A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

Conclusions
The present crisis obliges us to look for the points on which to base political
convergences and to critically confront the capitalist system. Historically,
one key starting point is the colonialism that was unleashed
from another part of the world, the one that embodies the modernity of
industrial capitalism and claimed that it had ‘discovered’ another large
part of humanity. However, as with other aspects of reality, the modernity
of industrial capitalism divided humanity into ‘We’ and ‘The Others’.
This has had all kinds of consequences.
This same modernity imposed itself over the whole world and installed
a model of civilizing development that was considered the only possible
destiny. In order to sustain itself, political and economic arguments and
dynamics - and even an epistemology - were constructed which, for a
long time, justified the necessity that the peoples of the earth submit
to the modernity of industrial capitalism.
It has to be acknowledged that, of all the forms of modernity that the
world has known, the most effective and functional so far achieved has
been the modernity of industrial capitalism (see Echeverría, 1989).
Based on the certainty of infinite progress (in time the idea developed
that technical efficiency would be able to counteract any limitations imposed
by nature), the modernity of industrial capitalism seemed supported
by enough arguments to show its eternal relevance and validity.
The core of the whole project generated the feeling of an inexhaustible
abundance that is not generated by nature but by technology developed
by human reason.
However the ecological disasters that we are already witnessing (climate
change, not to mention the inability to control the nuclear tragedy
in Japan) are proof to the contrary. Apart from the huge commercial centres
(malls), the feeling is not one of abundance but of increasing desperation.
Here the failure of the modernity of industrial capitalism comes
up against a very special problem. This is the need to recognize, at all
governmental and social levels, that the false sense of abundance, of
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