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A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

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So it is fundamental that this proposal emphasizes the production and<br />

reproduction conditions of the common good as much as it is concerned<br />

with the question of access to this right. How are we going to ensure<br />

that this right is fulfilled and if it is not, how to generate a system of<br />

sanctions over the ‘common good’? Who would be responsible for the<br />

failure?<br />

As for the empowerment of this indigenous/Afro-descendant cosmovision,<br />

we feel it is relevant to enter into detail into some of the dimension<br />

of the crisis that is affecting our Afro-descendant peoples and that this<br />

concerns relations with nature, the production of life through use value,<br />

the reorganization of collective life and interculturality. For this reason it<br />

is important to contextualize the complexity of the situation.<br />

In the specific case of the people of African descent these problems<br />

must be considered in three vital fields: political, socio-economic, sociocultural/socio-historical.<br />

These form part of the agenda in the various discussions<br />

in different spaces, both institutional and alternative, and they<br />

are expressed in social crises concerning:<br />

� the vulnerability of the territory;<br />

� the poverty, racism, colonialism and symbolic slavery, residues of<br />

which are still causing suffering among our peoples;<br />

� the need for reparations to become a right to development, as a matter<br />

of justice and historical truth.<br />

The territorial crisis: the right to the ‘Gran Comarca’<br />

The territories in which the Ecuadorian African descendants have traditionally<br />

lived has had to contend with the aggression caused by the extraction<br />

of natural resources and of monoculture, which affects their<br />

quality of life and in some cases they have been displaced by the corporations.<br />

They call on the collective territory for the right to ownership<br />

and possession to be guaranteed, that none are uprooted and that those<br />

who have had to leave have the right to return. [Juan García and] Grandfather<br />

Zenón reminds us that our ancestors paid for this right with their<br />

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