A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

ency. This enables the United States to impose on the rest of the world
the terms of a capitulation that obliges them to pursue neoliberal policies,
as well as supporting the dollar’s rate of exchange that best suits
the strategy of US domination, which entails a considerable depreciation
of the currency reserves held by the monetary authorities of other countries,
like China.
The United States thinks that a depreciated dollar will reabsorb their
trade deficit and stimulate their internal production. This is incorrect, for
we have been seeing for years that these variables react very little, indeed
less and less, to the lowering of the dollar value. The result is very
weak growth in the United States, which is almost stagnation. But it will
be said that the growth of the neoliberal regime was already feeble: this
is true, but the situation has worsened because the causes are now due
to problems of the whole system of the financing of economies.
Another related upheaval is also taking place in the raw materials markets,
particularly in oil, against a background of the exhaustion of world
energy reserves, which is provoking the current meteoric rise in prices.
b. As we know, the worst consequences of the real effects of the crisis
are borne by the poorest of the popular classes, creating enormous damage,
including in the United States, which is still the top economy in the
world, but displaying very bad social indicators com-pared with the other
rich countries of the North (for life expectancy, infant mortality rates, the
right to health and even education).
The damage also includes, in the North, a generalized mal vivre, particularly
at work (for those who have it), including the phenomenon of individuals
having psychological break-downs to the point of suicides, as
has been observed by industrial health specialist. I am referring here to
the combined effects of the threat of unemployment and the methods
of individual evaluation, causing competition among workers within the
same production unit, thus breaking the ties of respect, loyalty, solidarity
and conviviality. Hence the distrust among workers, surveillance, autocontrol
and fear at work. Pathologies of loneliness have appeared, accompanied
by feelings of moral betrayal of oneself, an awareness of the
lies about total quality and certification by the market, in worlds where
the collective spaces for thinking and acting together are being reduced,
98