cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4822013
I recently bought a course on investing and that is what the course advices for survival under capitalism. Would this come out as being a class traitor? Does it sound snobby? Or is it a good advice?
This is a tired subject. As Deng said, “Poverty is not socialism.” Do not fall into the Western Marxist trap of conflating the Christian veneration of poverty with communism. You live under capitalism, use it. If you have the finances to invest and secure a future for yourself, do it. It’s not a sin to have money and be a communist, it doesn’t make your political beliefs less “pure,” this kind of thinking is imbued with residual Christianity that should be rooted out. There’s a huge difference between “I work for Lockheed Martin and invest in oil companies” and “I buy index funds so maybe I can retire one day.”
You must buy VTI or VOO or VT or you will eventually starve. Millennials are on their own unless there’s a revolution. Even just having social security for millennials feels a revolution away. And I don’t think I’ll ever stop feeling like there’s another 2008 just ahead, at most 3 years away.
Wait what happen back then? I was not living in the USA in 2008
The Great Financial Crash that the world never actually recovered from, just painted over the cracks and pretended everything was okay.
i got bad news for ya brother https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007–2008_financial_crisis
On one hand, investing to not die of poverty is sensible.
on the other:
Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings-bank, and it has even found ready-made a servile art which embodies this pet idea: it has been presented, bathed in sentimentality, on the stage. Thus political economy – despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance – is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do
one has to find some happy medium, if one can afford to invest.Everyone who gets the opportunity should become a bourgeoisie class traitor (as in class traitor to the bourgeoisie). The problem that communism exists to solve is that the bourgeoisie have all the power. Why would you, someone who wants to change society, throw away an opportunity at having more power?
You gotta take care of yourself AND you exist in the time and place in which you exist. Assuming you live in the imperial core like myself, the only possible way you can retire some day is by having investments that you can live off of later. Index funds are a pretty simple and (to my knowledge) reasonably effective way of investing.
Do it if you want to, or don’t, but don’t judge your moral character as a comrade by it.i’d simply not, but i also dont have money
It’s not counter revolutionary to buy SPY omfg lol
Touch grass touch grass touch grass touch grass
Buy index funds, accelerate the process of socialization (half joking, but I read a very funny paper by a Chinese economist arguing basically this)
But also: Could Index Funds Be ‘Worse Than Marxism’? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/the-autopilot-economy/618497/
Lol comrade Jack Bogle
Which paper was this? I am very intrigue to read it
The entire paper isn’t about this, but there is a part where the author deals with stocks.
Hu, Jiayong. ‘Analysis of the Innovation and Development of the Socialist Market Economy Theory’. China Political Economy 2, no. 1 (1 January 2019): 85–97. https://doi.org/10.1108/CPE-04-2019-0006.
IIRC he is referring to this particularly interesting part of capital vol 3, see section: III. Formation of stock companies.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch27.htm
Not only do I passively contribute to genocide and oppression through paying taxes and selling my labor and skills to corporations, but I actively contribute to it as well by investing in an ETF. Yes, the percentage that goes to Lockheed, Raytheon, are tiny, but companies like Google and Amazon and Microsoft are often at the top.
I don’t seek to justify it. I’m just a selfish coward in the imperial core who can’t commit suicide and want to live a comfortable life when I’m older. I don’t really care about the “value” of it dropping or rising like homeowners who have a house as an “investment.” I don’t stare at charts all day long. I just need it to be enough when it’s time and hope I can kill at least one banker in my life time to make up for my sins.
If you’re looking for justifications to sleep at night, just don’t be an obsessive. Save money to invest in mutual/index/ETFs inside a Roth IRA, 401k, and general brokerage account. If you’re checking the price every day, getting angry when someone does praxis and lowers your stocks, and you find yourself being tempted to vote against the workers of the world just to improve your stocks - you may have a problem. Aspire to live, not become rich.
