A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

4 Indigenous Peoples of the Americas
AN ESSAY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE
INDIGENOUS MOVEMENTS:
THE POETICS OF SUMAK KAWSAY
ON A GLOBAL HORIZON
ARMANDO MUYOLEMA
François Houtart’s article “De los bienes comunes al Bien Común de la
Humanidad” (“From the common goods to the Common Good of Humanity”)
visualises some emancipatory lines on the horizon of change
in what is historically a time of risk and hope for humanity. The Utopian
features of the emancipation project have their roots in current collective
experience as much as in what Gerald Postema calls “prophetic memory”:
142 the critique emerging as the counter-image of hegemonic enactments.The
last few decades have seen the growth of a significant
critical understanding of capitalism as a way of life based on the profit
economy, the free market and the exploitation of man and nature. From
a purposive standpoint, the need to move from the idea of “common
goods” towards a global coexistence based on the Common Good of
Humanity is an imperative of civilization that implies imagining new fundamentals
of collective life. In this undertaking, the invocation and fragmentary
resonance of non-western civilizations is notable. For someone
who grew up and was educated in a cross-cultural context becoming
less and less remote from the ideas of scientific knowledge, it is fascinating
to witness that the growing global preoccupation with the preservation
of humanity invokes the participation of just such civilizations. But
it is even more surprising to learn that this preoccupation implies a
search for global solutions in the cultural sources that have historically
lain under the “civilizing” siege of the West; in cultural pluralism and the
potential for the transculturation of concepts, objects and ways of life
142 See Gerald Postema. “On the Moral Presence of Our Past”. McHill Law Journal.
36:4 (1991). p. 118.
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