A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

eality we do have a bottom-up civil society and a top-down one. The
unqualified use of the term makes it possible to create confusion and
present social solutions that overlook class differences. 7 Forms of participatory
democracy, as can be seen in various Latin American countries,
also follow the same logic, that of generalized democracy. Real
independence of the various executive, legislative and juridical powers
is a guarantee that democracy is functioning normally. A democratic
state must also be secular: that is to say, free from the intervention of
religious institutions into the organs of power, whether they are majority
religions or not. This is in fact the basis of religious freedom. This does
not mean a state is so secular as not to acknowledge the public aspect
of the religious factor (the social-ethical dimension of Liberation Theology,
for example) or worse still, as was the case in the countries of ‘real
socialism’, that it imposes atheism as a sort of state religion.
Other institutions should be guided by the same principles. Nothing is
less democratic than the capitalist economic system, with the concentration
of decision-making power in just a few hands. The same goes
for the social communications media and is also applicable to all social,
trade union, cultural, sport and religious institutions.
The notion of non-violence is obviously associated with generalized
democracy. The conflicts in human societies, whether in the family or
at the international level must be resolved by appropriate non-violent
mechanisms, formal or informal. The German sociologist Max Weber’s
concept of ‘legitimate violence’ as a State monopoly is dangerous because
it leads to an easy justification, for example, of the wars in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Libya. However while non-violence is desirable and desired
principle, the reality is that we live in a violent world.
Violence has nearly always been caused by the pursuit of economic and
political hegemony. In modern history, the reproduction of capitalism as
a system was a dominating factor in the exercise of violence, both for
7 A few years ago, on a wall in a popular neighbourhood of Bogotá appeared the slo-
gan: “We, too, have human rights!”
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