“According to Karl Marx, the creation of surplus value is the source of economic exploitation. Capitalists convert the surplus value into money value and that is how they accumulate profit. After analysing the capitalist economy, Marx reasoned that all profit is exploitation because profit means the denial of the legitimate right of the working class to the wealth they produce. Consequently, profit is nothing but the exploitation of labour. Marx concluded that the creation of surplus value will stop only when economic exploitation ends.

All communist states, including the Soviet Union, China and Vietnam, have rejected Marxʼs theory of exploitation. According to these countries, the creation of surplus value in the economy is an indispensable part of nationalprosperity. In repudiation of Marxist ideas, profit is not considered exploitation. If Marx made the first attempt to analyse and define exploitation, then it must be said that his work is not free from defects. This is because Marx tried to interpret exploitation only from the economic point of view.

According to PROUT, economic exploitation involves the unrestricted plunder of the physical and psychic labour of a particular community together with the natural resources in their local area. In PROUTʼs view, exploitation is not confined to only economic exploitation, but includes psychic and spiritual exploitation as well.

Economic exploitation has various forms and includes colonial exploitation, imperialist exploitation and fascist exploitation. There are similarities and dissimilarities in both the principles and characters of these forms of exploitation.”**

Let’s examine each of these three forms of exploitation

1. Colonial Exploitation

In the first form of exploitation, colonialists first capture a region and then gain control of and monopolise the raw materials in that area. They acquire these raw materials at a greatly reduced costs, export them and  manufacture finished goods either back in their own country, or in colonnist owned and run factories where they exploit cheap labour of the depressed region. The finished products are then sold back to the colonial region at an exhorbatanat price. This completely destroys the local industry and manufacturing. Some examples of this include:-

• Britain’s East India Company destroting the silk, cotton, sugar, salt, machine parts and shipbuilding industries.
• De Beers diamond mining in SouthWest Africa

2. Imperialist Exploitation

Here the exploiters exercise political and economic power power to exploit an allready colonised region. Political oppression is further used to stifle the local people’s means of commerce and livelihood, and to threaten their very existence – particularly the local industrialists. Often local industries are adjusted or changed to best profit the imperial power – like for example changing local food crops to cash crops destined for foreign markets. This form of exploitation is characterised by the local industries being owned by outsiders who suck profits out of the region. Often larger regions are carved up into smaller and weaker separate regions in a divide and conquer process to deprive the local people’s from owning or benefitting from local resources.

Examples of this include:-

• Mughal Emperor Akhbar of India 400 years ago – with his demands on Bengal to supply soldiers and arms for his wars at great cost to the local Bengal population
• Britsh Exploitation of India – where the explpoitation of the western area and the removal of local produce caused a famine killing 10 million in 1770
• Russian exploitation of Ukraine and the Holodomor famine which killed nearly 4 million in 1932 – caused by Stalin wanting to punish the independent minded Ukrainians by driving them off their small farms and centralising all food stocks around Moscow.

3. Fasicst Exploitation

Fascism is characerised by far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism combined with dictatorial power, military force and strong suppression of opposition. To justify their foreign exploitation, the imperialists inject nationalist superiority into their own people and portray the exploitation of others as something rational and even constitutional and based on the nation’s best interests. As soon as an imperialist power is transformed into a fascist power, it spreads out its tentacles to psychically and culturally oppress a vanquished people. Psychic exploitation is used to further the economic exploitation (called “psycho-economic exploitation”). At the start, the fascist exploiters select a weak community which inhabits a region rich in natural resources. The fascists socially and culturally uproot the victimized community by imposing a foreign language and culture on them and suppressing their own cultiral expressions. Because the local people cannot easily express their individual and collective feelings and sentiments in a foreign language, they develop a defeatist psychology and inferiority complex with respect to the exploiters. This defeatist psychology destroys the natural spiritedness and will to fight of the local people, and the fascists skillfully utilise this golden opportunity to further exploit the miserable victims. The primary interest of the fascist exploiters is to gradually suck the vitality of the local community so that they can pillage and plunder their natural resources, but if necessary they will even obliterate the local community from the face of the earth.

Examples include:

• British Imperialsts, who to legitimitise their exploitation of India, injected an inferiority complex into Indians based on British national superiority, and suppressed local language and education – making it seem second rate.
• Hitler’s injection of aryan superiority into Germany to justify his war efforts in Europe.
• South Africa’s Apartheid National Government’s injection of inferiority complex into black people’s and suppression of local culture, language and history
• Stalin’s injection of slavic supremacy to justify fasict exploitation of USSR’s outlying states after WW2.

