I finished this book tonight: Los papeles de Albert Mason, Volumen I: Acción directa económica. It was an unexpectedly great read. I've been gaining interest in anarcho communism and this goes deeper into how to practice anarchism in real life. The key ideas I take from it are:
- Learn about the legal entities made up by the bureaucratic state apparatus in order to play their game with their tools. Sometimes communists and anarchists judge these tools morally and try to stay away from them following purely moral and ideological arguments and stances. But we are participating in these games, whether we want it or not, by imposition.
- One of the main reasons to do this is to use legal entities that allow you to stay insolvent. Debt is part of the game and the systems are designed so that workers are screwed when they get into debts but oligarchs, corrupt officials, and the elites can access ridiculous amounts of debt without having to pay it all back at some point.
- Fractional reserve banking is a ponzi scheme, or if you want to be picky with the term, they even go beyond ponzi schemes. They take your deposits and use that to create money out of nowhere which is then given away as debt and the majority of it is used to sustain capitalist practices. Thus, putting your money in a bank is a bad idea, if you want to practice direct economic action. Saving money to earn a ridiculous interest that is cancelled with inflation is stupid. You either lose value by saving money in a bank or you gain more value by speculating or investing it in something. If you put it in the bank you allow it to multiply it as debt money in favor of the bank only and you let the bank speculate with it in other investments other than debt. You may as well give it away. Crypto is a lesser evil. Crypto is not exempt of capitalist practices, but at least you are not allowing a bank to expand their debt portfolio with your money.
- Build community practices to take direct economic action. After all that is what anarcho communism is all about. It's barely about theory.
- Destruction must be tied to creation. Making a strike, boicoting a brand or a business, expropriation, tax evation, insolvency, etc, are all destructive practices but they don't build anything. If you don't create why you are destroying or resisting, nothing will happen in the long term. Capitalists are even benefited with these things. If a brand or a company is boicoted, the competitors will gain advantage. Insolvency done by people without much capital and access to credit is nothing compared to what big capitalists can do. Destruction and resistance to private property can even get you in jail and nothing may change. It's not enough to beat authority, you also have to beat the need or the desire for authority, expropriation is not enough if you don't build alternatives to appropriation. Avoiding taxes is meaningless if you don't build self-managed public services and common infrastructure in your community, i.e., if you don't build the obsolescence of the capitalist state.
There are so many more things I'd like to mention but these are the main things I can remember in detail at the moment. You should read the book and we should take direct economic action together in all of the communities we participate in. Even here in hive, which is actually very much a system that allows capitalist and elitist practices. The (in)famous whales and their ridiculous power, the incentive of creating superficial and viral content which regulates our speech through capitalism, are two things I can mention right now.
