A values-based socio-economic model proposed by Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar in 1959: guaranteed minimum necessities, a ceiling on accumulation, cooperative and decentralized economy, and leadership that has no reason to exploit.
In a nutshell: The Progressive Utilization Theory: a social and economic model of cooperatives, economic democracy and basic needs for all. is a system in which the economy serves humanity, rather than humans being slaves to the economy. The Progressive Utilization Theory was proposed by Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar in 1959 as an alternative to both capitalism and communism, and it is the social half of the philosophy this site describes. The spiritual practice answers the question of what a human being is for; PROUT answers the question of what a society is for, and it gives the same answer: the all-round development, physical, mental, and spiritual, of everyone in it.
Why another system
Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti's diagnosis was that the two dominant systems of his century had each got one thing right and one thing badly wrong. Capitalism understood incentive and freedom, and let wealth concentrate until a few could exploit everyone else. Communism understood that exploitation must end, and built a state that crushed the individual and the spirit in the attempt. Neither system had a place for the infinite dimension of the human being described in the introduction to this section; both treated people as producers and consumers, and so both, in different ways, left them hungry.
PROUT starts from the other end. If the purpose of life is expansion toward the Infinite, then the purpose of an economy is to guarantee the conditions in which that expansion is possible for everyone, and to leave people free, once those conditions are met, to pursue it.
The five principles
PROUT is stated in five principles, and it is worth reading them slowly, because the whole system unfolds from them.
- No individual should be allowed to accumulate physical wealth without the clear permission or approval of the collective body. There is a floor beneath everyone, and there is also a ceiling.
- There should be maximum utilization and rational distribution of all the resources of the universe: the physical, the mental, and the spiritual.
- The physical, mental, and spiritual potentialities of individuals and of the collective should be utilized to the fullest.
- There should be a proper adjustment between these utilizations, so that the crude does not crowd out the subtle, and the subtle is not pursued while people go without bread.
- Utilization should change with time, place, and person. The method is progressive; it is not a fixed recipe.
The first principle is the one most often misunderstood. PROUT is not against wealth or incentive. It is against unlimited accumulation, because in a finite world what one person hoards, another lacks. The gap between the minimum everyone is guaranteed and the maximum anyone may hold is deliberately kept: incentive requires it. The gap is simply not allowed to become an abyss.
What it looks like in practice
Guaranteed minimum necessities. Food, clothing, housing, education, and medical care are the floor beneath every person, secured not by charity but by the structure of the economy itself, through purchasing power and employment.
Economic democracy. Political democracy without economic democracy is a vote every few years and no say over one's livelihood in between. PROUT proposes a three-tier economy: small private enterprises where individual initiative works best; cooperatives, owned and run by the people who work in them, as the main body of the economy; and large key industries, utilities and raw materials, run in the public interest, not for profit.
Decentralization. Economic planning belongs at the block level, where planners can see the land, the people, and the resources they are planning for. Each region should develop its own resources for its own people first, rather than exporting raw materials and importing poverty. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti named two new branches of economics for this: people's economy, the study of how ordinary people actually meet their needs, and psycho-economy, the study of how economic life shapes the mind.
Balance with nature. The concept of prama, dynamic balance, runs through PROUT's approach to ecology. A community is in prama when its physical, mental, and spiritual life are in proportion with each other and with the land that supports them. Ananda Marga's Master Units, self-reliant rural communities combining schooling, farming, and conservation, are small-scale attempts to build exactly this.
The social cycle
Behind the economics is a theory of history. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti observed that societies move in a cycle of dominance among four broad mentalities: the laborer, the warrior, the intellectual, and the acquisitor. Each class rises, governs, exploits, and is displaced by the next, and the cycle turns whether anyone wills it or not. What can be changed is its speed and its cruelty. When a ruling class turns exploitative, the cycle can be advanced by conscious intervention, so that the period of suffering is shortened.
Sadvipra: a new leadership
That intervention needs a particular kind of person, and PROUT names them: sadvipras, people of strong moral and spiritual grounding who belong to no class because they have cultivated the strengths of all four. Because a sadvipra has nothing to protect and nothing to accumulate, they have no reason to exploit. Courage without wisdom destroys; PROUT's leadership ideal joins the two, and it is the reason Ananda Marga insists that social change and spiritual practice go together. A revolutionary without an inner foundation gradually becomes part of the disorder they set out to correct.
"Ananda Marga is not an organization of idealists or moralists who preach a classless society, but a method – a system or a The inherent nature of a thing; for a human being, the longing for the Infinite and the effort to reach it. – which leads to a classless society." — Shrii Shrii Anandamurti
Where to read more
PROUT in a Nutshell collects Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti's writings on the theory across many volumes; Problems of the Day is a short, direct statement of the case, written for a general reader. Both are in the library.
