A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

tem in the East was disintegrated, the domination of the world by the
West turned absolute. Neither imperial Rome, nor colonial Spain, or emblematic
Bonaparte, or Nazi Berlin had so much power in their hands.
Once the order agreed by the Yalta Conference for the post-war period
was dissolved, the White House had free hands to turn the world into
influence zones of the United States of America, either by means of purchase
and bribery or by persuasion or force. Its allies, especially the
most important, became its subordinates. The Cold War period, together
with NATO and the Marshall Plan, had provided it with the instruments
needed to manipulate Europe.
That is how we received the relationship between totum and quantum
in this century. Never in its history had the world been so polarized and
so dominated. Neither was the need to define and defend the common
good as evident as it is today, nor so hard to obtain. The Tobin Rate is
the oldest, most sensible, acceptable proposal that causes financial
transactions to make a basic contribution to the Common Good with no
injury to contributing economies. It has never been possible to set it in
motion due to lack of intention of the States, of international financial
institutions, of private and public banks, of the world of capital as a
whole, both in the centers of capital as in the periphery. This failure gives
us the measure of the barriers to be overcome, and we are only speaking
of the immediate, evident and obvious ones.
Today, – after counting the achievements within the socialist failure of
the past century – it is deemed necessary to define the Common Good
as a valid pattern of socio-economic globalization of what is public in
counterpoint to the world dominated by what is private on the one hand,
and in correspondence with national and sectorial common goods. The
distinction between the Common Good and common goods is not only
quantitative, but also, and above all, qualitative. Sectorialized responses
can escape the observance of the principle of equity, while the comprehensive
character of the Common Good imposes a convergence of purposes
which can only be summed up in the level of what is public. If
the capitalist project were capable of generating an equity device, it
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