Is there any way to end this type of exploitation without a bloody revolution? Definitely the oppressed people will need to shoulder the responsibility of freeing themselves from the jaws of such destruction. In order to avoid bloodshed and bring the exploiters back to their senses, PROUT recommends the following:-

• Decentralised Economy – devolve economic power by replacing the centralised economy with a localised one. Economic planning should be based on hyper-local (or block-level) planning and include every village. This is the only way to put an end to colonial, imperialist and fascist economic exploitation. Local people must be in charge of their local economy.
• Co-operative economy – Across the economy, the cooperative system must be expanded so that no individual or group can take an undue share of the collective wealth produced by the industrial and agricultural labourers. Workers need to own their means of production.
• Local Credit – To end exploitation by moneylenders and political cadres, loans need to be extended from within the community, not from outside of it, by (e.g.) creating credit unions
• No Migrant labour – The floating population or workforce of any area must be either settled where it is living and the fruits of its labour remain in the local area, or made to leave that area and return to its original region. It will have to choose either option.

“The progress of history can never be reversed – the current of destiny can never be resisted. The elevated and benevolent intellect is the solution to all human problems.”**

**Quotes from PR Sarkar’s Prout in a Nutshell Part 19

Back in the late 1800’s, there was an ideological tussle in the field of medical science. Two heavyweights, Louis Pasteur and Antoine Bechamp were weighing in with two contrasting theories of disease model. Pasteur’s “Germ Theory” model – the idea that all disease is caused by external pathogens won the popularity bout and this thinking has dominated modern allopathic (western) medical thinking up until this day. However, it is the underdog, Bechamp’s, ideas that could really provide a lot more insight into our Covid predicament than can germ theory.

Bechamp’s model is commonly called “Le Terrain” (the soil) and it postulates that living organisms are constantly surrounded by an often hostile environment of microbes. When tissues become imbalanced (or diseased) in some way, then they become susceptible to attack from these belligerent microbes and can become breeding grounds for these “germs”. So it is the imbalance in the soil (Le Terrain) of the tissue that is the root cause of disease rather than the pathogens themselves (pathogens are always present). Of course, this model was a hard pill to swallow for ill patients, because it had implications on their own conduct which may have resulted in the imbalance in their “soil”, and meant they would need to change what they ate or how the behaved in order to improve their terrain (notwithstanding that there are genetic and geographic predispositions to factor in also). Pasteur’s germ model, conveniently absolved the patient of any responsibility for their illness – placing blame on germs – and hence paved the way for pharmaceutical companies to sell the blameless patient a quick cure which purported to kill the pathogen.

When we combine Pasteur’s thinking with the for-profit model of pharmaceutical companies, who have consistently funded that research which shows their own products in a favourable light, it is not hard to see why modern medical thinking is in the state that it is. After 150 years of almost exclusive germ thinking, we have arrived at the Covid crisis paradigm that this external pathogen is entirely to blame and that we need to find a quick fix external remedy to eliminate the pathogen, and then everything will be normal again.

We have to now ask the question – why does the virus effect different people differently? Some people experience no symptoms at all, while alongside them, others are losing their lives. Modern medicine has been forced to accept that there are those who are susceptible because their biome systems are more susceptible, more imbalanced (more DIS-EASED in the true sense of the word). We have come full circle and have had to realise that the health of the tissue (as Bechamp proposed) , i.e. the health of our biome system, is a major player in susceptibility to disease.

The other critical question to ask ourselves is why does the vaccine effect different people differently? Some people experience serious side effects – fevers headaches and a plethora of other symptoms. Others feel absolutely no ill effects. Some people are dying from taking the vaccine, while others carry on unaffected by virus or vaccine. Remember here that vaccine’s are essentially just a weakened (attenuated) form of the virus – it therefore stands to reason that if people react differently to the virus, that they will also react differently to a weakened virus.

It is clear that every single human biome is different and unique, and responds to both virus and vaccine in its own unique way. Every tissue is in its own state of balance or imbalance. Of course the amount of virus or vaccine that we are exposed to also plays a part. If we stress a balanced tissue with a larger load of virus, it may behave similarly to a weaker tissue with a smaller viral load. Hence, we do still need to protect frontline workers like doctors, from over-exposure to Covid virus. But for the regular person in the street, the health of the biome is absolutely critical to the response both to the virus and the vaccine.

