|
A grassroots movement for economic democracy based on cooperatives and local economies is quickly growing throughout the planet. After Capitalism, inspired by P.R. Sarkar’s Progressive Utilization Theory, offers a compelling vision of an equitable, sustainable model which economically empowers individuals and communities. Filled with successful examples from six continents as well as many resources, activities and tools for activists, After Capitalism will fill you with hope and the conviction that a new, democratic economy is indeed possible.
Includes a conversation with Noam Chomsky and contributions by Frei Betto, Johan Galtung, Leonardo Boff, Sohail Inayatullah, Marcos Arruda, Ravi Batra and others.
Pre-order now from www.aftercapitalism.org so the book is sent to you straight from the press.
In 2003 I published After Capitalism: Prout’s Vision for a New World. It was subsequently translated into nine other languages and sold a total of about 15,000 copies with no distribution or marketing. However, when I undertook to update it, both the world and the development of Prout had changed so much that I wrote 80 percent of the 390 pages new content. Economic democracy, a fundamental demand of Prout, is also starting to resonate with the indignados movement of Spain and Portugal, the global Occupy Movement and with many other progressive activists.
Next week, After Capitalism: Economic Democracy in Action will be available for sale on amazon and barnes and noble. A Kindle version, an audio book and an electronic version will quickly follow; the latter two will also be for sale at Apple iTunes.
What’s new in this book? There are six new essays by Prout activists and two revised ones, a conversation with Noam Chomsky, many more examples of successful cooperatives and Prout projects, a number of resource tools and practical techniques to effectively present Prout to the public, and a deeper analysis of the fundamental principles and how to apply them. The book has new sections on leadership training, Sadvipra governance, guerrilla street theater, a greatly expanded and improved section on the exploitation and liberation of women, a block-level planning exercise with detailed questions, instructions for the popular Sarkar Game, and much more. At the end are discussion questions for each chapter so the book can be used as a study guide; Appendices B and C are tools to design your own Prout Study/Action Circle.
The cover photo is provocative, showing an Occupy protest in San Francisco with a veteran holding a U.S. flag upside down, which symbolizes distress. The book is written for activists, progressives and the majority of people who want a better world. Mirra Price in Asheville will start a strong marketing campaign, sending the book to progressive magazines and newspapers, setting up radio interviews by telephone and eventually organizing a book promotion tour. I will be going to the United States to attend the Economic Democracy Conference in Madison, Wisconsin on October 11-14 and plan to tour for about a month. If you have any suggestions or contacts for this, please contact me.
I have often said that the best part of the previous book was the acknowledgements, and it is even more true of this book. More than 70 friends, including economists, ecologists, activists, agriculturalists, and some very good writers have generously given their time to review, correct and improve the text. The book is much better because of them.
With your generous support, this book can effectively spread the empowering messages of economic democracy and Prout to many people, including some whose voices are seldom heard, connecting us to make the world a better place for the good and happiness of all.
http://priven.org/new-book-after-capitalism-economic-democracy-in-action/
After Capitalism: Economic Democracy in Action
By Dada Maheshvarananda
Innerworld Publications, 2012, 392 pp.
Review by Andy Douglas
Balance is a word you would be hard-pressed to use to describe today’s global economy. Wealth inequality and exploitation, market manipulation, and the financialization of investment have created a situation which can only be described as extremely unbalanced, with a lot of suffering in its wake. Many argue that capitalism as it exists is unsustainable, that it cannot, and, more importantly, should not, survive.
After Capitalism: Economic Democracy in Action presents a look at a socio-economic theory which might bring things back into balance. Wide in scope, the book begins with a perceptive critique of the policies that led to the 2008 global crash and earlier crashes and then moves on to hopeful alternatives.
The author, Dada Maheshvarananda, has been a monk and activist for the past 40 years. He brings to his work a focus on spiritual values, a perspective on the economic sphere that respects human rights and the integrity of the land, and an appreciation of the interconnectedness of life and the existential value of each creature. Implicit in this critique is recognition of the need for a metric for social welfare based on how society’s poorest members are faring.
A presenter at the 2012 Economic Democracy Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, Maheshvarananda directs a think tank in Caracas, the Prout Research Institute of Venezuela. His ideas stem from a platform originating in India called the Progressive Utilization Theory (Prout). This theory, put forward by the Bengali philosopher P. R. Sarkar in the 1950s, offers a blueprint for structuring economies in a way that both incentivizes work (which communism never did) and restricts excess accumulation of capital (which capitalism will not do).
