A class struggle has been brewing in the co ops ever since the first year of North Country Co op, when the middle class leadership of the hippie movement won near total control. People with working class experience and others who were serious about desiring social change began to feel isolated from the masses --- and that their work was being exploited to perpetuate a set of bourgeois-escapist attitudes.

This struggle has been building up behind the scenes for the last two years. Now it has taken a qualitative leap and burst out into open confrontation.

From the beginning, the coops have operated on two false premises:
1. That you can operate a non-profit business in a capitalist economic system.
2. That there would be an always-available, readily tappable supply of extra money in coop people's bank accounts to bail the coops out when they got into trouble or needed to expand.

[continued]

The "Response to the Beanery Paper"written by Jeb Cabbage and Emma Evechild should not be overlooked or pushed aside.
What Jeb and Emma did in responding to the Beanery paper was in effect to throw a nasty bourgeois-intellectual stone from the unsanitary cesspool of anti-communism.
The deliberate twisting of quotes.out of context and the gross distortion ·and spreading of untruths of communist history lead us to conclude that this Nixon type tactic is being used to try and discredit their political opposition. This is being done for two obvious reasons: to protect their control of Mill City and to.protect the ownership and control of the class clique that now leads most of the coops.

The trend towards private possession of individual coops, and the overall domination of much of the coops by a small class clique, cannot be overlooked any longer by those with some level of socialist consciousness.

In spite of the fact of incorrect leadership in the coops, the coops do represent some form of socialism. Who can deny the tremendous amount of socialized labor that went into the construction of the coops? This means not only the hundreds of people who work long hours with no thought of personal reward but also all the other workers in all branches of production on whom the coops depend for their goods and services.