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A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

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flicts and many other manifestations of the same kind. To extricate ourselves<br />

from a situation that is globally so disturbing, we clearly need solutions.<br />

The different opinions on the question can be classified in three<br />

categories.<br />

What solutions?<br />

Changing the actors, not the system<br />

Some people, preoccupied mainly with the financial crisis, are in favour<br />

of castigating and replacing those directly responsible for the economic<br />

mess – “the chicken thieves” as Michel Camdessus, former director of<br />

the International Monetary Fund, calls them. This is the theory of the<br />

capitalist system (the neoclassical theory in economics) that sees<br />

favourable signs in all crises, since they make it possible to get rid of<br />

weak or corrupt elements in order to resume accumulation on a sounder<br />

basis. The actors are to be changed, not the system.<br />

Establishing regulations<br />

A second view proposes regulation. It is acknowledged that the market<br />

does not regulate itself and that there should be national and international<br />

bodies that take on the task. The State and specific international<br />

institutions should intervene. Michel Camdessus himself, in a conference<br />

with Catholic entrepreneurs in France, talked of the three hands:<br />

the “invisible hand” of the market, that of regulation by the State and<br />

charity for the victims who do not benefit from either of the two other<br />

hands. One of the main theorists of this regulation was John Maynard<br />

Keynes, the English economist. For this reason the term ‘neo-Keynesian’<br />

is being used in the current context. To regulate the system means saving<br />

it and thus redefining the role of the public bodies (the State and the<br />

international institutions), so necessary for the replication of capital, a<br />

fact that neoliberalism seems to have forgotten since the 1970s (Ernesto<br />

Molina Molina, 2010, 25).<br />

Nevertheless, there are various practical proposals. The G8, for example,<br />

proposed certain regulations of the world economic system, but of a<br />

25

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