.

Then they came up with the idea of forming a large, central wholesale coop "depot" for farmers to bring their goods to urban laborers, and vice versa. For while, the coopers were beating back the boss shops, but eventually they wereall driven into the powerful Knights union local to survive increased mechanization and the millers switching from using barrels for the flour to bags, which spelled the end of the independent cooperator coopers movement, even though they kept making barrels locally up until the 1930s.

There were the dairy cooperatives started up in Wisconsin and Minnesota after the turn of the century too. And as a matter of fact, my own grandpa was one of the leaders of the Minnesota county creameries associations before they all got gobbled up by Land O Lakes. In fact, he was one of the leaders who did the price bargaining for the Minnesota farmers in the Chicago market, and due to the big mess created by a dairy war around these parts over fair milk prices, wars between farmers and the railroad, etc. he became a leader of the movement that formed the Midwestern Dairymen's Company in the 1920s. He lobbied locally, regionally, and nationally for passage of the Cooperative Marketing Act of 1926 on behalf of Minnesota & Wisconsin dairy farmers too.

So you can see, with a fine long tradition of cooperative movement history here in my corner of the empire, it would be a tad arrogant to claim us hippies started it all in the 60s, don't you think?