A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

to the lack of social relationships. A poor person is a wakcha, which is
to say, someone who is socially isolated or bereft. Private property is
not a central element in individual happiness, though neither is submission
to a state apparatus guaranteeing collective life. We cannot elaborate
this assertion in detail here, but suffice to point out that it is the
enjoyment of the gifts of nature and of human creations in terms of sharing
them with others that frames and gives substance to the practices
of minkankuy; wealth is not possession of things but the networks of
the social relationships that are defined by the individual and collective
responsibility to look after one another, to take care of others, or to ensure
that the other lives well. The practice of minkanakuy is by definition
opposed to competition, to the logic of homo economicus who, facing
the flow of merchandise, thinks only of himself. In this respect, I insist
that minkanakuy, the supportive practice of taking care of one another,
of looking after each other mutually, cannot be confused with charity or
philanthropy. To live in terms of minkanakuy is to negate the economy
of profit and accumulation; in conceiving of wealth as social relationships,
minkanakuy implies the protection of the individual so they don’t
become a wakcha, a person short of social relationships and socially
bereft. The essence of pleasure - of individual enjoyment - is, according
to Slavoj Zizek, good collective living: pleasure as a constituent element
of social being that implies mutual care.
Without departing very far from our analysis, it is easy to discern that
the praxis of the minka is an institution that articulates the social and
the economic, the ritual and the political, the personal with the collective.
And we are not speaking of essences or archaic forms in which Andean
societies articulate the many practices of human action, but of knowledge,
of practices, of a normative universe and of an ought-to-be ethic
that sustains and gives meaning to social and societal relationships. It
is imperative to point out that, far from being a reificatory idealisation,
these forms of reciprocity have been or have come into being historically
in both symmetrical and asymmetric practices, that they have been activated
in varying degrees to generate surpluses; that they are forms of
social relation historically transformed by contact with other socioeco-
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