What is the role of cooperatives in Prout?
The cooperative sector is the largest in Prout’s three-tiered industrial system, leaving huge and complicated key industry (raw materials) to the state, while private initiative may take care of small and non-essential businesses. In the same way as Prout’s progressive socialism is fundamentally different from traditional materialist socialism, Prout’s cooperatives differ fundamentally from the forced Soviet collectives. Prout advances a scientific approach to producers’, consumers’, farmers’ and other type of cooperatives such as various forms of service cooperatives and cooperative banking. To ensure the success of cooperatives and counteract the rampant immorality of the prevailing corrupt economic system, Prout stresses the need for morality, strong administration, and wholehearted acceptance of the cooperative system by the people. Even in this mundane area does Prout present a spiritual perspective. Writes Sarkar: “Prout supports the implementation of the cooperative system becau
