For years I tried to figure out the exact meaning of the North Country "If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution" Emma Goldman shirt. An acronym pun from the Co-op War was not one of my guesses. Thanks for a documentary I've been waiting decades for someone to make. I hope you get a good deal on the cable streamer adaptation rights.

We had many of these same conflicting dynamics in the Greater Cincinnati Northern Kentucky region in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I was just a teen and found a place with different iterations of the Cincinnati Food Conspiracy, our Free Clinic, the FreeStore, New Morning our first of several attempts at creating a regional vision of the Free School movement. Crazy times, often scary, but I am grateful to have been present and involved.

Very interesting - thanks for sharing!

Very interesting doc. Wish they spent more time explaining why the CO felt the need to rapidly heighten contradictions. What were the conditions at the time that made them feel that sense of urgency to bring about the revolution. We definitely feel it now: we have climate change, a pandemic exacerbated by capitalism, sharpening racial contradictions, etc. But it would have been nice to understand the conditions back then to get a better understanding of the CO's rationale.

After the shortages of last year, I predict a comeback of co-ops along with more CSA's but some of it will be in rural areas where the farmers actually are. For three weeks, I was driving by hundreds of head of beef cattle, only to find empty meat shelves at the store. Crazy. Rep. Thomas Massie's PRIME Act would have helped that.

We'll figure it out one of these days... of how far we'll go.

Goddamn. They had so many people so much potential to really make a difference. American individualism really rots us from the inside out. Some day will learn.

It seems very arbitrary to me, and somewhat commodity fetishist, to label organic and wholefoods as bourgeois when if anything they are peasant and artisan. Actively preferring agribusiness commodity forms where purchasing them shares profits with the big food corporations. PepsiCo for eff sake. The British Co-operative movement does organic and wholefoods, and fairtrade goods, along with standard stuff, both corporate brands and Co-op brand (since the Co-operative movement is big enough to have an integrated supply chain including Co-op farms, processing and delivery, along with Co-op banks, Co-op Insurance, Co-op Funeral service etc). So there's no politicisation of product range. You can do party building elsewhere, and co-ops can materially contribute in terms of resources and labour time, but any co-op's primary purpose is to model and pioneer common ownership and to create benefit for working class customers and co-owners. If you mess up the business trying to make it a party instead of an economic enterprise, then you weaken the working class, as well as the putative party. The other thing is just that the leaven of sectarians is sectarianism rather than class unity. If your historical model is splitters and putchists, then it cannot be surprising if the class is never formed into its own party, which is the necessary precondition for smashing the state. Here infantile leftists, whether nominally claiming to be Stalinists or Trotskyists, are alike. All for premature Blanquism which just wastes previous organising, demoralises and divides the movement, brings socialism into disprepute, and alienates ordinary workers.

So all these people ended up in the Democratic Party?

22:50 Wow! It's just like a woman to choose selfishness and not see the 'forest through the trees'.