A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

Fig. 3: Solidarity-based associations in
a socialist society
Natural common
goods (N)
Cultural common
goods (K)
Production
goods (Pm)
Credit
Solidarity
association
Natural common
goods (N’)
Cultural common
goods (K’)
Production
& consumer
goods (Pm’)
Credit (K’)
weakened and driven back
by economic democracy
and more participatory elements
of political democracy;
by restoring decent
working conditions and
the welfare state on the
basis of solidarity; by making
a start on socio-ecological
reconstruction; and
by adopting a more peaceful
foreign, security and
development policy.
“Must not the transition
be thought of – and promoted – as a series of evolutionary steps in the
course of which the ‘nature’ of capitalism changes (or is changed) and
the ‘nature’ of socialism gradually emerges?” asked Jörg Huffschmid in
1988. Marx’ writing of 1871, that the working class had “to set free elements
of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society
itself is pregnant” applies all the more today (Marx, ... MEW. vol. 17:
343).
For the left, this would mean recognizing the evolutionary potential of
capitalism, strengthening its significance for transformational politics,
making full use of its capacity for reforms, and helping it to develop in
ways that go beyond capitalism. In the course of the transformation of
capitalism, one could increasingly add elements of a second great transformation,
which would overcome capitalism. The left would base its
strategy on the concept of a double transformation.
If one were to draw up a general formula of solidarity-based reproduction
analogous to Marx’s “general formula of capital”, it would be what he
himself expressed in the Manifesto: “in place of the old bourgeois society
with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association
in which the free development of each is the condition of the free de-
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