What Would Sarkar Do?
The Progressive Utilization Theory (Prout) was introduced in 1959 by Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar. In this visionary plan for social and economic management, Sarkar proposed that material goods be commonly owned and distributed fairly to meet everyone’s basic needs. This would form the basis for an economy of producer and consumer cooperatives, small businesses, and key industries organized as public utilities.
Instead, in the decades that followed the launch of Prout, society has focused mainly on speeding up market growth. This became the leading worldview after the fall of Soviet communism in 1991. The mainstream belief is that global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will continue to expand indefinitely through the production and use of materials and energy. In this self-generating system, personal initiative is the impetus behind a rising tide of wealth, while its benefits trickle down from the rich to the poor.
This structure has been challenged by recent circumstances, especially the Great Recession of 2008 and the austerity measures taken afterward. Many people now see that the availability of materials and energy — including arable land, water, fresh air, fossil fuels, and rare earth minerals — is shrinking relative to the growing size and needs of the global population. Besides this decrease in non-renewable resources, a widening division between social classes, and highly uncertain economic growth, there are the escalating financial costs and security risks posed by global climate change.
Our ideals of progress must be thoroughly reassessed. We must soon create a world that does not presently exist. This requires political action on a grand scale. It also means that unless this system-level transformation is carefully designed, global prosperity will devolve and humanity may not survive with any reasonable degree of safety or well-being.
Two major alternatives loom on the horizon. They could not be more different. One is a technology-driven corporate state which would undermine democracy and impose emergency management on global resources. Its leaders would appeal to popular fears in the name of restoring order and saving lives. The other course is the self-organization of production and distribution by the people themselves through participatory democracy. Put bluntly, the choice we face is between a centralized autocracy with increased competition for resources and a decentralized system of equality and cooperation for sustainable resources.
Sarkar’s plan for democratic resource management is the only plausible solution.
Sarkar’s plan for democratic resource management is the only plausible solution. Through mutual planning and management in self-sufficient socio-economic zones, communities could relocalize and human needs would be met more simply and ecologically. This is not a new idea. Projects for self-reliant eco-districts are already operating in many areas — from traditional commons (rivers, forests, indigenous cultures, community restoration and bioregional governance) to emerging commons (solar energy, Internet, alternative currencies, urban co-ops and DGML programs for ‘design global, manufacture local’).
Yet these diverse practices are not woven together through an overarching set of policies. They lack a democratic political movement to bring them forward. As the world’s economic crisis becomes more and more critical, we need a way to promote economic renewal in a free, fair, and collaborative way. This requires an action plan based on universal knowledge and values that consciously touch the minds and hearts of everyone.
Breaking Through to a Post-Truth World
Like many organizations, Prout has not developed its message much beyond the standard flow model of knowledge: just present your information and assume people will act on it. This is the way that most of us were taught. It’s also the culture of political discourse, media, and PowerPoint presentations in which we’ve been raised. Likewise, many of us go to conferences and lectures, take in podcasts and webinars or read books and are exposed to a lot of information that we don’t fully absorb or remember. Then program organizers wonder why their audiences are not more motivated by the topic at hand.
Nowhere has this created more confusion and misunderstanding than in conveying economic ideas. We witness how the news media attempts to be impartial by falsely comparing factual and non-factual sources of information. Yet we are less aware that a similar kind of imbalance exists in neo-classical economics. For example, the principle of supply and demand is celebrated for its scientifically balanced metrics; but the free market falsely equates the objective price of goods and the subjective needs of people. This makes us forget that economic demand is merely how much money we can pay for what we buy and does not measure the depth or extent of the needs that we cannot afford to satisfy.
As the blurring of fact and value becomes normalized, it creates an opening for social control through commercial and political propaganda. Citizens begin accepting these post-truth messages as real without checking whether opposing points of view are true. When values alone drive behavior and a behaviorist outlook dominates, our knowledge diminishes in importance. Gradually, we lose our standards for what comprises plausible information along with our basic reasoning skills for grasping policy options.
During the past hundred years, the psychology of behaviorism — the belief that people act solely through their bodily reflexes — has impacted every area of society, including education, economics, and communication. Now, behaviorist politics have led to charges of ‘fake news’ against the media and other information sources. When fact-based knowledge informs our values, together they shape our behavior in healthy ways; but as values become detached from knowledge, our capacity to distinguish true from false is weakened. Without an informed attitude or educated interest, the relationship between personal behavior and values becomes inverted, leading us to act upon utterly false ideals. We may laugh when someone blurts, “Don’t confuse me with the facts!” but it reveals a profound cultural cynicism and mistrust for the analytical way of processing information. Behaviorism not only reduces fact-based reality to a motor condition of the human brain, it denies the very existence of human consciousness.
