A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

The fundamental cause of the financial crisis lies in the very logic of capitalism
itself (Rémy Herrera and Paulo Nakatani, 2009, 39). If capital is
considered to be the engine of the economy and its accumulation essential
for development, the maximization of profits is inevitable. If the
financialization of the economy increases the rate of profit and if speculation
accelerates the phenomenon, the organization of the economy
as a whole follows the same path. Thus, the first characteristic of this
logic, the increase in the rate of profit as a function of the accumulation
of capital, becomes very evident in the process. But a capitalist market
that is not regulated leads unavoidably to a crisis. As the report of the
United Nations Commission states specifically: “This is a macro-economic
crisis” (Joseph Stiglitz, 2010, 195).
The context is similar to the crisis of the 1930s. However, the main difference
is that the current financial and monetary imbalance is now combining
with other kinds of crises, in the fields of food, energy and
climate: all of which, though, linked to the same economic logic.
The food crisis
There are two aspects to the food crisis. One is a conjunction of shortterm
factors, the other is due to (structural) long term factors. The former
can be seen in the sudden rise of food prices in 2007 and 2008. It
is true that this can be attributed to several causes, such as dwindling
reserves, but the main reason was speculative, with the production of
agrofuels being partly responsible (maize-based ethanol in the United
States). Thus over a period of two years, the price of wheat on the
Chicago stock exchange rose by 100 per cent, maize by 98 per cent and
ethanol by 80 per cent. During these years appreciable amounts of speculative
capital moved from other sectors into investing in food production
in the expectation of rapid and significant profits. As a consequence,
according to the FAO director-general, in each of the years 2008 and
2009 more than 50 million people fell below the poverty line, and the
total number of those living in poverty rose to the unprecedented level
of over one billion people. This was clearly the result of the logic of profits,
the capitalist law of value.
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