I hate the whole publicly traded model of companies. I hate capitalism. But have to engage in trading stocks (I mostly do Mutual Funds and a small quantity of direct stocks) so that my money doesn't lose value by sitting in a bank or cash.
Same thing with credit cards, don't like taking loans and getting marked on a centralised list for that but it's a safer option than using your own money.
Fortunately I don't do crypto so that's a plus.
Saying "I wish capitalism didn't exist" isn't praxis.
We've got to work with the world as she exists.
Don’t beat yourself up. The fractional harm that your meager efforts to not get wiped the fuck out by inflation cause is comparable to every other type of consumption under capitalism.
You have to live and living means participating in your society. When does that effort to continue existing cross over into the lying and self dealing that, for example, people into effective altruism are famous for?
I don’t know where that line is, but you’ll figure it out.
I feel better about credit cards when I pay my balance and full and every time I use cash back, knowing that I'm not causing them to make any money, and I'm actually costing them some money.
Yeah pretty much how I use them. But I'm pretty sure they earn money from every transaction or the whole thing would not exist.
you live by others labour , it is dirty .
and it will always be Dirty .. there is no escape to the Fact that you live Parasiticlly from other peoples Labour .. the ONLY avenue you have is the Avenue of Hirachy and Elitism.
You can start to consider yourself much more important then those that labour .. Of better Ideology ..Birth ... Culture ..Race ... Personal Biographie etc..
When you do that it will not feel so dirty anymore . but you will be then Dirty for others. So no escape from the Dirt without Abandoning Passiv income.
EDIT: Also you reduce it .. like a Hole Factory / Company all its Employees , there dreams and Hopes ... compressed into this crudes form.
He's not living off other people's labour. He's using it as a bank, cutting out the bank in the middle to maintain above inflation rates of interest.
If you're using a bank the bank is doing the exact same thing putting your money in stocks too.
nope . you can not trade without a Bank . And the Stocks Dividence come from other Peoples Labour.
this coment was not meant in a "fronting" / "personal" manner at all , obviously i dont demand he stop ,(what would that do? We live in a Society ) I dont follow vegan logic of personal Purity) . I simply explained that he feels dirty because it is Dirty.
When you live from other Peoples Labour, it is Dirty .. and the More you life by other Peoples Labour the More Dirty you become.
if it would not be dirty , he would not have felt it .
Ipso facto .
Get into highly leveraged options trading, you'll be too busy feeling other emotions from that to feel any guilt
there's mutual funds and ETFs that invest solely in ESG (environmental, social, and governance) funds. i honestly don't know if it's just marketing ploy or what but i know they're a thing and might be worth looking into [edit: i looked into these. they're a ploy. don't buy these. it's just S&P 500 shit with 4-10x the expense ratio]
finance capitalism is all dirty and bad. 401ks + others are just a trick to make people care about the market when it literally ONLY helps rich ppl and no one else. best to just do a total market fund try not to think about it so much.
hysa's are worse imo. they take your money and gamble the ever living fuck out of it a million times over until the economy collapses.
You have to be careful with those. I looked into something like that and the page about their principles touted opposition to nuclear power. Looked into who was running the fund and sure enough, big oil.
i went ahead and pulled some up ESGs out of curiosity to look at the holdings. ESGV, SDG, NUDV.
primary holdings were shit like microsoft, nvidia, tesla, amgen, novartis, home depot, johnson john, coca cola, etc. it's literally just S&P 500 but with like 4-10x the expense ratio.
fucking. lol.
A lot of the ESG stuff is shell companies owned by the usual suspects that technically don't do anything because it is literally just a shell company for Exxon or something.
I saw this post an hour ago but went past it because I thought it said socks instead of stocks and I was confused
You cant just deposit your money with an institution that will match inflation? Here in Chile you can get a Deposito a plazo en UF and forget about it
Not really. You can buy gold bonds or invest in mutual funds or fixed/recurring deposits in my country. Don't think there is a inflation matching thing here.
You cant just deposit your money with an institution that will match inflation?
You literally fucking can't in my country. They've had some smaller scale sells of government bonds but you can't really do that in a bank on a regular basis, all you get are their garbage investment funds or a savings account with like 0.2% APY.
Deposito a plazo en UF
that sounds great, things like this used to exist in clapistan, however if you want to play at making passive income like our overlords you must now gamble
There's "I bonds" if you live in the states, but they don't pay much.
If I were you, I'd rather just keep the money itself as is, not trading stocks or using credit cards...
I honestly have no experience with that sort of thing and rather not go through the mental gymnastics to do so, regardless of how my money depreciates and how safe using credit cards is...
