In the absence of a real alternative, I don’t think offering investing advice goes against leftist beliefs. After the Revolution, we can do away with investing altogether. But that Revolution is not yet here, and neither is the welfare of Retirement that brings.
All Workers must leech from each other to survive in Capitalism, so long as it exists, unless their wages are high enough that they may ensure their future subsistence through savings alone.
I agree that we must move against it, but participation is a necessary sin.
My point is more that what @[email protected] was offering initially, ie Personal Finance advice, is the necessary sin. Capitalism has made it necessary that Workers in the Imperial Core engage with it ruthlessly to ensure their own existence, there is no path outside of this unless you earn so much individually that you can avoid it.
We agree in concept, but I believe you place more of an emphasis on Moralism. If you’re arguing for Means/Ends unity, ie we must live and construct our goals in the same manner presently as we build them to ensure the ends match the means, then that’s a separate argument.
Marx engaged in stock market speculation for his own personal enrichment. Marx isn’t some moral guideline everyone must follow, of course, but it does call into question the position that leftists must avoid basic personal finance strategies.
All the financial guidance they offered lead to marginal gains from the back of the working class, I’d rather fight the people outside of the bucket instead of all my fellow crabs
All the basic personal finance strategies they offer force the working class to infighting while the ruling class skim the cream from the top
There’s a difference between doing what you
must and capitulating to the ruling class
What is it, to sin? Materially, I mean. Investing in the stock market enriches oneself on the backs of labor, but we must see these movements as aggregates. From the whole of Value contributed, a Proletarian that eventually makes enough to retire has taken back what has been taken from them. Investing for a Proletarian is a means of taking from the system of Capital the value taken from their labor.
Individual acts do not exist. Everything is in motion, guided by the past, shaping the future. A proletarian investing in the context of Capitalism is ultimately still contributing far more to Capitalists than they have taken back for themselves. A Bourgeois investor who does no labor and instead seeks accumulation is not the same as a Proletarian who, bit by bit, claws back the Value they have created and had stolen from them.
Again, aggregates and totals. A proletarian will not reach the level of their oppressors without extreme effort, and though this sum investment comes from the workers, they themselves are a worker and are clawing back what was taken. You are asking them to not claw anything back, but be beaten and stomped for the sake of solidarity. This mere self-flaggelation is not an act of leftism, but Moralism.
Moralism is a dead end, materially. We must all do what we can, but we must acknowledge the Material reality of why Capitalism itself is unjust, yet Marx avoided moral arguments for it.
I’ll leave this with a great quote about Marx: “The moment anyone started to talk to Marx about morality, he would roar with laughter.”
I completely disagree. Doing what you must to survive is not against any of the socialist principles that I follow. In a similar way, as a vegan, I don’t think it is against the principles of veganism to kill and eat a wild animal (or a fellow human) if you are in a situation where that is literally the only way to survive. Every person, and every thing on this planet, has the fundamental right to fight for their own existence even at the detriment of others, and to me that principle outweighs all else. It is in the absence of necessity that other principles, such as those that say murder is wrong and that it is wrong to benefit from the work of others, come into play.
Doing what you must to survive is not against any leftist principle, but trying to maximize your personal profits from someone else’s work is, that’s my whole fucking thesis
But maximizing your personal profits is doing what you must to survive, and even then it might not be enough. No matter how efficiently you optimize your investments, at least on my income or equivalent, or (as horrific as it is to imagine) less income than me, one bad ambulance ride can put you into crippling debt from which you will never recover. Under capitalism, you’re never secure unless you’re literally a capitalist. A worker like me cannot amass enough of a safety net to be 99% safe such that further optimization of income ceases to be justifiable as necessity and becomes unnecessary seeking of profit.
I’m not saying that having a 401k makes you a bad communist, I’m saying that it’s against our beliefs
In the absence of a real alternative, I don’t think offering investing advice goes against leftist beliefs. After the Revolution, we can do away with investing altogether. But that Revolution is not yet here, and neither is the welfare of Retirement that brings.
