The Three-Tier Enterprise System
Dharmadeva
The Three-Tier Enterprise System
This essay is an introduction to the three-tier economy of Prout, or to be more precise, to its three-tier system of enterprise management. Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, the propounder of Prout, considered the three-tier system to be one of Prout’s special features and we can better understand it by making comparisons to enterprise management in two economic systems that are well known to us, capitalism and communism.
There are generally considered to be three ways to own and manage a business: government ownership, private ownership and cooperative ownership. Ownership is an important consideration, because whoever owns and controls the means of production generally gets the lion’s share of what is produced. According to communist dogma, all businesses have to be government owned, and in theory the people get equal shares of the product. According to capitalist dogma, all businesses ought to be in private hands, and in theory output is shared in proportion to the contributions made by the persons involved.
Despite their obvious differences, capitalism and communism have three characteristics in common: 1) they are both wedded to their dogma, 2) in both there is a huge gulf between theory and actual outcomes, and 3) both produce highly centralised economies. Communism is (or was) centralised by design (Sarkar called it state capitalism) whereas capitalism inevitably becomes highly centralised driven by the relentless pursuit of profit. Companies must merge in order to survive, leading to fewer but ever larger companies.
During the 20th century capitalism and communism battled for ideological supremacy and of course it is now a matter of history that capitalism defeated communism. It is generally agreed that a contributory factor to the demise of communism was a grossly inefficient system of production. According to one argument, the government controlled industrial complex of the USSR was unable to respond to President Reagan’s Star Wars Program and the country collapsed in the endeavour to do so.
Of particular interest is that in the ideological struggles of the 20th century, the cooperative system did not play a visible role. In order to understand this invisibility and in order to understand Sarkar’s three-tier proposal, it is helpful to review some of the history of the cooperative system.
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