A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

spiral and complementary link between heart, word and action to produce
wisdom and not only knowledge, which is how the eurocentric
and androcentric enlightenment tradition has conceived development.
Thus reparation involves acts of common good together with the peoples
of African descent, taking into account the need to take responsibility
for the historical debt and to repair gender relationships, as it is
above all the women who, in our case, have suffered triple marginalization,
from racism, xenophobia and sexual discrimination.
Understanding knowledge from its epistemological origins as a ‘common
good’ involves questioning, geo-politically and ‘ego-politically’, the
kind of knowledge that has prevailed up until now, for we can see how
the knowledge of marginalized peoples has historically been made invisible
by those who have colonized power, knowledge and existence
in the world.
This is fundamental, as decolonization must enter into the awareness
of the individuals that are form part of these peoples and not only in policies,
laws and agreements. Only in this way can individuals with a consciousness
of community and of empowerment through their rights
make changes in their lives at all levels: family, collective and national.
The ‘common good’ has to form part of the ethics of the individual person,
as it cannot depend on police monitoring the waste of water. Every
single person has to feel we are intimately linked with the nature that
we are looking after because we shall therefore be doing it to our very
selves. Thus the exercise of the rights of the ‘common good’ has to be
achieved through the awareness, identification and enforcement of
these rights as they are embodied in the practices of each person. It is
therefore important that the text goes into greater detail about what is
required to achieve the ‘common good’ of all persons. 137
137 One of the issues that worry us about exercising participation for the ‘common
good’ concerns unequal relationships, as the mere fact of having ethnic, gender,
class, territorial and religious identities, inter alia, is no guarantee for a collective
consciousness. Representation should be the result of the critical, collective conscientization
of those who exercise their community’s mandate and it starts with
individual daily practice.
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