No Stupid Questions

this, but zoom out. network with your friends and neighbors to share resources. do your best to trade services in kind rather than money. every time you get what you need without resorting to the market, you've cut out governments and corporations that don't actually do anything for you. Maybe you need clothes and you can't sew, but you can grow and can food. The guy down the street can't work in a garden because his back's fucked up, but he can sew. Maybe you have to buy the fabric from a real store, but then you take the fabric and some jarred tomato sauce to him, and he gives you back something you can wear. He also gives you the jars back when he's done with them, so you can fill them again without having to buy more from the market. Bit of an injury? The other neighbor lady is an RN. She can't save you if you're having a heart attack but she can put in and take out stitches, help relocate a dislocated joint and all sorts of other stuff. She needs her driveway shoveled though, and you can't do it because you're injured but you can make bread, so you give some dope ass cheese bread to the kids that live across the way and they do it. The key here is small groups where people actually know one another with repeated interactions. Capitalism thrives when both sides of the equation have to balance out immediately, because the person you're dealing with is a stranger and is likely to disappear as soon as the deal is done. If you float him when he's short he'll never come back around to make it right. A community economy thrives when everyone in it knows that they're going to see the same people regularly, because that means Pete doesn't have to pay me for this food today. He's Pete. He has lived right down the street for years and he's gonna keep living right down the street for years, and he'll make things right eventually. He'll also float me when I'm the one short, and trust me to make things right eventually. This is how humans interacted economically for a very, very long time. Favors and even giveaways were their own sort of currency.

This is extra tough nowadays, because participating in the capitalist economy is not optional. We can provide some things for one another, but the alternative power structure isn't mature enough that we can realistically feed, house and clothe one another without resorting to the market. So you avoid the market when you can. Trade with your neighbors, do them favors, encourage them to do you favors. When you do have to participate in capitalism, buy unrefined, raw goods where you can and refine them yourself. Each step of refinement that a product goes through has to be profitable for the refiner, so the more refinement a product has gone through the more cost in excess of value is tacked on. Simply put: under capitalism a loaf of bread has to cost more than the ingredients and time it takes to make it or no one would bother to make and sell bread. But we can't all be wheat farmers. So you buy flour, and you deny them the profit of refinement. You buy fabric from the capitalists and put your own time and effort into making that fabric into clothes. You buy a tomato seedling for a couple bucks and you use the only thing that's 100% yours, the sweat of your brow, to turn that seedling into tomatoes. You get real simple and real friendly with the people around you, and you figure out every way you're capable of to avoid the power structure they've built around you and instead to use the power structure that you've built with a small group of people that actually give a fuck about one another. Limit your interfacing with the dominant power structure to strict necessity. And steal from walmart.