If you are willing to leech from other workers, go for it
All Workers must leech from each other to survive in Capitalism, so long as it exists, unless their wages are high enough that they may ensure their future subsistence through savings alone.
I agree that we must move against it, but participation is a necessary sin.
That’s what I’ve tried to say the whole time, some participation is impossible to avoid, but it’s still against the principles
My point is more that what @[email protected] was offering initially, ie Personal Finance advice, is the necessary sin. Capitalism has made it necessary that Workers in the Imperial Core engage with it ruthlessly to ensure their own existence, there is no path outside of this unless you earn so much individually that you can avoid it.
We agree in concept, but I believe you place more of an emphasis on Moralism. If you’re arguing for Means/Ends unity, ie we must live and construct our goals in the same manner presently as we build them to ensure the ends match the means, then that’s a separate argument.
Marx engaged in stock market speculation for his own personal enrichment. Marx isn’t some moral guideline everyone must follow, of course, but it does call into question the position that leftists must avoid basic personal finance strategies.
All the financial guidance they offered lead to marginal gains from the back of the working class, I’d rather fight the people outside of the bucket instead of all my fellow crabs
All the basic personal finance strategies they offer force the working class to infighting while the ruling class skim the cream from the top
There’s a difference between doing what you must and capitulating to the ruling class
What is it, to sin? Materially, I mean. Investing in the stock market enriches oneself on the backs of labor, but we must see these movements as aggregates. From the whole of Value contributed, a Proletarian that eventually makes enough to retire has taken back what has been taken from them. Investing for a Proletarian is a means of taking from the system of Capital the value taken from their labor.
Individual acts do not exist. Everything is in motion, guided by the past, shaping the future. A proletarian investing in the context of Capitalism is ultimately still contributing far more to Capitalists than they have taken back for themselves. A Bourgeois investor who does no labor and instead seeks accumulation is not the same as a Proletarian who, bit by bit, claws back the Value they have created and had stolen from them.
Again, aggregates and totals. A proletarian will not reach the level of their oppressors without extreme effort, and though this sum investment comes from the workers, they themselves are a worker and are clawing back what was taken. You are asking them to not claw anything back, but be beaten and stomped for the sake of solidarity. This mere self-flaggelation is not an act of leftism, but Moralism.
Moralism is a dead end, materially. We must all do what we can, but we must acknowledge the Material reality of why Capitalism itself is unjust, yet Marx avoided moral arguments for it.
I’ll leave this with a great quote about Marx: “The moment anyone started to talk to Marx about morality, he would roar with laughter.”
You either haven’t read my posts or are intentionally misreading them
There’s things we must do to survive, and there’s things we can do ignoring the survival and well-being of others
If the only way to win is to become the oppressors, we lose by default
I completely disagree. Doing what you must to survive is not against any of the socialist principles that I follow. In a similar way, as a vegan, I don’t think it is against the principles of veganism to kill and eat a wild animal (or a fellow human) if you are in a situation where that is literally the only way to survive. Every person, and every thing on this planet, has the fundamental right to fight for their own existence even at the detriment of others, and to me that principle outweighs all else. It is in the absence of necessity that other principles, such as those that say murder is wrong and that it is wrong to benefit from the work of others, come into play.
Doing what you must to survive is not against any leftist principle, but trying to maximize your personal profits from someone else’s work is, that’s my whole fucking thesis
But maximizing your personal profits is doing what you must to survive, and even then it might not be enough. No matter how efficiently you optimize your investments, at least on my income or equivalent, or (as horrific as it is to imagine) less income than me, one bad ambulance ride can put you into crippling debt from which you will never recover. Under capitalism, you’re never secure unless you’re literally a capitalist. A worker like me cannot amass enough of a safety net to be 99% safe such that further optimization of income ceases to be justifiable as necessity and becomes unnecessary seeking of profit.
I’m not going to stop you if you want to profit from the work of others, I’m too busy stealing from my employer
But it doesn’t change the theory, maximizing your personal profits without working for it is antithetical to socialism