Most people in society will be exposed to the virus and their immune and other systems will be balanced enough to be able to cope with the virus without severe symptoms – that is, for most people this virus is not a threat. However, there is a significant portion of society, whose soil is not optimal and who are immuno-compromised – for these people, the symptoms of a virus are threatening. In order for vaccines to work, they require a healthy immune reaction to create antibodies – this immune reaction is likely to be weaker in immuno-compromised individuals.

Here’s the rub – the vaccine catch-22. Those who most need the protection the vaccine offers are also those that are most at risk of suffering adverse reactions from vaccines!

Ironically, the group whose biomes are in a weaker state and more susceptible to the attack of a virus are also more susceptible to adverse reactions of having a pathogen and its associated chemical agents injected into their tissues in the form of a vaccine. Hence we see that vaccines are more likely to harm the very critical group that they are meant to protect!

The current global paradigm of McDonaldised, “one-burger fits all” thinking simply does not work in the real-world. We cannot have one uniform remedy that we can apply equally across a global population and expect uniform results – everyone, every biome is different and unique and needs a tailored approach. It is a fundamental law of nature that every living creature is unique and different. Trying to mass produce uniform solutions in a way that big, production-line Pharmaceutica loves to scale to, will never yield uniform results, and, in fact, it is yielding downright harmful results right now in that it is causing disproportionate harm to the susceptible group of patients.

The myth of a uniform herd-immunity only tramples the vulnerable underfoot. It’s imperative that we think out-the-box, and change our worldview to include the myriad diversity of the planet, if we are to create a workable solution.

How could Prout thinking help us on this? Prout suggests that in the field of medicine we adopt a localised, co-operative, multi-pathy model. Under such a model, each local area would organise and co-ordinate its own medical care. So if we were to apply this to the pandemic, the response would be via local medical co-operatives that co-ordinated with local rersources, national and global bodies. Importantly, every individual could be given a choice of a number of different treatments that they could adopt in order to deal with the viral risk (depending on what is available locally). This might range from an array of vaccines (yes, they can still play an important role) to homeopathy, Ayurveda/Chinese medicine to naturopathy and holistic immune boosting and balancing treatments. Where people do not have sufficient knowledge of which treatment is best for them, qualified professionals should assist them in the choice.

I am not advocating that doing nothing is an option, merely, that when it comes to sticking substances inside your biome, that informed choice be mandated. It should be the responsibility of the local medical body to record and monitor responses to various therapies and adjust responses as appropriate. Am I pitching for quack solutions? Absolutely not! All therapies will need to have been scientifically proven to be effective, but perhaps we need to tweak our mass statistical approach which considers all patients as equals – as this scientific thinking has lead us up the garden path of uniformity dysfunction.

Oh, and perhaps Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Astrazenica and GSK should run as patient co-operatives…..

My wife was born in Croatia and lived through the shelling of Zagreb by Serb forces. Over the last years with the polarisation of UK society over Brexit, Covid etc, we have repeatedly had conversations about how the climate in the UK was becoming increasingly like that of pre-war Yugoslavia. At first my reaction was, “Of course this cannot happen here, we are a progressive democracy”. But as things began to play out and politicians were killed, my views began to change.

Today I read this excellent article by Bosnian born writer, Elizabeth Rubin of the Intercept.

Survival and Denial

I Watched War Erupt in the Balkans. Here’s What I See in America Today.

In it she compares the current state of the US with pre-war Bosnia. She says that …

what flips civil strife into civil war is “A well-planned agenda, charismatic leaders, and fear. And perhaps one last ingredient that pulls together all three: the whittling down of history and all its complexities into a narrative of collective destiny — ours against theirs, us against them.”

Those ingredients are abundant in the run up to US general elections right now – it does make me wonder what will be cooked up as the heat in the oven increases.

One thing I am certain of, is that hate and fear are the easiest of emotions to stir up in people, and also the ones that most quickly lead to violence and unimaginable cruelty. Hate and fear are so easily transmitted through social and digital media at speeds and volumes never before witnessed by humanity.

