The concept of "passive income" in our capitalist society is a curse. The whole idea that simply having wealth makes more wealth without having to do anything at all is rotten at the very core.
Oh sure, my savings are in interest bearing accounts and funds and such. But it's still the toxic concept that allows for billionaires to exist.
All passive income means you are extracting surplus value from someone elses labour, every dollar you make on profit from stocks (savings accounts also pay interest from stocks the bank invests in) is a dollar tied up in an economy of extracting surplus value from labour. If you are against capitalism then you are doing the same thing here just to a lesser extent and more indirectly but materially its still money coming from someone elses labour into your bank account
Even stocks held in worker coops which I assume exist, still lubricate the extraction of value from the workers of those coops by an investor class.
If you want to say that you cant get by without this theft there is a name for that its called the Petty Bourgeoisie. Please do not feed the monster, you are tying your financial security to the success of capitalist markets and creating perverse incentives away from revolutionary action
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Red anarchists — If you don’t take responsibility for the harm you do, no one will. There’s no rapture-like revolution coming to wipe out capitalism’s sins and absolve you of any guilt for your part in it because “no ethical consumption”. There’s only this life you’re living and your choices absolutely matter. They shape who you are and the impact you make on your environment and your culture. If you just keep doing harm and blame your actions on capitalism, you’re no different than any CEO dumping toxic waste in a river in China. Harm reduction in your community is something you have direct control over. You can choose to not dump that waste. Or you can dump it and justify it to yourself by saying “it’s okay because capitalism did it”.
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We can either choose to take action to resist the violent system starting on an individual and on a local level, or we can live and die waiting for capitalism to magically go away worldwide while participating in it fully and thus furthering its growth and increasing its violence.
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@ambiguous_yelp @JessTheUnstill you're attacking a person who you agree with about like 99% of stuff and in the end neither of you have energy left to fight the rich.
We absolutely cant fight capitalism if we're going to replicate its structures on an interpersonal level, the best we can hope for in that sitution is a substition of the capitalist class for some other ruling class. We need to be principally and absolutely against exploitation of all forms otherwise it will keep popping up over and over in new forms. This is why I'm an intersecionalist and believe in Total Liberation and its why I don't believe in excusing participation in exploitative systems in any way. Is it hard or impossible in some cases to remove yourself from these systems? Yes. Does that mean investments in stocks should get a blanket pass because it can facilitate class mobility to the Petty Bourgeoisie? no.
@ambiguous_yelp first of all, we need to survive, individually and as community. Second of all we need to stand together in solidarity. And that includes tolerating each other's faults and (small) disagreements.
If only the purest are allowed into your fight, you've already lost.
Also why does solidarity in these conversations only ever extend to people doing exploitation and not to the people on the recieving end
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@ambiguous_yelp don't know, I receive solidarity.
Maybe because I didn't hit them over their heads about how they're not perfect enough to deserve my solidarity
If you think a bit of light criticism is "excluding people" then how are we supposed to build a stronger more principled and effective movement
@ambiguous_yelp because you demotivated someone who made a point in your favour.
Because your light criticism at a point were it was not needed helped fracture your own community and your personal reach instead of building up.
