A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

tury. A possibility that transcends the scenario of the isolated experiment
and thus faces the prospect of becoming sustainable.
For the moment, it is not a question of finding a definition of Common
Good as an abstraction. The level of what is general is satisfied with a
consensus to which we can resort; it is a question of being able to identify
it in the dimension it reaches by opposition to the process of global
commercial exploitation effected by the neo-liberal model. In this sense,
we can state that the starting point of revolutionary transformation in
the XXI Century (inevitably socialist, there is no other option) is based
on securing ways to rescue the Common Good.
We are not heading towards dynamics of simple oppositions. The last
two decades of the past century underwent the effects of an unscrupulous
privatization process in our America. But it seems indispensable to
make sure that this long-lasting disarticulation of what is public in favour
of what is private, which still prevails in many countries and attempts
to perpetuate itself in others, will not generate a reverse response mechanically.
The obsession to eliminate what is private in favour of what
is public can be as dangerous as the lack of control of the market. There
is the risk of confusing socialization processes with those of the nationalization
of property, whose practical implications and theoretical effects
deserve to be critically analyzed in the socialist experiments of the XX
Century.
It is of the utmost importance that these dynamics serve to balance
what is public and what is private in economy, to define the coordinates
that complement one and the other, to discover the point of sustainable
subordination of what is private in a term that should not be necessarily
long, and to attain irreversibility (which will only be possible when a systematic
and mature regime of social participation is formed: the democracy
which radical socialist projects have lacked). In any case, local
sce narios differ, and although the purpose of reinforcing what is public
has generic value, the specific agendas will always have to be different.
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