A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

say, but its materialization covers all the fundamental challenges for the
generations that enter the XXI Century as full adults or as they are leaving
youth behind.
The paradigm of modernity, which caused the longitude of the man-nature
axis to increase, surpassed the coordinates of capitalism in order
to reproduce itself in the socialist experiment of the XX century and to
still prevail in the world-system in our time. Modernity is the result and
expression of capitalism, and there is no doubt about the legitimacy of
this identification. However, it would be advisable to avoid reducing
modernity to capitalism, no matter how paradoxical this may seem. This
distinction implies scientific and technological modernity, and it is necessary
to find (without rethorical forcibleness) the resources that can
make it transcend the logic that creates it in order to recover it as an
´other´ modernity in the search for a better world. We are not only before
a deformation of XX Century capitalist modernity; this has a similar effect
on the devices on which the socialist experiment of that very century
was organized. Let us remember that one of the unresolved tasks is the
in-depth, unprejudiced investigation of the recovery of liberal values contributed
by encyclopedists and whose rescue, initiated by Marx himself,
was disallowed by his successors. So, superseding capitalist modernity
and restoring the positive aspects of the liberal thinking that preceded
Marxism constitute an unquestionable challenge for us.
Houtart reminds us that “the paradigm of human development of mo -
dernity is a paradigm of unlimited material and scientific progress, on an
inexhaustible planet, at the exclusive disposal of human beings so as to
always enjoy goods and services more freely.” What is evident is the
need and possibility of setting up a new paradigm. A paradigm based
on the criticism of political economy (the new and the old criticism), on
Marx ´s theory and on the valid corollaries that can be drawn from the
developments made of it by its followers (and even the criticisms made
by some adversaries), all of which contribute an essential precedent,
though still a precedent. It is not enough to join Houtart in stating that:
The new paradigm poses, as a fundamental option, balanced social dy-
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