A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

It is now a challenge for Cuba to generate the changes that incorporate
sustainability to its socialist project, in a genuine transition, insofar it is
not a question of isolated effects, but of a transformation that surpasses
the short term, covers all the aspects and which would not be conceivable
without a significant shaking of structures. The sequences of the
Cuban challenge are different from, and in some aspects inverse to
those of the new Latin American revolutionary projects; it seems to me
that they should be directed toward a coupling that will bring the projects
closer in the integration purpose already started. The prospect of preservation,
necessary so as not to introduce costly retreats, would have to
keep in step with that of opening-up . This does not imply a weakening
process of the Common Good, as it may be superficially inferred; on the
contrary, it should strengthen it, as it strips it of erratic regulations (I do
not consider I have to give ludicrous examples of functions concentrated
and centralized on the public sphere which, strictly speaking, do not correspond
to this study).
I would speak like this in relation to the quantum, to the level of local
scenarios, with reference to generalities and excluding the space of
specificities. Not for common goods, but for the Common Good; or perhaps
it would be more accurate to say for one and for the other. However,
there will be no feasible design for the quantum if we lose sight of
the totum. I never refer to that which is general or capable of being generalized,
but to the real, concrete totality: to the world-system such as
it exists and moves. And the world-system has been left immersed in
the most intense of its crisis – a typical capitalist crisis characterized by
Marx – in the context in which it was its lot to live.
The present crisis has its most comprehensive antecedent in the crack
that took place in 1929, even though we can point out at least two significant
recurrences between that situation and the present one. The
most significant was that which took place in the second half of the sixties,
which led Margaret Thatcher to her repeated declaration, “There
is no alternative”, referring to the neo-liberal establishment in the West.
Today the crisis is triggered from a structure different from the world-
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