WORLD WORLDWIDE RUSSIA News Journal Update - (en) Russia AIT: Down with debt slavery! No debtors, no creditors! (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Mortgages, loans, debts - these words are known to almost every modern person, no

matter where he lives, no matter what language he speaks. It doesn't matter if
you are a believer or an atheist, what political views you hold, what music you
listen to, whether you support football teams or are indifferent to sports, how
you spend your free time, which group of people you belong to according to your
inclinations, interests and sympathies. Every day you think about how you have to
find money for the next mortgage installment. ---- You don't have the money to
keep a roof over your head forever, so you figured it would be better to pay that
money back over a multi-year period. And then ... you will become the owner of
the home. Unless, of course, you have a well-paid job, your income is not eaten
up by inflation, and your house and workplace are not destroyed by artillery,
missiles or aircraft of any state. After all, all the same, you will pay this
money to the one who rents you housing. Often - the same payer of a multi-year
mortgage, like yourself, barely making ends meet.

But in the entrance of your high-rise building, a list of people appeared who did
not pay the rent for the apartment, utility "services" on time. It does not
matter if these payments eat up almost the entire beggarly pension and the person
barely has enough for food. Now these people are debtors, dishonest payers. The
money will be collected from them in court.

This is how most people live in today's world. Not housing, but a car, a country
wooden house, furniture or some other things needed in the household. All of them
are not available to you with your salary, because they are sold at greatly
inflated prices. After all, the owners of a construction company or an enterprise
that produces things you need should make a profit. And now you are no longer
your own. Debt becomes the force that guides your life. Paying off a loan is the
purpose of life. And for her sake, people are ready to work 15 hours a day, seven
days a week, without a break for lunch. Deny yourself proper food and rest. We
are ready to accept the most difficult work with violations of labor protection
standards, a high risk of injury and an immediate threat to life. To endure
humiliation, physical and psychological abuse.

Some sell their bodies, engaging in prostitution, to pay off a loan for a
two-room apartment for themselves and their families. Others, for the same
reason, conclude an agreement and go to war for a large sum. "I can be killed,
maimed, but my family will receive a lot of money, pay off loans and live
normally. Anyway, I won't earn that much anywhere, "they say. Already
politicians, these best specialists in advertising state "goods", are making a
statement about the introduction of credit deferrals for those who are mobilized
into the army.

The credit system turns a person into a creature loyal to the established order
of things, no matter how unfair it may be. Someone becomes loyal to the boss and
is no longer ready to support his workmates in a labor conflict. After all, if
you lose your job, you can no longer pay off your loans. And it is absolutely
difficult in this situation to resist the state, even if it grossly tramples on
your rights and freedoms, which are spelled out in the laws. After all, large
fines for participation in "unauthorized actions", arrests, dismissal from work
for "extremism" can greatly undermine your creditworthiness.

Is it really worth it after that to talk about some kind of "freedom", about
"democracy", which allegedly provides "free choice" for people enslaved by debts?
It would have been just as "reasonable" to speak in the 18th century of free
voting for serfs in Russia and African slaves in the United States. As the
anarchist theorist Pyotr Kropotkin wrote more than a hundred years ago, the
worker "gets into debt and becomes a slave, a banker's slave, just as he had
previously been a seigneur's slave."

Cancellation of the working people's debt obligations to the capitalists and the
state! The transfer to debtor workers of housing and other property taken on a
mortgage, not luxury items. This is what the oppressed working people should
strive for in our time. Those who are exploited for the sake of their
superprofits by the capitalists and bureaucrats. This requirement is important
for anyone who is ready to defend the interests of workers. Who knows our daily
life and has not lost a sense of reality.

Of course, this does not apply to a variety of politicians, whether "left" or
"right", "communist" or "liberal", "patriotic" or looking for a "European way".
These people are not interested in the material interests of the working people.
They only need a struggle for "democracy", that is, guaranteed elections of
themselves for deputies, mayors, governors and presidents. For what their
competitors, the "Putinists", already have - for power over us - working people.
Power that guarantees big money. Therefore, they will never put forward the
slogan of the abolition of mortgage debts - which is relevant in our time for the
working people of all countries and peoples.

But one has only to turn to the history of social movements to see examples of
how people were inspired by the struggle for freedom from debt. Back in the
Middle Ages, the rebellious peasants, having seized the estates of the feudal
lords, first of all destroyed debt securities. The insurgent workers and peasants
did the same in other times. The Paris Commune, proclaimed in 1871, returned to
the poor things pawned in pawnshops for debts. We anarchists remember that our
predecessors fought for the abolition of the workers' debt obligations to the
capitalists during the revolutions of the first half of the 20th century in
Spain, Latin America and Russia.

The same was said by the founders of revolutionary anarchism. "They have no
desire to pay mortgage debts, taxes. Let them not pay them more. Let those of
them who do not want to pay their personal debts should no longer be forced to
pay them," Mikhail Bakunin wrote about the actions of the rebellious French
workers and peasants in 1870.

The same slogan was proclaimed by one of the creators of the theory of anarchist
communism, Pyotr Alekseevich Kropotkin: "The pledge of real estate is a clear
injustice. No one has the right to appropriate your land for lending you money,
because the land acquired its value thanks to the labor of your fathers, who
cultivated it, built villages, built roads, drained swamps; now it produces only
because of your labor. The International will consider it its duty to burn all
mortgage papers and put an end to this shameful institution.

Of course, under the conditions of the state and capitalism, it is impossible to
abolish debt dependence. This is not good for those in power. We, revolutionary
anarchists, believe that this goal can be achieved only by replacing capitalism
and the state with an anarcho-communist society in which production and all
social wealth are in the hands of self-governing labor collectives and
territorial communities - communes, in which every worker has the right to life
and providing for his needs in food, housing, leisure - everything that he has
already "earned" by participating in socially useful work. A society where there
will be neither debtors nor creditors.

Nikolai Svobodin

https://aitrus.info/node/6072
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