A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

nomic and political systems, and that their ethical bases are being undermined.
All the same, their contents, the forms and the normative universe
of these practices can be explored with the aim of regaining,
reconstructing and reinventing them in the light of present and future
needs and expectations. This needs to be a critical exercise of theoretical
imagination and of historical commitment to deny any attempt at
conceptual reification. It also implies a political and epistemological
struggle against the denial of contemporariness that capitalism deploys
against all forms of criticism of its cultural fundamentals. The concept
of sumak kawsay, as imagined in political discourse, is a recent invention,
it is a category that cites a way of life that needs to sink its roots
into the practices of minkanakuy underlying the modes of production
and multiple relations of collective life in the Andes. Otherwise, it runs
the risk of ending up domesticated and reduced to its aesthetic dimension,
and subsumed in the capitalist symbolism of cultural democracy.
The idea of the Common Good of Humanity, as formulated by Houtart,
poses many questions and challenges. In my view its very definition
could lead to misunderstandings. If it is a radically different collective
way of life which humanity should reach, I do not understand why we
should call it the Common Good of Humanity, in a historical time of
grotesque global political impostures. The military interventions with the
destruction and death that came in their wake in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Libya, in the name of liberty, democracy and the “protection of civilians”,
illustrate how socially and politically desirable concepts can be appropriated
and used by the imperial powers. For its part, the United Nations,
with its immovable power structures, has demonstrated not only its ineffectiveness
in preventing wars but also something much more worrying:
its usefulness for legitimising the military interventions of the big
powers at a global level. The Common Good of Humanity series shows
us a form of declaration to which this discussion certainly aspires, but it
is much more important to work on the creation of new collective subjectivities
that move away from the liberal ethos that sees individuals in
perpetual competition among themselves and from the collectivism that
distorts the solidarity-based liberty of minkanakuy.
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