A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

would not be necessary to break the accumulative dynamics of capital,
and the socialist proposal would turn trivial, but that variable is impossible
because it contradicts head-on the logic of profit. Profit is the starting
point of inequality, and inequality is the quintessential erosion factor of
the Common Good.
We are fully in the center of the dilemma to be solved in contrast to the
globalizing scheme within which the century and the millennium started,
and it would be naïve to think that it will be resolved through linear and
spontaneous logic or by the strict combination of local achievements.
We place our hopes – those of Latin and Caribbean America, at least -
on conditions that can be defined from the reality initiated in 1959 by
the Cuban socialist experiment which has subsisted, with proved capacity
of resistance to imperial hostility and to an aggressiveness without truce,
limits or terms, until the radical transformations in Latin American geography
contributed to propitiate an extended scenario of resistance and a
prospect for integration based on the interests of our peoples.
Houtart points out that, in the cases of Venezuela and Bolivia, “transition
would consist in (1) initiating an economic policy based on the needs of
domestic market ( what is on a long-term or medium term basis),
(2) promoting stricter ecological and social laws for ecological and social
exploitation, (3) making users pay for their costs and (4) promoting international
legislation to prevent the phenomenon of “comparative ad van -
tages” in favour of those who apply slacker regulations” 176 We have now
started to talk and to associate in actions of common interest which take
institutional form in the “ALBA” (BAPOA: Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples
of Our America) Project and in the establishing of “CELAC” (CLACS:
Community of Latin American and Caribbean States). Cuba is no longer
alone in America. Time returns again to show its determination over
space and to prove Galeano right. It is worth stating that the search for
the common good, which is the compass of the BAPOA Project and the
axis of solidarity globalization, enters as a real possibility in the XXI cen-
176 François Houtart: “ From the common goods to the Common Good of Mankind”.
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