A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

To achieve this one will have to dismantle some existing power blocks.
And I use deliberately the word ‘dismantle’ because as long as those
power blocks exist ‘generalisation of democracy’ [73] will be out of the
question. It are those commanding heights that hold entire economies
in their grip and condemn billions of people to misery and poverty, that
drag us into war, cultivate political apathy and a false consciousness,
and cause environmental degradation. It are those commanding heights
that seized control of our education, our health care system, our press
and our governance, and above all it are those commanding heights that
will decide on what to do (or not to do) about global warming. In the
words of Hedges, those are the ‘mortal enemies to be vanquished’. 57
So that means we will have to dismantle the three MIC’s: the Marketing
Industrial Complex, the Media Industrial Complex and the Military Industrial
Complex. And of course also NATO and all military bases abroad.
We will have to dethrone the financial and industrial juggernauts and all
their collaborating international intuitions. The text goes a long way towards
this direction but doesn’t explicit mention the wish to dismantle
those institutions [74-76].
Planning
The text only once mentions the practice of planning the economy. He
does so in a negative way, referring to the lack of ecological concerns in
the planning of socialist economies in the past and of China at this moment.
[59] For those countries this is correct, 58 but one mustn’t stop
here. The economic planning in the Soviet Union was the first experiment
to subordinate the market to the needs of the citizens. As such it
page 120
53 Mészáros I., op. cit., p. 159.
54 Amin S., op. cit., p. 26.
55 Wilkinson R. & Pickett K, The Spirit Level. Why Greater Equality Makes Societies
Stronger, New York 2009.
56 Wilkinson R. & Pickett K, p. 20; http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=250.
57 Hedges C., art. cit.
58 Cuba is a different story. See below.
121