I'd just want a simple life... don't want to overcomplicate shit as I do...
I get it but it's simply not feasible. Every rupee I earn will be devalued continuously. The government in my country has also brought in massive inflation since 2014 and it only gets worse as the currency is weakening and the country is being sold off to capitalists.
Damn it, I have no business advising you, considering I've not experienced the same situation...
Yes, it sucks, but no way around it if you ever want to be able to retire. My employer pays double my pension contributions, so I've got that accumulating, and when I have enough in the pot I'll transfer it to a private pension and invest it myself as ethically as I can.
Unfortunately there is a tonne of greenwashing and lip service paid to ESG requirements, together with the high fees and lower returns means they aren't really worth it. Plus in a fund, yeah you get diversity, but no discretion if you want to participate in boycotts, and on a macro scale it makes fund managers too powerful.
But also no-one take advice from me I am literally still waiting until I have enough to minimise the fees before managing my own pension.
Hot take: trying to make your 401k investments "ethical" is exactly the same as voting for Biden because he's the lesser evil.
OK, I will just sell my house when I retire and then die when I run out of money.
Look at this bourgeois, owning houses. I bet you have your own toothbrush, too
Trading stocks on speculation is just gambling against the random nature of the market. It's no different than going to a blackjack table and can be fun (also dangerous and addicting). You're not engaging in capitalism you're engaging in a game with other players (traders).
Owning stocks like in a 401k investment account is different. I won't do it. At least with pensions (i.e. a pension fund) you could gain some sort of political purpose through its corporate and government investments. This led to famous instances of corruption, as well, but it still demonstrates the political power of the investment.
The 401k destroyed that. It's now just all of the rent seeking with none of the voice. Pure liberalism. They're literally passing laws in states right now that make it ILLEGAL to consider what you're investing in and if it's an ethical business or not.
Saying that you have to invest in stocks or else you'll lose money is like saying you have to vote for Biden or else you'll lose rights. I don't really give a shit if you do either, and your personal situation is something I don't know about. But both should make you feel dirty, yes.
Owning stocks isn't just existing under capitalism. This isn't treat discourse. You're not buying an Xbox that someone was exploited into making. When you own a stock, you are the capitalist. Owning part of the company gives you a part of what's taken from the employees or others, directly. A lot of common retirement investment is with large funds that own real estate. When you get your 5% return on your investment it's not just magically growing on a tree. It's coming from rents.
There's no functional difference to buying a $200,000 apartment and renting it out as a landlord or putting $200,000 in a 401k managed retirement fund that owns several hundred apartments buildings. And they do.
There are more ethical ways to invest money than owning stocks.
Individual, alienated, consumer decisions are ethical? This is what happens when no class analysis. Landlords aren't bad because they make money from rents. Landlords are bad because their interests align with the interests of the ruling class, and they oppose the interests of the working class, who they exploit as a class. the contingent material realities of owning property for the sole purpose of getting personal income has the effect of changing peoples beliefs and behaviors. The system warps their worldview and pits them against the workers, but it is the system that benefits one class by exploiting another that is the enemy, not individual landlords. It is the system that alienates and exploits.
There are undoubtedly evil, unethical people who are drawn to real estate and speculation, and I would have serious reservations calling the bourgeois capitalist executive of some giant real estate development/property management company a "good person." But an individual owner of a 200k property (which is essentially nothing, a tiny house far from any urban area), which may have come to them through a lifetime of earnings, or just lucked into it or inherited it from a family member, is not by default a class enemy or individually ontologically evil. They may become that, though owning a single small property wouldn't produce much income; forcing them to either sell or expand with the market.
I really don't see the point of lecturing somebody over a fucking 401k. Must be nice living in a perfectly hermetically sealed ethical bubble, into which no evil ever permeates. People out here calling themselves leftists while recreating the underlying logic of religious purity politics.
Landlords aren't bad because they make money from rents.
I’m sorry, what? Any form of unearned income (i.e. not producing any real goods/services) is fundamentally taking away from productive investment and therefore bad.
Let’s not even talk about class interests or exploitation for the moment. If you spend 30% of your income on paying rent, you now have 30% less money to spend on real goods and services, spending that actually keep the local economy going and circulated into the hands of the working people.
Instead, 30% of that money (and that’s a huge proportion in aggregate of the whole population) are being funneled to the top 1%, most of whom will not re-invest into their local community or economy. Instead, those money will be spent on driving up even higher property prices, which in turn makes rent and mortgage more expensive for everyone else.
But yes, most people investing in 401k aren’t even anywhere close to the obscene amount of wealth of the top 1%. So there’s no point scolding them. However, the point that landlord’s rent seeking behavior isn’t “bad” is just pure nonsense.
