Left-Wing Political Activist and Progressive Leader in the Berkeley Co-op
Appendix: Letters to the Editor, San Francisco Chronicle
Behind the Co-op Issue
January 3, 1967, p. 48Editor—For the past three or four years the Berkeley Co-op has been under increasingly heavy fire, not from profit-enterprise competitors, but from groups of its own members.
Angry delegations descend on directors' meetings. Wrangling and disputes at district ("center council") meetings have driven away interested members, who expected cooperation to be somehow different from this.
Staff members—management professionals and dedicated career cooperators—find themselves attacked as enemies of the consumer. Stores have been picketed by their own members. Co-op elections, once decorous and unexciting, are currently occasions for heated electioneering...
The nearly 40,000 members (each representing a family) of this largest urban consumer, cooperative in the United States are but little aware of the pressures being exerted by groups within the membership in the current election campaign.
Their cooperative business, which operates seven supermarkets in East Bay cities, four service stations, a repair garage, a hardware-variety store, and a children's clothing store, had a volume of some $23 million in 1966...The Berkeley Co-op is both a model and an inspiration to the rest of the cooperative movement in the U.S. In its 35 years of existence, it has operated its democratic machinery will, procuring for the consumer commodities of reliable quality at fair market prices, carrying on a steady program of consumer education, and advancing fair employment practices.
The Co-op was the first business to hire Japanese-Americans in "visible" jobs on their return from relocation centers during World War II. The Co-op has had the policy of recruiting and training Negro employees long before the civil rights demands of the 1960s.
Why then the present turmoil? To answer this question, it is necessary to examine what may be called the "new Berkeley mentality."...
It is a kind of dogmatic zealotry about the big problems of the world: racial prejudice, economic inequality, and war. The thinking of the Dogmatic Zealots (hereinafter called the DZs) is almost entirely polarized around a cluster of highly- charged terms.
One of these terms is "the power structure." The world, according to this view, is run by a "power structure" that profits by existing injustices and is therefore determined to perpeturate them. And who is this "power structure"? It is, by a curious extension of C. Wright Mills' concept of the "power elite," anybody who is in charge of anything. That of course covers President Johnson and his Cabinet, the directors of General Motors, the Regents of the University of California, the city council of El Cerrito, and the directors of the Berkeley Co-op.
The "power structure" is by definition bad. Because it has a vested interest in the status quo, it cannot be reasoned with. It will never change unless forced to do so.
One way of forcing the power structure to change, according to the DZs, is by activist involvement. Eschewing the ordinary democratic processes of discussion and debate, they seek "controntation," by which they mean that if enough angry people join together in sit-ins, lie-ins, pray-ins, picketing, marching and boycotts, the "power structure" will be compelled to "negotiate" and ultimately yield to the "just demands" of the demonstrators. This is known as "bringing the power structure to its knees."
The other way to influence the "power structure" is for DZs to gain control of organizations. Not able, of course, to gain control of General Motors or Safeway, the DZs naturally pick on handier targets such as the Co-op (or KPFA).
The present election campaign for three Co-op directors, which will continue by mail and in the stores until the annual meeting of January 20, is shaping up into a battle between the "new Berkeley mentality" and the traditional Co-op attitudes of patient, practical idealism and good will.
This fact is not easy to discern, because a number of smokescreen issues—alleged indifference to the needs of the poor, alleged gimmickry in pricing, alleged racial discrimination—have been raised by the six petition candidates who are running against the nine nominated by the member-elected nominating committee. Labels of "liberal" vs. "conservative" and "radical" vs. "liberal" have been applied by reporters trying to clarify the confusing picture, but only confuse it further.
Basically, what is at stake is the fundamental conception of the Co-op. Is it to continue to be a broadly based consumer organization uniting all sorts of people on the basis of their consumer interests, or is it to be made into an "activist" political organization?...
The petition candidates all expressly advocate the Co-op's "taking its proper role in community issues," specifically, protesting the war in Vietnam, boycotting Dow Chemical Company, supporting the Delano strikers, and taking stands on local bond issues.
Candidated with the more traditional Co-op view—like Dave Bortin, Anne Dorst and Clinton White—believe that these causes may be worth supporting in other ways, but that for the Co-op to take stands such as these is to divide the membership, drive customers out of the stores, and destroy the Co-op.
They do not believe that a better world can be created by anger, hate, and denunciation, but that it can be created only a little at a time, by the building of institutions which, like the consumers cooperative, practice in economic terms the justice and brotherhood we all want.
S. I. Hayakawa, Berkeley
Berkeley Co-Op
January 5, 1967, p. 40Editor—Professor Hayakawa, having advanced a thesis of discord in the Berkeley Co-op, has regrettably had to twist the facts to fit his metaphor. His "DZ" (or Dogmatic Zealot) theory may be nice semantics, but the real issues are a lot more HD, or humdrum, than he makes out.
Co-op dissatisfaction centers first of all on inept business practices resulting in high prices and a falling patronage refund to members. Prof. Hayakawa says, "The thinking of the DZs is polarized around a cluster of highly-charged terms." He hints at sinister political motives and proceeds to throw around a lot of highly-charged terms of his own: "activist involvement . . . confrontation . . . sit-ins, lie-ins, pray-ins . . ." implying all these are occurrences, or issues, affecting the Co-op. They are not.
Let us therefore calmly examine the actual problems plaguing the Co-op, the HD facts behind the present turmoil.
According to Professor James Carman of the University of California School of Business Administration, who made a survey of food costs in three Shattuck Avenue supermarkets, Co-op prices are highest. The Berkeley Citizen, a Co-op newspaper, confirmed these findings in its own independent survey.
The Co-op annual report shows that while competitors' profits reached new highs in 1966, Co-op profits declined by 25 percent. Members can see this reflected in the patronage rebate checks that were mailed out a few weeks ago, a refund of 1.85 percent of purchases as compared to 4.04 percent in 1961.
There is deep dissatisfaction, and it has been expressed by old-timers and younger members alike. The source of it all goes back to 1961 and the purchase by the Co-op of the Sid's chain of supermarkets. This was a purely management decision taken without consultation with the membership. What then appeared to management as a great chance for sudden expansion has turned out to be a disastrous investment.
In making this purchase the Co-op departed from its established policy of building stores designed for member needs, on Co-op owned property, and acquired instead what has turned out to be a costly paper empire. Everything we acquired was under lease—land, building, even the shopping carts!
The Castro Valley store is a case in point. We acquired from Sid's under onerous lease terms, a building far too big for our needs. Our losses there rose from $107,000 in 1965 to $137,000 in 1966.
These heavy losses have made it necessary for management to cut corners in the Berkeley stores—less service, higher prices—and the Berkeley members are feeling the pinch.
The real issue in the election is, then, membership control—precisely the "ordinary democratic processes of discussion" which Prof. Hayakawa accuses some unnamed persons of "eschewing." The whole idea of a Co-op is that the member-shoppers who own it should have a voice in management policies. The Board of Directors should be broadly representative of the membership, not a rubber stamp for management, nor confined to any one clique. And, as in any democratic institution, there should be the opportunity to raise questions without running the risk of being labeled a "DZ."
Robert E. Treuhaft,
Member, Co-op Board of Directors
Oakland
Courtesy of University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt4x0nb0bf&brand=calisphere
Title: Left-Wing Political Activist and Progressive Leader in the Berkeley Co-op
By: Robert E. Treuhaft, Creator, Robert G. Larsen, Interviewer
Date: 1988-1989
Contributing Institution: University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info
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