Qualms with investing as an anarchist

Apologies if this post doesn’t fit well here, this has a personal element but is ultimately a moral and political discussion.

Personal context:

I’ve lived with no/low income as a disabled person my whole adult life with no end in sight. I try to follow best personal finance practices to try and ensure my survival as I can’t simply look to make more money. As I understand it, the advice I’ve read would be to begin investing (commonly in equity ETFs) once you have saved enough of an emergency fund and are ready to put away assets for the long-term. Due to a unique situation, I might manage to save enough money to begin investing before I go back to living paycheck to paycheck.

Concerns:

A) Is it unethical? On one hand, I’d be investing into truly evil companies. On the other, there’s no ethical survival under captialism and my minuscule investment won’t make or break a megacorps’ ability to do evil shit. Taking a silent stand won’t have an impact and I may just be hurting my own personal finances in the process. In turn, that ironically may make it harder for me to safely save and spend money on things like community organizing.

B) Isn’t it contradictory and unsafe? Investing in equities means I’d be betting on continued “growth” for decades to come. This is the system I’d be working to dismantle and investing in it would be like I’m betting against myself. Considering the impending climate crisis and foreseeable global instability, investing in equities feels like more of a gamble and less of a sound financial decision, but I’m not sure what that means for how I should manage my finances.

Social Ecology

Social Ecology, developed from green anarchism, is the idea that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in our social problems. This is because the domination of nature and our ecology by humanity has its ultimate roots in the domination humanity by humans. Therefore, the solutions to our ecological problems are found by addressing our social and ecological problems simultaneously.

Quotes

Poetry and imagination must be integrated with science and technology, for we have evolved beyond an innocence that can be nourished exclusively by myths and dreams.

People want to treat ‘we’ll figure it out by working to get there’ as some sort of rhetorical evasion instead of being a fundamental expression of trust in the power of conscious collective effort.

~Anonymous, but quoted by Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

~Murray Bookchin, “A Politics for the Twenty-First Century”

There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal. A society based on self-administration must be achieved by means of self-administration.

In modern times humans have become a wolf not only to humans, but to all nature.

The ecological question is fundamentally solved as the system is repressed and a socialist social system develops. That does not mean you cannot do something for the environment right away. On the contrary, it is necessary to combine the fight for the environment with the struggle for a general social revolution…

~Abdullah Öcalan

Social ecology advances a message that calls not only for a society free of hierarchy and hierarchical sensibilities, but for an ethics that places humanity in the natural world as an agent for rendering evolution social and natural fully self-conscious.

~ Murray Bookchin

poVoq@slrpnk.net

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3 days ago

Every case is unique, so you need to do what you think is best for your specific case. I personally mostly perfer to invest into things that lower my ongoing costs and not things that increase my income. In the end time is the most valuable thing you have, so think about it from that perspective.