Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [64]
Once we accept the myth of unbridled freedom, then placing a ceiling on an individual’s “success” is seen as undemocratic. So Americans defend anyone’s right to accumulate unlimited wealth. But isn’t this a frontier concept? On the frontier it appeared as if there were enough resources for everyone. But the frontier has disappeared; there’s only so much farmland in the United States and now it’s shrinking, not growing. Yet we give some the right to own 100,000 acres when we know this denies dozens of farm families the right to own any land at all. Is this democratic?
Third, we must probe our deep fear that social planning is always alien and handed down from the top. Hearing the word “planning,” we immediately see a grim-faced Politburo officer handing down production quotas. Our stereotypes make us blind to the similarly antidemocratic planning that takes place in our own economy. Industry and government executives here speak English instead of Russian, but their power over our lives may be just as profound as that of economic decision-makers in the Soviet system.
So the question is not whether we should have planning. Every society has planning. The issue is what kind and by whom. (In Sweden, for example, a committee of local residents decides who can bid on farmland that is for sale, if it is to be sold outside the family. Typically, these committees try to ensure that it does not go to the larger farmers.) But so narrow is our view of planning that it is hard even to imagine developing democratic, accountable planning mechanisms controlled locally and coordinated nationally. In our blind fear we hand over our power—to the unaccountable. What is grown depends only on what will sell to those with money, not on what is needed by those without money. So production is not accountable to need. Neither is production accountable to our children and grandchildren, who will need the resources squandered today. Processing and marketing decisions, moreover, are accountable only to the boards of directors of a handful of corporate giants, as we’ll see in Part III.
We have the information to break out of these old fears and misunderstandings. After 200 years we can see where they have taken us. And we can learn from what we see. The destruction of resources, the emergence of a landed aristocracy, and hunger in America are not necessary. Shocked into this realization, we can begin to imagine the shape of an economic system truly consistent with democracy. What we need now is courage.
I can’t offer you a set of how-to’s to get us moving in the direction of greater democracy, although Part IV shows you what some other people are doing. But here I would like to offer certain principles that have evolved as the basis of all my work over the last ten years. While there is no blueprint for how we can transform our society, the first step is to develop a sense of the direction in which we want to move—an orientation that more and more people will come to share, so that our distinct tasks become ever more complementary and therefore ever more effective. Here is what I would like to offer to the building of such an orientation.
My Grounding Principles
1. Because scarcity is not the cause of hunger, increasing production alone is not the solution. The solution can be found only by addressing the issue of power. Thus, “development” must be redefined, here and in the third world, not merely in terms of more production or consumption, but first and foremost in the changing relationships among people. Development must be the process of moving toward genuine democracy, understood as the ever more just sharing of political and economic power.
2. Just as “development” must be redefined to encompass the concept of power, so must “freedom.” For what is freedom without power? Freedom to complain about what’s wrong in our society without the power to do anything about the problems is virtually meaningless. Thus, freedom