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.

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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.

A few years ago I happily discovered Dada Maheshvarananda’s work, and later, when I read his book, After Capitalism, it was a further revelation. A broad and ambitious book, it sets out a comprehensive critique of the economic system that’s literally killing planet Earth as it distorts and destroys all life as we know it—call it the Death Ship. After Capitalism offers, as well, an alternative vision, a humane horizon we can begin to see through the soot and the smut, something to move toward as we engage the struggle against the Dark Angel. The book felt urgent when I first encountered it, and I gave it to friends and comrades everywhere. Its message is even more urgent today—the crisis deepens and the approaching catastrophe accelerates.

Dada Maheshvarananda is a monk and a social activist, an engaged intellectual and a gentle warrior whose wise words are born of his wide experience with social justice movements, his ceaseless travels, his restless curiosity, his vivid sense of wonder, and his deep awe for and love of life. His every gesture is somehow simultaneously a challenge and an embrace. He encourages us to go deeper, to become moral actors in the real world we’ve been thrust into, to engage everyone we meet, to agitate and organize, and to consistently choose love—love for the earth itself, love for all living things, and love for all kinds of people in all kinds of situations.

Now comes Tools to Change the World, written by Dada Maheshvarananda and his colleague Mirra Price, a wonderful companion to After Capitalism and a practical guide for activists and educators who are working to build an unstoppable movement for peace and justice. The Study Guide and accompanying Facilitation Guide offer resources, practical activities, and concrete steps that all movement-makers can take toward building a radical movement to transform the world from a place of fear and hatred and destruction into a cite of joy and justice, peace and balance—powered by love. These tools can be deployed in every imaginable venue: school or classroom, work-place or union hall, community center or church basement, farmer’s market or city park. It’s an essential books for dreamers and doers.

If we can imagine a world without predation and exploitation, oppression, abuse, and subjugation, we must also think through what’s needed to actually accomplish that visionary future against a vicious, nihilistic, and hyper-violent enemy. It will take more than the exhilaration of street demonstrations, more than the exuberance of mass action, more than militancy—even though all of that is necessary. It will take a strong force of comrades, thinking, planning, and rising together. Tools to Change the World is a handbook, a guide, and the broad outline of a map we will have to draw on the go—we are all citizens of a country that does not yet exist.

The book can help us learn to think and stand together—shoulder-to-shoulder—toward a common goal. Through words and deeds, study and action, we can discover a generic egalitarianism—we are all one, instrumentally identical in voluntary associations characterized by discipline and courage as well as enthusiasm and joy at being part of something larger than ourselves: we share a utopian vision. Our relationship—our political belonging—binds us to one another in anticipation of action. The object is to win, and we have to have each other’s backs.

We’re not exactly allies then—allies is the wrong word because allies tend to function in service to while we choose to act in solidarity with. Allies don’t want to be racist (or sexist or homophobic), and from their perch of relative social privilege, sincerely hope to do good work. Allies offer support to an oppressed group, but that work can carry the whiff of charity—reaching down to lift up the downtrodden. Allies confront prejudice and individual bigotry or backwardness, but rarely state power or the structures of racial, patriarchal capitalism—the field of action is individual and interpersonal, disconnected from social action; the operation is on-line or in the cafe, only infrequently in the streets. The distinctions matter, even if, to be fair, the self-designation, “ally,” covers a wider swath.

By contrast, we want to act collectively and strategically. We despise and oppose bigotry, but we refuse, for example, to embrace optics over justice, “multiculturalism” or “diversity” or “non-gendered restrooms” over an honest reckoning with reality. We need to think politically, and embrace the discipline of common work. We aim to overthrow capitalism and to dismantle the capitalist state, and that will require sustained mass mobilizations, planning, and disciplined organization.

The biggest obstacle to authentic comradeship in US history—the third rail of American radical politics—is and always has been white supremacy, and tepid (or non-existent) work toward Black Liberation. Comradeship in America can only emerge from a deep understanding of the super-exploitation and particular suffering of Black workers and communities, an unconditional embrace of Black Liberation, and a willingness to sacrifice for Black Freedom.

Tools to Change the World can be used as a textbook for organizers as we create subterranean schools, clandestine institutes, and secret academies. We operate beneath the surface as a result of engaging in insurrectionary activities intended to subvert, unsettle, and topple the established system. I had a large political cartoon fastened to my backpack during our fight to stop the invasion and occupation of Viet-Nam—the drawing depicts a high-tech, fully armored American soldier with a flame-thrower burning and destroying everything in his path as he strides purposefully across a barren landscape, while under him and out of his sight, an elaborate and complex root system flourishes and sends shoots out in every direction. Aboveground was all fire and fury, death and destruction; underground was life itself. Tools to Change the World is an underground workbook.