Maheshvarananda argues that capitalism is designed to benefit the rich; by its nature it excludes many more people than it benefits. On top of this, it’s systematically destroying the planet. He cites four fatal flaws: (1) concentration of wealth, (2) the majority of investments are speculative, not productive, (3) the encouragement of debt and (4) turning a blind eye to the environmental impact of its own policies.
There are thought-provoking ideas here about what might replace capitalism (and the critique also recognizes the many failures of communism). Such an economy would focus on smaller-scale entrepreneurship (limited capitalism), a robust cooperative sector, and publicly-owned key industries.
This structure, the author argues, could become decentralized through the formation of economically self-reliant regions based on common economic and social conditions, common geographic potentialities, cultural legacy and language. Decentralized planning would allow each region to utilize its own resources and opportunities for its own benefit. In such a context it would be important, he notes, to encourage a sense of universal humanity, avoiding parochial separatism.
Cooperatives receive special attention in the book, including a history of their development and a focus on the most famous cooperative network, Spain’s M[안내]태그제한으로등록되지않습니다-[안내]태그제한으로등록되지않습니다-ondragon. The Prout Research Institute of Venezuela was hired by the Venezuelan government to assess the strength of the cooperative movement in that country. PRI researchers have written extensively about the factors necessary for cooperatives to work, which include a supportive social environment, sound advance planning, skilled management, innovation and adaptation, and education.
Maheshvarananda paints a portrait of projects where some of these ideas are being implemented, from a cooperative health care clinic in Kenya to a sustainable farming community in Brazil. He lauds the Occupy movement in the U.S. and describes other people’s movements, such as one in the Philippines that is encouraging youth to fight against materialistic “pseudo-culture” and embrace their own traditions. As daunting as the task of creating true economic democracy seems, he suggests that cultural movements have a large role to play, empowering people at the grassroots level.
The author also compares Prout to other models such as “participatory economics” or Parecon. The two theories seem to have a lot in common—an emphasis on decentralized economy and on cooperatives, for starters. Parecon, however, lacks a spiritual perspective, according to the author. And the two differ on the question of incentives. Prout, writes Maheshvarananda, believes higher income should be given in recognition of people’s merits and accomplishments in order to motivate creativity and self-development, while Parecon insists that skilled professions should not receive a higher salary than other jobs.
The book also has garnered praise from a number of activists. Bill McKibben writes, “The search is on for new ways to inhabit a strained earth…plenty of interesting leads in these pages.” Noam Chomsky notes, “You can’t have meaningful political democracy without functioning economic democracy.” The last chapter of the book is devoted to a wide-ranging conversation between Maheshvarananda and Chomsky, in which the latter, among other things, blasts the failure of the U.S. to develop a high-speed rail system, and praises the changes taking place in Latin America, with indigenous movements coming to power, and few U.S. military bases left in the hemisphere.
The book features a number of short “guest essays” by economists and activists, and these sections contribute to the richness of the book’s argument.
Of course, there are weak points. In one section the author puts forward the land value tax, in which resource use, land use, and pollution are taxed: “taxing the unearned billions of dollars of income that a few capitalists reap from the gifts of Nature…”
Yet one of the guest essayists, a Duke University economist, contradicts this idea. Land value taxes, he writes, are useful in a capitalist economy, but would be less so in a Proutist economy. “If land value taxes were imposed, co-ops will be required to reduce output and increase price in order to earn sufficient income to pay their taxes…”
The exchange seems typical of a debate unfolding within the pages of the book, though, and presumably within the culture of Prout activists. Prout’s founder apparently offered broad strokes in his theory. Practical applications are now being hammered out in localities around the globe. In an appendix, the author presents an exercise designed to bring Proutist analysis to bear on an imaginary country’s economic problems. (In fact, Maheshvarananda notes, Proutists have been called in to offer real-world perspectives on balancing the economic potentials of several regions around the world). In this exercise, an underperforming agricultural sector is addressed through various means, increasing the yield of land, for example, through crop rotation and other progressive methods, reducing costs of production, and diversification, irrigation, and increased fish production.
The benefits of a balanced economy would spill over into other aspects of life, from the environment to education to criminal justice. Everything’s connected, after all, a point the author drives home. It’s this comprehensive spirit in Prout theory that holds great appeal, the work of justice and the work of the individual going hand in hand.
