The Plowboy Interview: Frances Moore Lappe

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PLOWBOY: You're critical of the wastefulness and injustice in our country. Is there another that you prefer . . . or that you feel we should model ourselves after?

LAPPE: No, I don't believe there's a model anywhere that we could or should adopt wholesale. But I am convinced that we can learn valuable lessons from other countries. From China, for example, we can discover how the redistribution of control over farmland—giving management to the villages under a system which allows everyone who works to have a say in how the resulting profits are used—has greatly reduced hunger in one of the world's most densely populated countries.

Many western European nations can teach us that it's possible to provide security to those unable to care for themselvesthe elderly, the handicapped, etc.—at a more humane level than we do, without undermining the economy.

And we can learn from countries such as Nicaragua, which are still in the birth process, too. That land is attempting to establish a "mixed economy". The government is developing food, health, and educational assistance programs for the poor . . . but private enterprise is encouraged, as well, as long as it lives up to such obligations as producing efficiently and following the laws established to protect the workers.

PLOWBOY: I've heard you use the phrase "economic democracy". What do you mean by that?

LAPPE: Well, I'm saying that the idea of democracy-which, in essence, refers to a system in which people have a right to have a say in how things are run and to recall leadership when it fails to listen—has to embrace economics as well as politics. You simply can't have a genuine political democracy without economic democracy as well. As the famous Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis once said, "We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth in a few hands, but we can't have both."

Unfortunately, we Americans have to open our imaginations in order to comprehend even the idea of economic democracy. The truth is that most Americans have absolutely no training at all in how to share power effectively.

Our lack of experience at democratic planning has really come home to me in my work at the institute. You see, we're trying to run our project on an inclusive, group basis. All the full-time staff is involved with the decision-making processes—in everything from personnel to salaries—and we're having to find out by trial and error how to work well together. One thing we know for sure: People have to have basic trust and good will if group decision-making is to work at all!

PLOWBOY: Then how can such a model function? There's an awful lot of mistrust in the world.

LAPPE: Naturally, people have to look out for their own legitimate interests . . . that's why we say we're not antiprofit, but antiprofiteering. However, many individuals need the feeling that they're connected to, and serving, something bigger than their pocketbooks. Most of my acquaintances get tremendous personal pleasure out of knowing that their lives have meaning beyond themselves . . . but usually they experience that only in their interactions with their families. Most of us work at jobs that—while they pay the bills—don't seem to serve society. Few people, then, have the freedom to feel useful. So the real question, you see, is not how to extinguish individual self-interest in order to serve the community, but how to plan and create structures in which people can serve both themselves and the community simultaneously.

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