Coming Together: Prospects
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
Prospects "So we beat on," as F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Wherever the system grows too burdensome, wherever it breeds...
...Over the past eight years it has suffered every imaginable catastrophe: The sweet potato growers have been nearly wiped out by hurricanes...
...She read it off a book, what a co-op was—how everybody owned it and how everybody had an equal vote...
...The morning I reached Lafayette I called upon Father Albert Mc-Knight, a black priest from Brooklyn who in 1964 founded the Southern Consumers Cooperatives...
...But cooperatives are victims as well of their own failure to unite politically behind their fractionated cause...
...They seem to have abandoned the maxims of Rochdale for those of Rochefoucauld, that worldly wit of the 17th century who observed, "We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others...
...The difficulties arise not only from private competition, which is practically overwhelming, but from the very nature of cooperatives...
...Fortunately, it has something to build on...
...Right now," he told me, "our morale is very low...
...For a century it has survived every setback (and every victory...
...What was there to life before...
...Thanks to a century of painful progress, cooperatism's base today is broader and stronger than ever before...
...Even today, as consumer and communal currents here and there begin to eddy, few Americans have been encouraged to think in terms of the cooperative commonwealth...
...they have not exerted the pressure necessary for change in their organizations...
...The question is whether cooperatism, with its history of hopes and disappointments, can now coalesce into a movement that offers Americans a genuine alternative to state-corporatism...
...You see," McZeal says, "that's what everybody needs...
...She may have been remembering the ill-starred venture of a man named Nelson—Nelson Olson Nelson—who came down from St...
...to be one of the most impoverished in the United States, [Nelson] undertook to establish there, with his own money, a chain of stores which could eventually pass into control of the customers...
...Through the National Association of Housing Cooperatives, sponsors are continually asking Congress to subtract this from a bill and add that, to amend this section and revise that section...
...The co-op, he says, is "the best thing that ever happened to me...
...It will not go away...
...his mother remembered hearing "some talk about cooperatives in Louisiana when I was a little girl...
...they make big mistakes...
...Today McZeal manages the bakery and helps out in the credit union...
...OK, from now on every co-op gets 10 days of sunshine...
...In a sense the young, with their new co-ops, communes and "intentional communities," have already begun the educational process...
...The two sisters in the group were former members of the Hyde Park Co-op, Chicago's only cooperative supermarket...
...In other words, it awaits the kind of political rebellion that erupted 50 years ago, when farmers who were determined to have their cooperatives refused simply to "go home and slop the hogs...
...National Alternative From New Harmony and Rochdale down to the present, cooperatism has been essentially a local phenomenon, an idea kept alive by people loyal to their land, their neighborhoods and their towns...
...the bakery has gone deep into debt, a victim of mismanagement and embezzlement...
...Never have they demanded the total overhaul that is plainly required...
...The hodgepodge of available subsidies compels co-op sponsors to hustle the system...
...As a dishwasher I thought I had it made," he recalls...
...But first we need a strong economic base, a cooperative base...
...The 1,000 rural electric co-ops, whose members only a generation ago had to grope through the kerosene gloom, now consistently shun the thousands of black, Indian and Chicano families whose shacks are still dark...
...The salvation of the black man in America is in the South," Father McKnight said...
...They will need considerable help from established opinion makers—our editorialists, our politicians—who are at present nowhere near the cooperative fold...
...Recently he called on a carpenter who owed $1,000...
...Give me 10 days of sunshine, then I'll start paying you back...
...To me it was the Lord's Prayer...
...The Good Fight Nelson's disastrous Louisiana purchase typifies much of cooperative history...
...I'd never heard such beautiful words...
...Such leaders have had to be geniuses because they have had to struggle against gigantic odds: the indifference of government, the opposition of private industry, the time-honored, laissez-faire habits of America...
...never have they protested that the present tangle of subsidies shuts out the poor, drives up housing costs and provides bankers and developers with what amounts to a Federally endorsed blank check...
...Rather, there are thousands of separate co-ops and communes, each sailing a brave and lonely course, each trying to make headway against a swelling sea of corporate wealth and power...
...Louis and, at the age of 78, died...
...At the same time co-ops require consummate organizing skills rarely found in private industry...
...For the most part, coop-eratism's largest beneficiaries remain ingrown and narcissistic...
...they dream big dreams...
...As Horace M. Kallen notes in The Decline and Rise of the Consumer (1936), "Believing the bayou region...
...Just staying alive in Louisiana, where the illiteracy rate runs as high as 75 per cent in some places, is success of the highest order—testimony both to the strength of McKnight's leadership and to the hardiness of the cooperative idea...
...With it, cooperatism remains both parochial and apolitical, an idea that frequently sprouts but too seldom spreads...
...Among other things, this would require establishing cooperative banks capable of providing low-interest loans to new co-ops, setting up a consumer cooperative service in Washington —possibly within the Department of Commerce—and in general making cooperatism an explicit goal on our national agenda...
...And the buying clubs are not far behind...
...Those people at Lockheed, they messed up even with all that money, and the government helped them out...
...I began this report with an account of an instant rent-a-car co-op that four stranded airline passengers and I slapped together in haste and frustration at the New Orleans airport...
...Now he was determined to transform the stagnant backwaters of Louisiana into sparkling cooperative freshets...
...Only the farmer, among American cooperators, appears to have understood that the fight is to be won or lost in Washington, and not in Berkeley or Kansas City or Pigeon Falls...
...There's no hope for blacks in the North except a back-migration...