The original argument was "any form of investment is a form of rent seeking, land lords are rent seeking, landlords are bad, so investment is bad."
I didn't say landlords aren't bad, I said that what makes them bad isn't their individual consumer decisions, but the decisions they are likely to make with the ruling class against our working class.
When I'm talking to other leftists I'm hoping that we share some common values. My fear is that we share values but we don't understand the material circumstances from which those values manifest. There is a reason we are against private property, rent seeking, etc., but it isn't ethical. We use a materialist dialectic. If not we are no different from religious zealots and liberals. Our beliefs aren't shibboleths, they emerge out of revolutionary necessity. I'm not picking friends or people I agree with, I'm trying to engage with messy, contradiction laden politics; History, not dogma.
The action of rent seeking is bad, but it doesn't make someone a class enemy by sheer virtue. It dehumanizes over time, people become class enemies, they arent born evil. And people can change. All I was saying was there are cases where regular people are just going along with what their material circumstances dictate, like op, and there's absolutely no point in trying to make them feel bad about it or alienate them from the broader movement. We should be bringing people in, not locking people out. This is an ethical value that I believe more than nit picking their investments or lack thereof. If we don't understand why rent seeking is bad, then we end up making lousy formulations like the one I was responding to.
When you quote me like that its like you're just trying to misconstrue what I'm trying to say, and I don't know what the point of that would even be. The post I was responding to used a really bad example, with the $200k investment even, so it was clear to me where they were coming from. You seem to want to make it look like I'm saying being a landlord is okay. What I'm saying is that if you ever want to get something done politically for the working class, you will have to do it in a way that splits the petty bourgeoisie; and the only way to do that is by objectively understanding and appealing to their material interests, and not alienating them as individuals. And that is never gonna happen when your method of critique coarsely amounts to "Landlords bad."
What I'm saying is that if you ever want to get something done politically for the working class, you will have to do it in a way that splits the petty bourgeoisie; and the only way to do that is by objectively understanding and appealing to their material interests, and not alienating them as individuals. And that is never gonna happen when your method of critique coarsely amounts to "Landlords bad."
this is Tailism, plain and simple. we won't ever unite the 'workers of the world' by adopting less rigorous theory and softening our platform for the benefit of whatever portion of the 'petty bourgeoisie' is more centrist/fascist than right/fascist, especially if we are trying to 'appeal to their material interests'. the 'petty bourgeoisie' do not have the same material interests as the proletariat, they are in fact diametrically opposed. first world workers at least, especially 'labor aristocracy' or 'petty bourgeoisie' will necessarily have a decrease in their material comfort and economic 'well-being' in the case of revolutionary world communism, they have an unequal share of the world's wealth as imperialist citizens. any bourgeois class traitors should be using their unearned wealth for the cause, not to grant them the most comfortable life they can get under the circumstances. if you are investing a bunch of money, put it towards strike funds or something, not just your retirement.
You're right, the petty bourgeoisie will have to work with the proletariat to abolish their class, just as the proletariat will have to work to abolish our class. They will have to work against their interests as capitalists. This has happened before and it will happen again, because if revolution is to happen it will be a necessity. So "appealing to" material interests as capitalists is impossible, I agree. But unless you plan on guillotining millions of people, there will have to be an appeal to a material interest that emerges as a contradiction to their interests as capitalists, that will emerge from the struggle for revolutionary conditions. So you caught me out on a technicality, but my point still stands. The mass movement will include people who are from the petty bourgeois classes, unless you disqualify them from it on essentialist grounds. If you can't deal with contradiction in your analysis then you're not doing critical analysis, you're participating in an aesthetic.
the point i meant to make is that class traitors cannot be motivated by material gain, because they will never get it under communism. we have to unite everyone that actually does stand to gain to implement communism, diluting our methods and platform so that lanyards can stay comfy is not communism. no one is disqualifying class traitors, but they absolutely cannot be primarily or even partially motivated by material gains for themselves, because they will choose capitalism over communism every time in that case, they will misinterpret theory and dilute the cause and message. paying into your 401k for your retirement is not revolutionary, it is normal selfish behavior. it doesn't disqualify you from participating in revolution, but is not itself a revolutionary activity.
Only if you limit "material interests" to the realm of capital. As materialists, we only deal with material interests, and those interests include the realm of social interests.
