A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

(Harvey, 2003; Zeller, 2004). The economic and political power elites
were banking on a radical market development in the form of neoliberal
capitalism, and largely held the social, democratic and ecological
counter-movements in check. A way out of the stagnation was to be offered
by the growth areas of high-tech capitalism. This proved insufficient
to halt the slowdown of growth however, and led to one
speculative bubble after the other. Although globalization strengthened
the winners of international cut-throat competition, it deepened the gulf
between rich and poor countries, thus making it impossible to tackle the
problems of poverty, hunger, environmental pollution and violence.
The development of financial-market capitalism seemed to be the last
chance to somehow satisfy the drive for a maximization of profits. As
productive capitalism had reached its limits, the financial markets with
their ever more opaque “products” outside of the so-called real economy
were to supply the returns for the propertied classes. In some
strange way, money was supposed to multiply itself indefinitely by a
process of manipulation. But the result was the deepest financial crisis
since the 1930s. Governments were forced to guarantee the gigantic
over-accumulation of the last thirty years, thus preparing a new, second
phase in the crisis of 2008. Just one percent of the annual real interest
rate on the $200 trillion in cash assets is bound up with the redistribution
of four percent of global GDP, i.e. almost the total increase achieved during
the good growth years went into the hands of the “moneyed class”.
The way out of the crisis of the 1960s and ‘70s has turned out to be the
way into the most serious crisis of capitalism in eighty years. The model
of a modern bourgeois-capitalist society that arose out of the first great
transformation is not sustainable. The crisis of capitalism is thus also a
crisis of civilization.
A multi-dimensional crisis of civilization
This crisis of civilization is above all a crisis of reproduction. For the first
time in the history of humankind, the natural foundations of its global
existence are acutely jeopardized by the crisis in the relationship between
society and nature. The non-renewable raw materials and sources
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