A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

The most extreme among them go so far as to call for the suppression,
pure and simple, of State institutions – including the army – as well as
a privatization of the currency. Of course they are aware that these
measures would push capitalism towards chaos, but they think that,
thanks to the market mechanism, such chaos would benefit capital and
that capitalism would reconstitute itself faster and better than through
State interventions in the form of artificial public assistance to enterprises
that in any case were doomed to fail.
3. And what about the reformist positions? The gravity of the situation
has favoured a return to the theses of Keynes: “Keynes is today, more
than ever the flavour of the month” wrote Paul Krugman, who is a neoclassical
economist! In fact, even if they oppose the traditional neoclassical
theses about State interventions, neo-Keynesian interpretations
come from the same theoretical matrix, which we would call ‘bourgeois’.
For the most advanced among them, in spite of nuances, variants and
subtleties, their visions are hardly ‘reformist’ since they consist of introducing
minimal changes in the functioning of capitalism in order that it
can survive as long as possible.
The report of the Stiglitz Commission is a good illustration. Its final document,
drawn up in 2009 at the request of the president of the United
Nations General Assembly, does not question the bases of the dominant
ideology. The old neoliberal certainties have only to be re-vised, not to
be abandoned: exchange rates should be flexible, the virtues of free
trade are reaffirmed as against the ‘dangers of protectionism’, the defects
of corporate governance should be corrected, but the management
of risks continues to be entrusted to the financial oligopolies and the
regulation of the world system remains under the hegemony of the US
dollar.
We are a long way from the rejection of globalized financial liberalization
as expressed by an increasing number of the countries of the South –
not without contradictions, it is true – from the People’s Republic of
China to Bolivarian Venezuela.
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