A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

of the debates among the ‘winners’ about recognizing the humanity of
‘The Other’.
The worldwide colonial experience has thus been identifying one part
of the population as the conquered and the other as the conqueror. This
has encouraged some to take over political decision-making for the
whole of humanity and others to resist their impositions in all sorts of
ways. The colonial experience also assumed the task of continually
shaping and maintaining a defensive discourse in terms of scientific
norms, to justify or to discredit the knowledge and feelings of the different
peoples of the world. Subjectivity, political practices, the engendering
of knowledge, among other things, all respond to the development of
a ‘We’ that does not include all of humanity.
However, to analyze the present situation as if the Conquest and the
whole colonization process ended with the formation of the modern republics,
is to ignore the processes of internal colonialism that developed,
rooted in the subjectivities of the new nation states. It is true that, outside
the territory of the ‘New World’, European colonial peoples also
ended their subjection with the liberation struggles of the second half
of the 20 th century. What is most remarkable about the colonial process
is its ability to reconfigure itself and adapt to different historical moments
across all parts of the world.
It is possible to consider colonialism as an ongoing process if we incorporate
two of its basic elements into the analysis: ‘actually existing’
modernity and capitalism. Modernity, as a human process linked to the
development of techniques and co-opted by capitalism, has been exhaustively
examined by Bolívar Echeverría (1989, 2007, 2008). He postulates
that modernity is not the exclusive heritage of any one region in
the world: it is necessary to consider it as an essentially human phenomenon,
which has been turned into a synonym for capitalism and ‘the
West’.
There are many peoples around the world who have responded creatively
to the challenges posed by relationships with nature, by using
techniques that enable “human societies to build their civilized life on
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