A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

Fig. 2: Capitalist enterprises as engines of
innovative development
Raw materials (R)
Knowledge (W)
Wage labour (L)
Fixed capital (SK)
Capitalist
enterprise
Waste (R’)
Knowledge (W’)
Wage labour (L’)
Fixed capital (SK)
Consumer goods
(KW)
cannot exist without constantly
revolutionizing the
instruments of production,
and thereby the relations
of production, and
with them the whole relations
of society. Conservation
of the old modes
of production in unaltered
form, was, on the contrary,
the first condition of
existence for all earlier industrial
classes” (Marx/
Engels 1848: 465).
The subjection of society and the entire mode of production and way of
life in the name of unbridled capital utilization and profit maximization
and permanent, more or less “creative destruction” (Schumpeter) of all
traditional forms of production, institutions and convictions, were the
two sides of the unbridled capitalism that had been advancing steadily
since the late eighteenth century. Capitalist enterprises became engines
of modernity that absorbed credit, raw materials, energy, labour, knowledge
and culture and reproduced them in an altered form (Fig. 2).
While the English Industrial Revolution swept away the technologicaleconomic
pillars of the traditional modes of production and living, and
made capitalism universal, the political French Revolution destroyed the
foundations of all traditional rule. Not religion or heredity, not tradition
or inherited privileges, but the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
the Citizen”, in short, the human rights that the National Assembly approved
on August 26, 1789, became the sole legitimate point of reference
for the entire social and political order. As Hegel was to proclaim
forty years later: “Thus in the notion of law a constitution has been set
up, and from now on everything is to be based on this. As long as the
sun has been in the heavens with the planets revolving around it, we
have never yet seen that man has put himself on his head, that is to say
146