A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

on this mind, and built reality in accordance with it… This was … a marvellous
sunrise.” (Hegel 1831: 557 -8). Constantly expanded efforts by
broad social and political movements for the universal granting of human
rights on the one hand and their subordination to a bourgeois class society
and the hegemony of the owners of capital or state bureaucracies
on the other have marked the last two hundred years. Burgeoning hopes
of a free and equal society based on solidarity and the creation of a new,
modern unfreedom and inequality have gone hand in hand.
Both revolutions, the capitalist Industrial Revolution and the bourgeois
political revolution – had, as we have seen, internal contradictions. And
furthermore they themselves were in contradiction to one another. The
imperative of capital utilization and the norms of democracy and human
rights are nothing less than congruent. Unfettered utilization of capital
has a double effect. First, its potential for dissolving and destroying existing
forms of production and ways of life is usually far greater than its
ability to create new forms. Whole continents can be turned into
poverty-stricken zones, as happened to India or Latin America during the
nineteenth century, and is now happening to Africa. Secondly, capital
utilization is not capable of generating, by its own efforts, the most important
conditions for its own reproduction and development: educated
and motivated workers, an intact natural environment, and financial stability
(Polanyi 1978). On the contrary, profit maximization relies on low
wages, cheap raw materials and speculative capital investments. This
however turns human rights into a farce, and democracy is reduced to
submitting to material constraints. Imperialism, racism and nationalism
are the consequences. Capitalism is dependent on a countervailing
power, and on non-capitalist sectors.
The double transition to a society based on unfettered capital utilization
and seeking to legitimize itself in terms of democracy and human rights
may be called the first great transformation of the modern era. The new
order was however extremely unstable, and marked by sharp antagonisms.
The struggle against these tendencies, which threatened the destruction
of society, the state and its culture, characterized the whole of
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