...it will doubtless take years of education to turn that around...
...It may be ironic, but it is certainly not accidental that nearly every successful co-op has been the creation of a single organizing genius—a Shadid, a Kazan, or a Kaplan—who has led his people a step or two out of the wilderness...
...As one young coordinator of a natural food store in Minneapolis told me, on learning that the Health Department might close down the shop, "If they off this place, I'm through with America...
...neither do the affluent reach out to the poor...
...To most people Rochdale, England, is a less familiar name than Carbondale, Illinois...
...We've made a lot of mistakes," he says, "but so did Lockheed...
...In fact, many young people take pride in viewing their co-ops as «o«political —that is, as a disengagement from an unresponsive government...
...Each new co-op and commune tends to make the mistake of looking inward and seeing itself not as a part of a national movement but as a penultimate test case...
...Louis in 1915 to organize a chain of cooperatives among poor people...
...Similarly, the big farm federations—those young Davids that have grown into gnarled Goliaths—have with rare exceptions turned their backs on true cooperatism...
...Co-ops are ships that pass in the night...
...Nelson's working capital had dried up, and the customers never accumulated enough money to take over the ballooning business...
...Yet one gets the feeling at times that if cooperatives lose many of the battles, they may nevertheless be winning the war...
...Unlike Lockheed and the powerful aerospace industry, however, co-ops lack the clout that comes from unity...
...In Lafayette, where we five were headed, a relatively poor people's cooperative is again fighting the good fight...
...He filed a personal petition for bankruptcy, went back to St...
...They rely on such dubious business assets as amateurism and voluntarism...
...Soon after McZeal lost his job, a friend invited him to a meeting of people trying to form a new cooperative...
...The carpenter was true to his word...
...So the natural food stores come and go, talking of Jean Jacques Rousseau...
...It was the old capitalist-cooperative vision—that of the Grangers, the EPICites and the Rochdale weavers—transported to the Louisiana bayous...
...Their disillusionment with politics may be understandable, but it will not revivify the cooperative idea...
...But the old do not signal to the young...
...10 Days' Sunshine Alfred McZeal, a co-worker with McKnight, was a dishwasher for 15 years at a five-and-ten store...
...We need some successes...
...Without it, Co-op City would be just a "project," the Berkeley Cooperative would seem no different from the A&P...
...and consumers today, if not exactly organized, are at least tuned in to their grievances and, in man) cases, ready to enter the fray...
...The Southern Consumers Cooperatives is a fragile framework of enterprises—a bakery, a credit union and a sweet potato growers' co-op-all nourished by the nickels and dimes of poor blacks in northern Louisiana...
...the literature is clogged with failures...
...So I asked a lady sitting there to tell me what was going on...
...Come home and have another baby...
...Need: Organisation Regrettably, few individuals participating in cooperatives today appear to understand either the difficulties of their cause or the solutions that are possible...
...One of McZeal's responsibilities is to collect from credit union borrowers who have gotten behind on their payments...
...Wherever the system grows too burdensome, wherever it breeds alienation or powerlessness or poverty, there one finds cooperatives...
...Everyone, it developed, had a passing acquaintance with the subject...
...It's the rain," the man told McZeal...
...No one can doubt in these troubled times that the cooperative idea is once again capturing the imaginations of many Americans, particularly among young people...
...Man, if that store hadn't closed down, I'd be there yet...
...Traveling around the country, one finds there is really no such thing in America as a "cooperative movement...
...To be sure, most cooperatives still operate on a shoestring...
...The cooperative impulse in America is strong and genuine...
...the credit union has made too many loans to people unprepared or unable to pay them back...
...Unfortunately that political groundswell, which brought us such landmark benefits as Capper-Volstead and the REA, has no analog at the moment...
...Hustling the System Even the triumphant and progressively inclined urban co-ops—Seattle's GHC, for instance, or New York's United Housing Foundation —appear too weak, too busy and too often at bay to bring the good news to others...
...As we sped down the dark Louisiana highway, which for a time shadowed the Mississippi River, I told them something of my researches into cooperatives...
...He had spent most of his life promoting profit-sharing schemes for workers and evangelizing for cooperatives...
...But by 1918 the operation was sinking fast...
...What if they said...
...He called it the Nelson Cooperative Association, and for a time it flourished: 61 retail stores, four meat markets, a large bakery, a milk pasteurizing plant, a coffee factory, a condiment factory and a 1,500-acre farm...
...Yet now, as in the '30s, we have a chance to nourish the country's cooperative impulse, to develop it as a means of coping with our urban problems just as we developed it to help meet our rural needs...
...I can't make no money when it rains...
...Cooperative housing faces equally uncertain prospects, although for different reasons...
...But there it is, stubbornly afloat in the bayous, near Nelson's old dreaming grounds...
...Within the next 12 months the Congress will probably initiate a massive subsidy scheme for new group health maintenance organizations, but health cooperatives will be vouchsafed a very thin sliver of those funds, because health cooperatives have few advocates in Washington...
...What if the government did the same thing for co-ops...
...I didn't know anything about it...
...Not one black man sits on the board of a single local rural electric cooperative...
...This provincial quality has been the cooperative's strength and also its weakness...
...the man belonged to a credit union in Dayton, Ohio...
...For all practical purposes, that struggle is just beginning...
...they are victims of an economic system that discourages their way of doing business and offers every advantage to their competition, the nation's largest and wealthiest corporations...
Vol. 55 • April 1972 • No. 8
