A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

seems to me to be of the utmost immediate importance. Here I refer to
that which I neither can nor want to identify with any other name than
that of the transition. The concept of transition has had polemic development,
mainly after the passage from the eighties to the nineties (and
particularly since the very year of 1990).
North American political science appropriated the concept to characterize
the supplantation of Latin American dictatorships by liberal democratic
regimes that favoured the “lightening” of the public sector in
benefit of privatizations and the support of resigned impoverishment
with the palliative of the alternation of the parties in power. So once this
concept was established in US political science in the second half of the
eighties to magnify the virtues of this change of direction in the political
and legal superstructure of Latin American periphery (O´Donnell and
Schmitter 179 ), it was transplanted very rapidly to define similarly the capitalist
regression which “real socialism” was beginning to experience –
let us remember that this was the name given to the regime led by
Moscow until the end of the eighties.
This was a curious process of the misappropriation of a concept that
had been previously credited in social science to explain the movements
of passing from onesocio-economic system to a new one replacing it.
It was first used by Marx to refer to the passage of the feudal mode of
production to the capitalist one in Europe, and afterwards, emphatically,
– in his Margin Notes to the Programme of the German Working
Party, in the Congress at Gotha (1875) –, to characterize the sequence
of changes of all types that were evidently indispensable in the period
between the supersedence of capitalism and the configuration of socialism.
This connotation, as used by Marx, seemed to have been forgotten,
and it was assumed that the term could be only applied to the
processes heading towards capitalism in economy, and towards liberal
bourgeois institutional building and thinking in politics.
179 See Guillermo O´Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter: Transitions from Authoritarian
Rule, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1986.
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