A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

the right of participation in decision-making. Effective access to the use
and regulation of common goods and services produced by humanity
produces through a social process involves participatory democracy
(which does not however eliminate the new meaning of bourgeois
democracy, which is simply representative). This leads to autogestion
or co-management, according to the situation, and to an agreement on
the new vision, as is currently being expressed by the indignés. Organization
is at the heart of all processes of participation. All this concerns
the participation of the working class and of the workers’ movement,
side by side with other sectors of society.
Another burning topic is the question of equality and of citizenship. We
cannot continue fooling ourselves with the formula that we are all equal
before the law when we lack the status of citizenship with genuine rights,
especially the equality of opportunity. We should remember what Hannah
Arendt said: “being a citizen means having the right to all rights.”
Finally, achieving the common good and the Common Good of Humanity
requires a new education for a new culture, which means developing
new content and new methods. 127 Human rights and the protection of
the environment (ecology) form part of this contemporary educational
effort. Education in values and in many other subjects play a central role
in being able to rethink comprehensively our paradigms that have been
inherited from the 18 th , 19 th and 20 th centuries.
We must clearly spell out what this perspective involves, this new geopolitical,
geo-economical, geo-cultural and geo-spiritual culture, if we are
to become citizens of the world where, in the future, nobody will be
treated as a foreigner – a word we should eradicate from our vocabulary.
The north and the south, the east and the west form a total unity within
diversity, which is the greatest expression of human wealth. We are one
and many at the same time. What I want to say is that we must be thinking
in terms of world governance, without being tricked into capitalist
127 Work on this is being done by the trade union movement UNE/SN in Paraguay
264