A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

The global dominance of this project became apparent early on, through
the destruction, absorption or submission of all pre-capitalist modes of
production, through the various colonial adventures, through the establishment
of unequal exchange between the centres and the peripheries,
and through what has recently been called ‘globalization’, which finally
brings together the concepts of growth and Westernization, that is to
say, the spread throughout the universe of the latest forms and dominance
of capital.
There was a reaction against this model, expressed in ‘post-modernism’.
However, this mode of thinking, which developed in the second half of
the twentieth century, also incorporated a particularly ambiguous critique
of modernity, which was generally limited to the cultural and political
fields (M. Maffesoli, 1990). The idea of history as something constructed
here and now by individual actors, the refusal to acknowledge the existence
of structures and the denial of reality by systems defined exclusively
in vertical terms, as well as the explicit desire not to accept
theories in human sciences, have turned this current of thinking into the
illegitimate child of modernity itself, so that people have become depoliticized.
Post-modernism has transmuted itself into an ideology that
is pretty convenient for neoliberalism. At a time when capitalism was
building the new material basis of its existence as a ‘world-system’, as
Immanuel Wallerstein has termed it, the denial of the very existence of
systems is most useful for the advocates of the ‘Washington Consensus’.
It is important to criticize modernity, but with a historical and dialectical
approach (actors interacting, who have different degrees of
power) and with the desire to recover the emancipatory nature that characterized
one moment of European history. It is not possible to identify
modernity with capitalism, but neither can one talk of modernity without
including capitalism.
This is the reason why it is imperative that we reconstruct a consistent,
theoretical framework, benefiting from the contributions of various currents
in human thought, including those of a philosophical nature, as
well as the physical, biological and social sciences. It is important to sit-
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