A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

lood and sweat. As he says: “the most important right that the children
of African origin can claim from the State is to be born, to grow up and
to live with dignity in the ancestral territories that are part of their history
and where they can re-create their culture”.
Thus achieving the common good involves new, harmonious, equitable
and realistic conditions of production and reproducing this buen vivir requires
fulfilment in various fields: enjoying buen vivir through the productive
use of the territory according to a people’s own ways of de cisionmaking,
based on socio-cultural respect for the land. We shall return to
this point later on.
The educational crisis: the transversality of ethno-education
One of the fundamental problems of the Afro-descendant population is
the lack of access to education. Thus the problem arises: what kind of education
will they accede to with all these policies? The colonial educational
model continues to affect the mentalities of our peoples. There is no guarantee
that an educated Afro-descendant brother will have the collective
awareness to work for the ‘common good’. “At the political and organizational
level, the Afro-Ecuadorians are totally distrustful and sceptical concerning
their capacity to generate, based on their unity, their own,
independent political and social force…because of their divisions and a
leadership that is ineffective and discredited.” (Antón, 2011: 150).
At the present time there are alternatives to hegemonic education, like
ethno-education, but this has been confused – or, rather, destabilized –
by the capitalist regime, and its transversal capacity has not been understood
by its very beneficiaries. Ethno-education means using pedagogical
strategies that take into account the diversity of ethnic groups
with their different kinds of knowledge: traditional, modern, technological,
contemporary. Thus it cannot be limited to a cultural space where
the population is the majority, without transforming the education imparted
to the nation as a whole, as the territory is not only linked to the
land.
This involves imparting interculturality and ecological rights, including
the transversality of gender, to all the diverse populations. In turn, it implies
having respect for and the right to knowledge acquired in other
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