A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

tory (with a capital letter because I now consider it a subject) is revealed
by the fact that, thanks to the privileges granted to the Catholic King and
Queen by Pope Borgia, the riches plundered from the New World, on
which England, Holland, France and the German States built their
processes of capitalist accumulation, led Spain to a totally subordinate,
impoverished, and structurally fragile role within the European accord.
In the middle of the past century José Ortega y Gasset used to say, with
his proverbial irony, that Spain had no decadence because it had never
known any splendour. 175
I am not covering history, I neither want to nor can do so here; for that
reason, I limit myself to running the risk of skipping from one point to
another. At this point, I am doing so in order to recall that the first half
of the XX century, in which the Marxists of the time, on perceiving that
German capitalism had been late to the imperialist distribution of the
world, revealed to us the seriousness of the fact that Germany´s technologically
flourishing economic power, which was territorially repressed
by its European adversaries, was out of step. The attempt to impose a
German globalizing project unscrupulously cost nine million dead in the
First World War and sixty million in the Second. We know that, in the
end, Nazi Germany failed in its globalization, – which could have virtually
been called so –, thanks to the Soviets´ resistance, which was as tenacious
as the aggression had been. Had the Bolshevik revolution not
taken place previously, the map of the world after 1945 would not have
been the same.
However, the XX Century was not destined to end as a time of harmony,
but in the entrenchment of imperial Washington. Although neo-liberal
globalization originated from a British proposal with a view to responding
to the mid- seventies crisis and to giving the green light to financial capital
so as to get to the bottom at all costs, Washington took the most
advantage of it and registered the globalizing device. And when the sys-
175 José Ortega y Gasset: Invertebrate Spain, Editorial Revista de Occidente,
Madrid, 1956.
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