The Postcapitalist paradigm – Daiber and Houtart ed.

Common Good

2009 UN Stiglitz commission created a Universal Declaration of the Common Good

The philosopher Geraint Hardin first wrote about the Tragedy of the Commons – empty land is wasted land and everything becomes merchandise. An example is the C18th enclosures of UK common land. Human life becomes commodified. Hence in 1998 Riccardo Petrella introduces the idea of the Common Good as a counterbalance to neoclassical views of welfare.

Financial capital becomes more profitable than real capital. If capital is the engine of the economy then profit drives the accumulation of capital. Example – Food prices: 2007-8, they double, why?

Agrofuels based on maize

EU has said that by 2020 20% of fuel needs to be agrofuel. This has created speculative shifts in production.

Externalities (external costs not paid by the consumer or producer) of intensive production e.g. deforestation. In Malaysia and Indonesia 80% of forest has been destroyed to produce agrofuels. We might argue: “Agrofuel prodcution follows the laws of capitalist economies and ignores social costs”. Discuss.

Estimated that 50 m more people fell into poverty as a result. 20% of the world’s population consumes 80% of the world’s resources.

“The economic rationality of capitalism not only tends to deprive a large majority of the world’s population of their lives, but it destroys the natural life that surrounds us’. 2011 Dierckxsens

Four problems of the traditional economic view of rationality and self-interest:

1. It ignores externalities
2. It sees the planet as having infinite resources
3. It prioritises exchange value over use value
4. It sees capital and its returns as the priority and so produces enormous inequality

Common good needs

a. A new production model – use value above exchange value (useful for life rather than for a transaction). In capitalism ‘ a good or service that cannot be exchanged into merchandise has no value’. In the new model the market serves human needs, it does not generate them artificially by advertising.

b. Collective organisation replacing individualism. The moral economy with new values for example, consumers who co-operate together to negotiate lower prices for green, carbon neutral fuel sources.

c. A new relationship with nature Climate Summit – Cochabamba 2010 “Living well’ replaces ‘growing fast’.

d. A new symbolic framework – harmony and reverence as values we all share.