Maheshvarananda has led meditation workshops at rallies and demonstrations around the world such as the World Social Forum, emphasizing the importance of a centered, calm spirit in activist work. Accessing the well of joy within, he implies, enables one to be part of the solution, motivating and supporting in making a positive difference in the world.
He urges the restoration of balance to our ecology and economy, and to our own lives, before it’s too late.
http://www.zcommunications.org/book-and-music-reviews-by-various-reviewers
In just a few pages I felt the brotherly embrace of a comrade-in-arms, a soul-mate, and a companion; further along his fierce intelligence and original insights challenged me to make new connections; by the end I was inspired to re-imagine next steps in my own efforts at movement-making.
by Bill Ayers
Dada Maheshvarananda is a monk and a social activist, an engaged intellectual and a writer whose powerful new book, “After Capitalism: Economic Democracy in Action“, provides a comprehensive critique of the economic system that grips the planet and suffocates our lives, names the contemporary political moment we’re facing with astonishing clarity, and illustrates with concrete cases and specific examples the practical steps needed to build a radical movement toward joy and justice, peace and love, sanity and balance. It’s a broad and ambitious book to be sure. In just a few pages I felt the brotherly embrace of a comrade-in-arms, a soul-mate, and a companion; further along his fierce intelligence and original insights challenged me to make new connections; by the end I was inspired to re-imagine next steps in my own efforts at movement-making. This is an essential book created by a gentle warrior.
The questions that animate Dada Maheshvarananda’s work are the same ones I saw recently scrawled across a sprawling panorama created by the tormented painter Paul Gauguin—in 1897, after months of illness and suicidal despair, Gauguin produced on a huge piece of jute sacking an image of unfathomable figures amid scenery that might have been the twisted groves of a tropical island or a marvelously wild Garden of Eden; worshippers and gods; cats, birds, a quiet goat; a great idol with a peaceful expression and uplifted hands; a central figure plucking fruit; a depiction of Eve not as a voluptuous innocent like some other women in Gauguin’s work but as a shrunken hag with an intense eye.
Gauguin wrote the title of the work in bold on top of the image; translated into English it reads:
Where do we come from?
What are we?
Where are we going?
These are questions—horrifying for Gauguin, inspiring for Dada Maheshvarananda—that rumble in the background on every page of “After Capitalism.” How can we see ourselves and our problems/challenges/potentials holistically? How can we connect our personal and spiritual seeking with the practical search for a better world for all? How can we live with one foot in the mud and muck of the world as it is while the other foot stretches toward a world that could be but is not yet? How can we transform ourselves to be worthy of the profound social transformations we desire and need? And how can we build within ourselves the thoughtfulness, compassion, and courage to dive into the wreckage on a mission of repair?
We begin by opening our eyes:
Look! says the pilgrim.
I can’t look…
Look at it! Open your eyes for once, for God’s sake, have the courage to at least look, will you?
I can’t look…I’m going to be sick…
You mean you won’t look, don’t you? You can look, but you won’t. It might upset you, it might mess your outfit—or it might ruin your whole day. You refuse to look. Admit that at the very least.
I won’t…I can’t…What’s the difference?
The difference is this: willful blindness is a form of cowardice and indifference, and the opposite of moral is not immoral; the opposite of moral is indifferent.
Wide awake it’s clear that planet earth has enough resources to meet everyone’s basic needs if we share; on the other hand if we hoard we are in for famine, pestilence, war, and mayhem. It’s equally clear that both tendencies live deep within every human being: selfishness and selflessness, me and we, individualism and collectivity. The question at the heart of this book is this: Where do we go from here, socialism or barbarism, chaos or community?
The practical and theoretical work of Dada Maheshvarananda and his comrades is the fight for economic justice, and on the side of sharing. One of the great deceptions of our time is the sham that meaningful political democracy is possible in the absence of economic democracy. “Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice,” wrote Mikhail Bakunin (adding that “socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality”) and it is self-evidently so: there can be no real freedom where huge differences in wealth and access make any voluntary exchange or contract little more than legal larceny and authorized plunder. The traffic in human beings, modern-day slavery, the market for body parts, international adoption—all bear the mark of privilege, exploitation, global injustice, and structural violence. And so do the sanitized schemes of the bankers, the financial wizards, and the ruling class generally.
