A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

too). Besides, three-quarters of these people are peasants. The extension
of lands being put under cultivation at the world level is accompanied
by the reduction of peasant populations vis-à-vis those of the cities,
which are absorbing the rural exodus. An increasing proportion of land
is being cultivated by the transnationals, who no longer aim at producing
for consumption but for industrial or energy outlets. In most of the countries
of the South that are excluded from the benefits of ‘globalization’,
a (relative) dynamism in agricultural exports from commercially grown
crops coexists with the importation of basic food products.
And here I would even suggest interpreting the events that are shaking
the Arab-Muslim world (without, of course, underestimating their complexity)
as being related to a capitalism that has destroyed their structures
over a long period as well as the neoliberal form of this capitalism
that has created, under the cover of ‘good governance’, the basis for
the current social explosion, particularly the precipitous rise in the prices
of food products. At this moment imperialism is watching carefully.
c. But apart from that, it would seem that the conditions are combining
so that a major consequence of the crisis could be the deepening of the
North-South confrontation – in spite of the cooptation of the ‘G20’. The
North-South confrontation is taking place in a world where the levels of
contradiction are becoming more and more complex: contradictions between
the ruling classes and the classes they dominate, between the
different ruling classes that control the State, between the countries of
the South themselves, but with a relative predominance at the moment
of the contradictions between ruling classes, together with the rise of
the so-called ‘emerging’ countries.
Internally the path chosen by a large majority of these ruling classes is
that of capitalism, or one of its variants. But, not only is there no way
out by this path because the resolving of the contradictions produced
by capitalism is absolutely impossible in the South, but it leads them
into conflict with the imperialist powers of the North. One of the risks
weighing on the popular struggles in the South is to see their resistance
taken over, neutralized and transformed into pro-systemic forces by the
ruling classes, while these ruling classes in the South, above all those
which have the most consistent and rational strategy (as in China) will
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