But I can think of historical examples too. During the Minneapolis uprising of 1934, the Teamsters shut down all trucking within the city that attempted to ship goods without the truckers union. One of the groups that emerged was petty agricultural producers that trucked their own agricultural goods to markets. The Teamsters gave these petty producers passes to truck their goods, which while keeping the food supply for the city available so that people wouldn't starve, it also split these petty producers from the reactionary forces. I can think of a more recent example in Seattle with the campaign to pass a $15 minimum wage. small restaurant owners were allowed a few years to implement those changes whereas other cities which required an across the board implementation for small businesses as well as large ones, the campaigns failed or were quickly rolled back. And no, neither of those movements were revolutionary (though the teamsters rebellion was pretty spicy) but they were progress for workers that was only successful by splitting the petty bourg by making concessions to their material interests.
And maybe this is where we diverge as communists, as I don't see a road to actual communism that comes from an uncompromising adherence to the maximum program. Its politics all the way down.
My point in the post above is more directed toward the creation of a socialist material interest that supercedes capitalist material interests, but I can support both perspectives given the right historical circumstances and a powerful materialist dialectic
Maybe you can enlighten me on more ethical ways to invest my money because at this point I think not putting money into a 401k is a terrible financial decision.
Tax deferred compounding interest is too good of a deal for the average person to pass up. Over 30 years you'll be looking at anywhere from 100-150% return on investment.
$50 a paycheck for 30 years with 5% avg return turns your $39k total contributions into $100k in retirement savings. $100 turns $78k in total contributions into $200k savings.
For many people who find saving difficult, me included, being able to set it and forget it, plus the understanding it needs to be for retirement to get the full return, has allowed me to save money I would have spent/wasted otherwise.
Due to the compounding factor, the sooner a person starts the better the return, so to discourage young people to not put money into a 401k is IMO actively harmful.
IMO It's like telling someone they shouldn't have health insurance. Yeah it's bullshit that society forces us to participate in a fucked up system but not having it puts future you at a terrible risk.
Just to clarify: a 401k is just a savings account that is tax deferred. By itself that doesn't make any money or interest. Most people then take that money and have it invested. That's what I'm commenting on.
The return in a 401k is from (typically) a managed fund or an index fund. It's a good return, as you note. That's because it's largely from rent extraction.
It's a great deal if you are ok with functionally owning a small apartment in some other state where a family pays half their paycheck so that you get your 5% return on investment. But know that is what is happening.
The whole "I have no other choice" position is past any point I'm trying to make. I don't know anyone's specific situation.
What are ethical ways people could/should invest their money into instead?
I'm not going to ever be a landlord, but I want to retire at the point.
To be clear you don't need to have money invested/growing in order to retire. You just need money. Putting $50 in a jar is still $50 you'll have in retirement to spend on something. Nothing unethical about that.
But to counter inflation and sometimes just for the sake of wanting more, you can take an additional step of investing your money so that it makes more money. That passive income needs to come from somewhere.
If you invest in stocks, it's coming from the company's exploitation of its workers to generate profits (in addition to other rent seeking behavior; many companies own sizable real estate investments).
If you invest in real estate, it's coming from rents.
If you invest in funds, it probably owns stocks or real estate.
What you're really asking for is a way to generate passive income without exploiting anyone. But this is a solved problem. The answer is a government entitlement program that folks can pay into (i.e. Social Security). It's just been gutted by Congress. Did they remove the only general ethical option for investing for retirement? Maybe.
This isn't to say there aren't places where each of us feel we could put our money and have it grow without feeling part of something unethical. Maybe a local business could use an investment and be happy to pay back interest. Some folks are morally opposed to government bonds but I think they're fine as an option.
And thinking of investments outside of the box a bit can help too. Spending money today to upgrade or buy better things can itself have a future return on investment and be equally good of an investment strategy than putting money in a savings account.
I would at least sympathize with the idea that in a worthwhile society someone who has served the country their entire life deserves a dignified retirement funded by people of working age. Insofar as that goes, the money in a 401k doesn't grow on trees, but it's still a reasonable way to appropriate the funds theoretically.
The government can always create the money for retirement funds out of thin air.
The fact that retirement is tied to 401k is an explicit instrument in financializing the entire economy i.e. turning America into one giant casino where a very small proportion of the people always win big while the rest of the people lose.
Social security is not sufficient to provide for a retiree on its own, and assuming the bourgeois vampires in Congress won't kill it completely is a huge gamble.
They're destroying social security because it's good and it works, yes. I'm not telling anyone to gamble on it being around.
You literally said people should feel dirty for having a 401k.
What's that have to do with social security?
You should feel dirty if you have a 401k that's invested in stocks
What's that have to do with social security?
Love to pretend not to understand the context of my conversations so I can score debate points or something.
