A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

vived five hundred years of extermination decree 130 , to present itself as
a political actor, bearer of ways of life, values, religion and millenary economic,
legal and political practices from which Good Living originates,
as a flower preserved with great love. It is necessary to bear in mind
that these millenary practices were denied, as if they did not come from
human beings. And I, who risk yielding to their proposal, cannot forget
that I am a cultural and political descendant of the then so-called unique
civilization, actually a very particular expression – European, modern,
Christian and capitalist – of human history.
The world of peasant cultures, on its part, faced extermination decrees
from capitalism and from socialism: from the former, for considering it
backward; from the latter, for considering it an enemy of forced socialization,
starting from the revolutionary prototype, the proletarian, and
from the submission of everything and of everyone to centralized State
control led by the proletariat dictatorship. So, I ask myself: am I able to
grasp the wealth of its contributions to today’s world, immersed in a
deep crisis, without submitting it to the filter of the so-called unique civilization,
Western capitalist modernity?
I undertake, as a challenge, the criticism of whatever cultural colonialism
is left in me. And one of the steps in this exercise is materialized in the
attitude of acceptance of what has subsisted and is presented by the
peoples that survived colonization. Before any criticism, I need to ask
myself if my doubts – and the doubts of others – do not carry, either
consciously or unconsciously, the remnants of the supposed civilizing
superiority that led my ancestors, and still leads many contemporaries,
to judge these peoples incapable of generating anything better than the
way of life born in Western Europe and extended all over the world
through diverse forms of colonialism.
I also want to add a challenge common to those who were converted
to Christianity in our Latin America. Will we be capable of being self-crit-
130 An expression used by Evo Morales, President of Bolivia, in an interview.
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