Economic democracy requires popular control, wide participation, and decentralized decision-making, and it insists that the minimum requirements of life must be guaranteed—food, housing, clothing, education, and health-care. Life is the birthright that transcends borders, and the most straight-forward gauge of the degree of justice available in any society is how power responds to that basic right.
Our struggle is for more participation, more equality, more recognition of human agency, and more transparency as we lean toward revolution. We must rouse ourselves, shake ourselves awake and perhaps shock ourselves into new awarenesses.
But it’s often hard to look, and obstacles spring up everywhere: when we feel ourselves shackled, bound, and gagged or when we are badly beaten down, struggling just to survive, living with dust in our mouths, the horizons of our hope can become lowered, sometimes fatally, and our eyes, then, dim. What kind of world do we want to inhabit? When no alternatives are apparent or available, action becomes pointless. When privilege obstructs our vision it acts as an anesthetic, putting us to sleep; we must then call upon the aesthetic—the world of the imagination—to combat the numbing power of the sedative.
We all live in our time and place, immersed in what is, and imagining a social scene different from what’s immediately before us requires a combination of somethings: seeds, surely; desire, yes; necessity and desperation at times; and, at other times a willingness to dance out on a limb without a safety net—no guarantees.
Imagination is essential, more process than product, more “stance” than “thing,” imagination involves the dynamic work of mapping the world as such, and then leaning toward a world that might be but is not yet. Most of us most of the time accept our lot-in-life as inevitable—for decades, generations, even centuries; when a revolution is in reach, when a lovelier life heaves into view, or when a possible world becomes somehow visible, the status quo becomes suddenly unendurable. We then reject the fixed and the stable, and begin to look at the world as if it could be otherwise, and we begin the important work of reweaving our shared world.
Choice and confidence is a necessary politics. I don’t want to minimize the horror, but neither do I want to get stuck in its thrall. Hope is an antidote to cynicism and despair; it is the capacity to notice or invent alternatives; it is nourishing the sense that standing directly against the world as such is a world that could be, or should be. Without that vital sense of possible worlds, doors close, curtains drop, and we become stranded: we cannot adequately oppose injustice; we cannot act freely; we cannot inhabit the most vigorous moral spaces. We are never freer, all of us and each of us, than when we refuse the situation before us as settled and certain and determined and break the chains that entangle us.
The tools are everywhere—humor and art, protest and spectacle, the quiet, patient intervention and the angry and urgent thrust—and the rhythm of and recipe for activism is always the same: we open our eyes and look unblinkingly at the world as we find it; we are astonished by the beauty and horrified at the suffering all around us; we act on what the known demands and we also doubt that our efforts made enough difference, and so we rethink, recalibrate, look again, and dive in once more. If we never doubt we get lost in self-righteousness and political narcissism—been there—but if we only doubt we vanish into cynicism and despair. Awake/Act/Doubt! Repeat! Repeat! Repeat for a lifetime.
Revolution is still possible, democracy and socialism, possible, but barbarism is possible as well. Our expansive and expanding dreams are not realized, of course, not yet, but neither are they dimmed or diminished. Every revolution is, after all, impossible before it happens; afterwards it feels inevitable.
The work, of course, is never done. Democracy and freedom are dynamic, a community always in the making. We continue the difficult task of constructing and reinvigorating a public. We must love our own lives enough to take care of friends, children, loved ones and elders, to marvel at the sunset and enjoy a good meal, to run on the beach and dive into the surf, to make love for breakfast and again at noon and wake up in wonder; we must love the world enough to never look away, to never give up and never give in, and to add our weight to history’s wheel.
Dada Maheshvarananda is an extraordinary and sweet revolutionary not because he has a fully worked-out and internally consistent argument as well as a set of concrete action steps that will take us from here to there—there being some vibrant and viable future characterized by peace and love and joy and justice—but because he lives with the necessary sense of perpetual uncertainty that accompanies social learning while at the same time trying to make a purposeful life 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, and Dada can explain why and how to join the revolution.
“Excess of joy weeps,” writes William Blake in a possible epigraph for this book…and for us. “Excess of sorrow”—and Lord do we have that excess right now—“laughs.”
W.H. Auden provides another: We must love one another or die.
Bill Ayers is the author of several books on education, as well as a memoir, “Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-War Activist,” and the forthcoming “Public Enemy: Memoirs of Dissident Days.”
|