There are undeniably dark clouds looming, but I do hold out hope that love is a more subtle and robust emotion than fear, and if good people continually make efforts to connect with their subtler and broader sentiments rather than the cruder fear and hate, then the sun will shine again.

Spirituality and economics have traditionally been viewed as things on opposite ends of the human intellectual spectrum. One built on graphs, models and complex mathematics, while the other is painted with the brush of mystique, imprecision and often unproven assertion. And yet Prout brings these two things together to shape a new vision of economic policy that can create a more sustainable and humane world. Why? Here are 3 reasons.

1. Outlook
   • So often, economics lacks a global or even universal outlook. Economics are played out on the stage of national monetary policy, that excludes other countries, or the state of the entire globe. “Make my country great – and lets not give a damn which other countries we harm in the process” is the common cry of the nationalist economists, what to speak of concern for lifeforms that are not human – animals, birds, plants etc. Economics has been allowed to become a reductionist way of thinking, in the mistaken belief that reductionist precision will give us the answers we need. The world is far more complex and unpredictable than that, and it is the minds with expanded, universal outlooks that will shape the economic solutions of the global future, not those minds blinkered by narrow sentiment. Universal outlook is a natural product of those involved in spiritual pursuit – those trying to understand the very large and very subtle nature of the universe.
   • Dogmas cloud our intellectual ability to develop beneficial economics. What do I mean by dogma here? Simply put, a dogma is an idea or belief that will not allow your mind to advance beyond its narrow confines. For example – the idea that the market will take care of itself. Under the influence of this idea – economists have allowed or justified the harming and exploitation of so many third world countries – and reneged on the responsibility for this -because it is the Market’s fault if some bad economic crisis results. Another dogma that our governments cling to right now is that printing more money will solve our economic woes. By clinging to this they fail to see that what they are doing is creating an invisible sort of inflation that really harms everyone (except the super-rich). The spirituality I refer to in this article, is one of mind expansion, one which forces the mind to shatter any limiting beliefs or ideas that confine it, one which is in line with the human condition of never being satisfied with anything limited in nature. The blending of this type of spirituality with economic policy making will bring about a much clearer economic planning.
2. Happiness
   • Economics is intended to bring humans to a state where they can pursue happiness. Beyond guaranteeing the provision of the basic necessities for living (food, shelter, clothing, education, medical care), good economics needs to provide humans with that additional purchasing capacity that will allow them to pursue happiness in life. Of course humans need to be free to pursue happiness in the way that they see fit, providing it does not harm others. The natural limitations of this needs to be economically recognised – humans seek an unending state of happiness but cannot achieve this through any limited physical means. Hence, local economic policy should limit the variation in additional purchasing capacity between people and to what extent this additional purchasing capacity can be used to accumulate physical wealth or possessions (since this leads to disparity of wealth and a raft of further economic issues). If we define spirituality as the pursuit of a permanent state of happiness, then this brings a new dynamic to what could realistically be encouraged and invested in as far as the pursuit of happiness without harming others goes. Yes, we would always need to keep the economy moving by encouraging spending on some luxury goods, but imagine if financial incentives were prioritised for physical, mental and spiritual health pursuits….
3. Security
   • A goal of good economics is to provide a secure financial base for a society.  In reality, the best economic models and policies in the world cannot prepare us for the variability that occurs on this planet, and throughout the universe. Providing absolute security is beyond any economic model. No one can predict just when birth, death, plague, pestilence or natural disaster might strike, and with what force. Absolute security can only come from something absolute. I think this is where a spiritual outlook can bring a healthy dose of realism to economics. Economics can and should strive to provide a sense of relative security, with the acknowledgement that real security is something that can only be understood in a spiritual sense – it is only with spiritual insight that one can explain why bad things happen to good people, and that there is continuity before birth and after death. However, “Trust in God, but tie your camel”, as the old adage goes – its still important for economics to constantly strive to provide relative security and financial equity amongst Earth’s many inhabitants.

It’s my guess that the successful economic leaders of tomorrow will have a spiritual as well as fiscal mindset. The blending of these two modes of thinking will provide the type of optimistic realism that can inject new ways of thinking about economics into a science that is lagging under its own sense of impending doom.

 

Take a moment to watch this brilliant take on how our species can view the COVID-19 crisis, in ways that can either hinder or help us to create a better future.

