A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

quency associated with black people still continues in spite of the Constitution
having made us citizens with all human rights. Legal action
needs to be taken that condemns these discriminatory practices based
on racial hatred as a crime. Life as a common good must first of all involve
the principle of freedom, which means empowerment both in time
and space. One of these is the body, which is affected by gender, race
and class and this extends to the community bodies in their diverse
forms, discursive and symbolic.
Aware of the results of capitalism, neo-liberal economists are making
alternative proposals from alternative theoretical bases, like those of
Stiglitz, one of the greatest and best critics of the neo-classical model
and Nobel Prizewinner for Economics in 1994. There are also the proposals
of Armartya Sen who starts with the idea of ‘development as
freedom’, taking into account the ethno-cultural and economic particularities
of each people, so that we feel it is important to put forward
some of the notions that contribute to the ‘common good’.
Sen (2000) takes the notion of agency and uses it to give priority to generating
proposals that start from the grassroots upwards, and not the
other way round, while the person who takes action to bring about
changes that become the ‘common good’ will be the motor for generating
action for development with social justice. He bases his proposal
for work with agencies and the public debate on the social participation
of an economic policy that transforms the democratic system based on
basic political, economic and human rights in accordance with the specific
needs and values, both of use and of exchange and not only of
rents, and usefulness based on the priorities of human groups. In this
sense, his position goes further than the concept of human capital as is
utilized in neo-liberalism, using it for an integral, relational and complementary
life that includes harmonious links with nature. Only in this way
can we understand conflictual situations like the famine experienced in
countries that have a high percentage of Afro-descendants – where the
problem is not necessarily one of production but poor mechanisms of
distribution – and the link of production with nature, or between mortality
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