ABSTRACT
Ed Whitfield, co-managing director of the Fund for Democratic Communities in Greensboro, South Carolina, suggests a framework for democratizing wealth that calls for enabling human potential currently stifled by exploitative structures and private ownership of productive assets. The goal is total economic democracy and community control over production, so as to place “the wealth created by human labor back into the commons for the benefit of all.” It would require creating new relationships among people, new democratic norms and political procedures to establish and defend those norms, and new environmental outcomes that reflect those norms. Cooperative associations and democratically managed community groups would own productive assets, and public financial institutions would control surplus values and investments. Examples include experiments by F4DC in community ownership and community-as-developer, along with a Southern Reparations Loan Fund.