For working class Americans, there are 3 options:
- 401k
- Try to rely on social security exclusively, in spite of the fact that it's both insufficient and likely to disappear, realize this is nonsensical and move to 3
- Work until you drop dead
Just want to be sure, you think everyone who isn't independently wealthy should just do 3), because doing 1) is immoral? Do you feel I'm misrepresenting your position here? It's easy to get misinterpreted in text so I want to be 100% sure that you're not saying something else.
If the only two options for investing are "become a ghoulish rent seeker" or "don't do that" then yeah that's where it would come down
You didn't mention "become a landlord" as an option. Why not? That's a perfectly viable path for many working class Americans to retire into.
What does that even mean? I think people should not invest their money in rent seeking and should put it elsewhere when they can, even if it means receiving less of a return on investment.
Are we just debating ethics and morality? It's pretty boring ngl
So instead of a stock index fund, which is where a pension would have put the money anyways if I were lucky enough to have one, I should give the money directly to the US government to hold onto so they can ensure that they can afford Israel's bomb budget? That's way more ethical?
EDIT: like the ethics gap is so big that anyone who just puts the money in the stock index instead of choosing to give it to Uncle Sam is a "rent-seeking ghoul" who should "feel dirty?"
"so they can ensure that they can afford"
They don't need your money
In an economy based on generalized commodity production, you actually do need a certain amount of money to sustain yourself.
Whatever helps you sleep at night while paying not only taxes into the US military's budget, but voluntarily buying bonds to fund them.
Do you see how this conversation is asinine? There is no ethical choice under capitalism.
There's a moral difference in owning a savings bond and being a landlord. Sorry if you don't want to engage with that and think it's all a wash because nothing is ethical under capitalism.
Having a savings bond and being a landlord are different and both are different from having a 401k account that is invested in mutual funds.
Putting your retirement savings in a mutual fund doesn't make you a capitalist anymore than owning the savings bond makes you a bomb manufacturer.
I said above:
There's no functional difference to buying a $200,000 apartment and renting it out as a landlord or putting $200,000 in a 401k managed retirement fund that owns several hundred apartments buildings. And they do.
We can disagree there, then. There's a much cleaner and direct connection between a fund and rent extraction than there is between a savings bond and a bomb. That's exactly my point. These details matter.
You can lump it all together if you want. I see more nuance.
I don't agree that the connection is much more direct.
Do you feel the same way about pensions?
EDIT:
Also, when I was 19, making less than minimum wage waiting tables at a buffet, struggling to make my half of the rent payments for my shithole apartment I put what I could spare into a 401k. I didn't look at the investments at all, which means they were whatever the fund did by default, aka probably stocks. Was I a landlord at the time?
I addressed pensions in my initial comment.
Most pension funds have a similar issue in that they are investing in rent seeking etc. But unlike 401ks, pensions carry with them significant political power than can influence where the money is going. This is (imo) why they are being gutted in favor of individual 401k accounts.
Unions and pensions can be powerful tools. They're being replaced by Independent Contractors and 401ks.
If a pension fund looks identical to a 401k index fund then yeah I'd have the same opinion.
This is so fucking tiresome.
Unions exist to support their members' interests. To that effect they want the pension funds' money invested efficiently and safely. They're not buying bonds for moral reasons (again they're not, it's a direct investment in the US Empire) but for security reasons. They're not buying specific stocks because they're more moral, but because they look like promising investments.
It's not morally better than a 401k, it's just more efficient and removes the individual worker from having to deal with the investments personally.
They're being gutted because it's cheaper for the companies who are extracting every dime they can from their workers.
So I guess revised list of options
- Pension - only if you're a dirty rent-seeking landlord
- 401k invested identically to a pension - only if you're a dirty rent-seeking landlord
- social security - not viable
- die at your post - leftofthat approved
- shovel more money directly into the empire's coffers - leftofthat approved
Damn those are some bleak options, yeah. Almost like the US is a capitalist hellscape or something.
"Join us or perish" is what they seem to be signaling, yeah.
Apparently you see that as only having two choices and are going with "join them," which is fine I'm not your morality coach. I'm certainly not asking you to sit down and die.
You can rationalize it all you want. That you have no choice but to participate. I hear it all the time from people telling me to vote for Biden.
I hear it all the time from people telling me to vote for Biden.
Eat my ass
You can rationalize it all you want. That you have no choice but to participate. I hear it all the time from people telling me to vote for Biden.
"You criticize society yet you live in it. Curious."
Election betting might be slightly less sleazy if you want to try that?
Right now I have zero faith in both trump and Biden. Literally anyone can win.
Fair, but seeing Trump ahead in literally every poll still gives me a degree of certainty. That goes double for how Biden is treating Michigan.
a small contradiction 