Professor Sohail Inayatullah elaborates on the 3 modes of thinking and their possible outcomes:-

1. Restrictive – Conspiracy based and blaming others for [personal political gain
2. Active – using the systems we have to be better prepared for such crises
3. Transformative – adopting new models that can transform the future

The transformative approach is definitely the only sustainable solutions, however, this involves complete systems change and thinking of healthcare as a global commons, centred around people and planet, not profit.

Its a buzzword, spray-painted across so many commercial taglines, and unconsciously uttered by so many mouths, but are we all caught in a trap of understanding what sustainability really means? We find safety in it, which is why it’s such a good vehicle for marketing, because, after all, isn’t that what humans really want – to find shelter, to be safe?

Thing is, there’s a flaw, a gaping hole. If we scratch below the surface it’s glaringly obvious. Sustainability, in the way we commonly think about it, is not actually sustainable! Let me explain…

Sustainability is “the quality of causing little or no damage to the environment and therefore able to continue for a long time” (according to the Cambidge Dictionary). It means working with the planet to ensure future generations are not compromised. But here’s the rub – its a materialistic concept – built on the belief that matter is the fundamental substance in all nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are the resultants of material interactions. So what we think of as sustainable implies that if we just treat the material world properly, it will continue to give us shelter and we’ll all be okay. But that ain’t necessarily so.

A certain Mr Marx, one of the best economic analysts of the last millennium, fell into this trap when proposing his solutions to the economic problems he had identified. While I cannot really dent his analysis of capitalism, his proposals for solutions had more than a few rusty spots, the main one being that he tried to propose a materialistic solution to the problems. One could argue that the wheels were destined to come off the communism wagon from this point on, because life is so much more than just materialism. In fact – materialism itself, we are seeing now, is a large part of the problem!

If humans are reduced to thinking of life in purely materialistic terms, then their desires, their hopes and dreams become ensconced in material reward – entrapped in cycles of consumption, commodification and shop-till-you-drop. As I said earlier, if humans desire shelter, then they will need a ton, no, make that twenty, of material things in order to feel safe and sheltered by this material world for any period of time.

Actually, this desire for shelter can never really be quenched by any discrete material things – it’s our nature to always want something more, something better, no matter how much stuff we acquire (starting to see now why this physical sustainability is so powerful as a sales pitch?)

Sustainability has become the art of selling you material items or ideas in a way that makes you feel sheltered for a while, but knowing that the feeling itself is not sustainable. Sooner or later, that feeling of safety will wear off and you will be looking for the next sustainability fix. That electric car you just bought – how are they disposing of the rare-earth metals in the batteries? Shouldn’t you be buying this brand new hydrogen powered model?

We do need a better definition of sustainability – a broader one. One that acknowledges and includes that human life is more than material – it’s physical, as well as mental as well as spiritual. This new definition needs to be based around the realisation that our desire for shelter is infinite – we will never feel permanently safe or at peace by buying something limited.

This infinite want can only really be fulfilled by something of infinite magnitude – which needs to happen in the arena of infinite things – that, precisely, is the core of spirituality. (Yes, the church may have distorted this somewhat, but do you see why writing off religion as an opiate may have been a mistake, Karl?).

Our new definition of sustainability needs to include the concept of mental sustainability – what is needed to nurture the gardens of the mind and keep them healthy. Mental flourishing does not take place when you water your cerebellic roots with a stream of pseudo-cultural edu-tainment, escapist claptrap or Orwellian doublespeak. In fact, many of the subtle techniques that are used to sell us goods through the medium of sustainability are downright mentally exploitative and harmful.

Take for example fear – it’s a natural instinct in all animals, but it can be so easily exploited to get you to make an irrational decision – for example to buy a new anorak from recycled bottles (I am not saying you should not buy the anorak, just that you should not decide to buy it based on your fear, because then you are probably buying something you do not need). Like the body, the mind thrives based on what it is fed, and so sustainability needs to produce healthy mental foods and healthy psychic eco-systems too.

Ultimately the planet is not sustainable – at some point our sun may supernova or our planet may lose its magnetic flux and be decimated by solar particles. I have every faith that humans will have found a way to inhabit other planets by then.

Ultimately the mind is not sustainable either – what is born will surely die at some point.

And ultimately, the spirit doesn’t need sustaining because, well – it just persists.

But here, on this planet, at this time and in this person, you and I need an environment that is truly sustainable – physically, mentally and spiritually in order that this wonderful expression called life can continue to happen.