A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

employment, against lack of access to education, healthcare and clean
water, hence, to denial of any of the totality of “the goods of freedom”,
108 their realization depends upon these struggles, to create the
basis for their redemption. Otherwise, they are merely demands with
no “substrate”, form without content, a formal imperative with no
“ground” in reality. 109 Without such a “ground”, human rights become
the rights, the liberties of those with the private means to realize them,
become privileges of the propertied, and cease to be human rights. That
they become only when the common basis for their realization – natural,
social and cultural wealth – are accessible for each and all, even to the
least of our “brothers and sisters”. These foundations are earthly nature,
their incredible yet today so endangered wealth of life and of the possibilities
of life are the historical and present cultures without which we would
long since have been nothing more than just another long extinct species
of biological evolution. They are the economic, social, political, cultural and
spiritual structures of our lives, to the extent that they can be useful in realizing
human rights. All this is the “common good of humanity”.
If John Locke says that private property grows out of one’s own labour,
since it is that which justifies wealth, he completely ignores the fact that
the real economic power of individual labour power depends first and
foremost on the natural conditions under which it is used, second on
the cultural heritage of knowledge, skills, and productive forces in their
broadest sense which have been passed on to us by previous generations,
and third on the productive force of cooperation with living generations.
We owe 99.9% of our labour productivity today to these three
conditions, and not to our own efforts. That shows clearly, however,
how much of the results of these efforts we are obligated to repay for
108 Cf. Michael Brie: Freiheit und Sozialismus. Die Programmatik der PDS in der Diskussion
[Freedom and socialism: The Programme of the PDS under discussion], in:
Michael Brie; Michael Chrapa; Dieter Klein: Sozialismus als Tagesaufgabe [Socialism
as an everyday task], Berlin 2003, pp. 7 - 64.
109 For the terms “ground” and “substrate”, “content” and “form”, cf. G.W.F.
Hegel: Science of Logic, Part 2.
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