When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, I began posting a series of short reports documenting his early moves toward creating a fully-realized authoritarian government: “Making America Great Again, Step by Treacherous Step.” I noted that the base for a dangerous white nationalist movement is always present in the US—sometimes buried deep in the American soil, sometimes organized, activated, and out in the open. With Trump the white supremacist camp had found its perfect avatar: a charismatic con-man and buffoon who had mastered the art of manipulation through a new media, a character who could perform grievance for a mass of people disaffected from the establishment, a pathological liar playing up economic insecurity, racial and religious bigotry, and xenophobia. With Trump the white supremacist movement was consolidated, motivated, and living in the West Wing.

It was hard to keep up, and several friends noted early on that documenting the breath-taking pace of events would become draining—that was certainly true. And others were doing a better job of documenting Trump’s every move anyway, offering insightful and useful analysis toward naming this political moment—I relied (and still rely) on Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales at “Democracy Now!,” honest reporters and smart observers, Vijay Prashad, an outstanding thinker and writer, and Barbara Ransby, a wise and subtle scholar/activist. I kept current, but, sorry to say, I stopped posting. And now, almost three years later, it’s clear that what so many of us had feared has indeed come to be: the architecture of a new American fascism is in place.

Like the most dangerous and murderous authoritarians (both today and in history), Trump was legally “elected.” In spite of gerrymandering, wide-spread voter suppression efforts, Citizen’s United and unprecedented amounts of cash intent on buying a “free election,” it’s well-known that Trump lost the popular vote by close to three million votes, and that the Electoral College, an anti-democratic, worm-like appendage on the American political system, sealed the deal. Most people don’t know that Trump garnered a meager 25.3 percent of all eligible voters.

Representing a tiny fraction of the population, Trump spares no effort in claiming to enjoy vast popular support as he demeans and demonizes his political opponents, many of whom wilt and disappear under his gaze. He repeats a fantastic chant against “Crooked” Hillary from his 2016 campaign rallies: “Lock her up!” “Lock her up!” and he says our country is being “infested” with dangerous aliens, including Mexican rapists, and Africans from “shit-hole countries.”

Debasing opponents (real or imagined) of every stripe is a calling card—“disloyal bureaucrats,” the Environmental Protection Agency, comedians, Hollywood actors, athletes, the Justice Department, leaders of the FBI—but scapegoating Black people and other people of color is Trump’s reliable trademark.

It’s long been said that if fascism ever came to America it would come with a familiar face wrapped in an American flag and carrying a Bible. And here it is: a right-wing government that opposes liberal democracy (and, of course, Marxism, socialism, and anarchism) and attempts to forge national unity under an autocratic leader with a totalitarian program advocating stability, law and order, and more and more centralized power, claiming all of this is necessary in order to defend the homeland, and to respond effectively to economic instability. Fascist states attempt to mobilize a mass base through deliberately constructed fear and hatred as they prepare for armed conflict and permanent war by appealing to patriotic nationalism and militarizing all aspects of society. Fascists agitate “popular” movements in the streets, apparently spontaneous but in reality well funded and highly organized, based on bigotry, intolerance, and the threat of violence, all of it fueled by the demonization of distinct and targeted vulnerable populations—racial, religious, gendered—and the creation of convenient sacrificial scapegoats who are repeatedly blamed for every social or economic problem people experience. Fascist regimes promote disdain for the arts, for intellectual life, for science, for reason and evidence and facts, as well as deep contempt for the necessary back and forth of serious argument or discussion. And fascist states favor protectionist and interventionist economic policies as they entangle corporations with the state. Sounds familiar, right?

Tools to Change the World is a fascist-resistant resource. Dada Maheshvarananda and Mirra Price have created an asset for battling to upend the system of oppression and exploitation, opening spaces for more participatory democracy, more peace, and more fair-dealing in large and small matters. These are revolutionary times—Tools to Change the World can help each of us as we work to join the revolution.

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William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired), founder of both the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society, taught courses in interpretive and qualitative research, oral history, creative non-fiction, urban school change, and teaching and the modern predicament.  A graduate of the University of Michigan, the Bank Street College of Education, Bennington College, and Teachers College, Columbia University, Ayers has written extensively about social justice, democracy and education, the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. He is a past  member of the Executive Committee of the Faculty Senate, and past Vice-President of the curriculum division of the American Educational Research Association.

Ayers’ articles have appeared in many journals including the Harvard Educational Review, the Journal of Teacher Education, Teachers College Record, Rethinking Schools, The Nation, Educational Leadership, the New York Times and the Cambridge Journal of Education.