Prout teaches that the neohumanistic integration of knowledge and values is a consciously spiritual activity.
Prout teaches that the neohumanistic integration of knowledge and values is a consciously spiritual activity. Nothing could be more important. Yet the Prout movement has not fully infused the psychology which this entails within its own messaging. Neither talking points nor talking heads can speak into people’s deepest listening to dissolve the strong emotional grip of materialism. Breaking through the illusions of a post-truth world requires that our presentations combine accurate information and principled values, leading our physical bodies to progressive action. For this reason, the dynamic conjunction of factual knowledge and values-based ethics must be integrated within all our communications.
How Would Prout Do It?
Sixty years after PR Sarkar introduced his Progressive Utilization Theory, some fresh thinking has emerged on how to share the lessons of Prout in a more experiential way. In this manual, Dada Maheshvarananda and Mirra Price reject the notion that the linear imparting of knowledge will automatically cause people to adopt values or behavior. They acknowledge that a speaker can’t just present one-way information and expect someone to suddenly endorse something as life-changing as economic transformation. Their collaborative work, Tools to Change the World, makes a significant contribution to the psychology of advocacy by showing how people’s values, attitudes, worldviews, and orientations are also critical in changing their behavior.
Through simulations, games, group discussion, team learning, sensitivity training, group dynamics, and other forms of modeling, Tools challenges people to try on new personal behaviors. This readjusts the typical three-step communication flow — of introducing knowledge, developing values, and shaping patterns of action — by ensuring that human behavior integrates knowledge and values in unison. So, as people take on new skill sets, experiences, and new competencies, they are able to experience themselves more holistically and purposefully as they come across the economic concepts of Prout.
For that reason, Tools is not just for students. Along with its Facilitator’s Guide, this book provides a way for teachers, trainers, and changemakers to master the art of social transformation. In short, advocacy calls for strategic planning. Before knowledge is introduced by a trainer, its developers must focus on both the purpose of the information and its expected depth of understanding by the public.
With close study and application of this manual for economic change, the emerging global context for Prout comes more clearly into focus. As our deteriorating material and climatic conditions create a major financial crisis, it’s likely that bloggers and politicians will continue spinning ‘alternative facts’ to justify a mad race for increasingly scarce resources. Yet, by presenting fact- and value-based economics in a way that allows people to organize themselves, Tools shows how society can develop balanced economic solutions by combining accurate knowledge with naturally arising beliefs. This is precisely how Prout’s vital message will cut through the toxic air of post-truth perception, confusion, and fear.
Restoring the dynamic balance between fact and value is the primary way of creating ethical and socially progressive behavior and comprehensive economic change.
Restoring the dynamic balance between fact and value is the primary way of creating ethical and socially progressive behavior and comprehensive economic change. Embodying this creative tension is what turns trainees into activists and builds mass movements. Tools shows that this process is not the physical flow model of information > values > behavior. Rather, changes in individual behavior (such as action for cooperation and sustainability) must be preceded by one’s emerging interests, attitudes, or values (for social ownership and participatory control of resources), which in turn are rooted in self-reflective knowledge (like the ideas of Prout).
Unlike behaviorism, this is the conscious path of self-organization for individuals and societies alike. Dada Maheshvarananda and Mirra Price’s brilliant handbook for creating economic democracy doesn’t just speak this truth. It puts us in a position to live it.
James Quilligan has been an analyst and administrator in the field of international development since 1975. He has served as a policy advisor and writer for many international politicians and leaders, including Pierre Trudeau, François Mitterrand, Edward Heath, Julius Nyerere, Olof Palme, Willy Brandt, Jimmy Carter and His Royal Highness Prince El Hassan of Jordan.
He was a policy advisor and press secretary for the Brandt Commission (1978-1984). He has been an economic consultant for government agencies in Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Ivory Coast, Algeria, Tanzania, Kuwait, India, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Canada, and the United States. In addition, Quilligan has served as an advisor for many United Nations programs and international organizations, including the International Monetary Fund.
He is presently Managing Director of Economic Democracy Advocates.