A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

positive connotation. In Bhutan, under the influence of Buddhism, they
have the notion of happiness, which has been officially adopted as a political
and social objective. These are perhaps small islands in the ocean
of the world market, but they herald the development of a critical vision
of the contemporary model, with a clearly holistic perspective.
Prioritizing use value over exchange value also means rediscovering the
territorial aspect. Globalization has made people forget the virtues of
local proximity in favour of global interchanges, ignoring externalities and
giving primacy to finance capital - the most globalized element of the
economy because of its virtual character. Territorial space, as the site of
economic activities but also of political responsibility and cultural exchanges,
is the place to introduce another kind of rationale. It is not a
matter of reducing the question to a microcosm, but rather to think in
terms of multidimensionality, in which each dimension, from the local
unit to the global sphere, has its function, without destroying the others.
Hence the concepts of food sovereignty and energy sovereignty, by
which trade is subordinated to a higher principle: the satisfaction of the
requirements of the territory’s dimensions (Jean-Philippe Peemans,
2010). In the capitalist perspective, the law of value imposes priority for
commercialization, and hence it gives precedence to the export of crops
over the production of food for local consumption. The concept of ‘food
security’ is not adequate, because it can be ensured by trade that is
based on the destruction of local economies, on the over-specialization
of certain areas of the world, and on globalized transportation that is a
voracious consumer of energy and polluter of the environment.
In the same line of thinking, the move towards regionalization of eco no -
mies on a world scale is a positive step towards delinking from the capitalist
centre that transforms the rest of the world into peripheries (even if
emerging economies). It is also a positive step in relation to both to trade
and the monetary system, as it allows to re-design the globalizing model.
This brings us to practical measures. They are numerous, and we can
give only a few examples here. On the negative side, the predominance
of finance capital cannot be accepted, and for this reason tax havens of
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