/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2109461
Grindset? It's literally just putting money away. Anyone can do it. Look at the lines at every McDonalds down the block. It's not rich people going there. It's not rich people eating at Applebees everyday. They could be putting that money into stocks and easily becoming rich. No one teaches poor people these cheat codes to live. Rich people know. Congress knows. Poor people don't.

>>2109459
>>2109471
>the reserveless propertyless proletarian is reserveless and propertyless only because they haven't joined the #grindset
Retarded.

Imageboard dwellers live in a fucking bubble. The very fact of being in a position where one has the money to invest, irrespective of whether one chooses to do so or not, proves one's relative security over someone who is reserveless - i.e. proletarian. Such people are middle-class; petty-bourgeois.

>>2109471
And as soon as poor people started doing it in mass their accounts will be deleted, the market is a casino and the house always wins

>>2109473
The market is not a casino. Learn what a 401k is. Even Walmart offers them. Read the book "Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance in Your Twenties and Thirties"

You will be rich in 20-25 years with a little planning. Even at minimum wage. If you live at home it's even better and it won't take long to become a millionaire.

>>2109471
lol the very concept of a wage worker who earns just enough to eat and have a roof over their head and not because they dont know how to handle money but because they literally cant afford anything else is impossible to imagine to you

>>2109478
now youre just repeating yourself. this only applies to people who have things beyond their wages live on, ie, homes, substantial savings, etc to fall back on

>>2109472
Who do you think eats at Chilis, McDonalds, Applebees, KFC, Olive Garden etc etc etc. These places make billions of dollars and it's not from rich people. I know plenty of poor people who live pay check to pay check but still eat out constantly. This is money you could be investing. Anyone could be investing.

>>2109478
I have a 401k at my work, I know what it is and I know for a fact that a private equity company is going to take that money and gamble it on some highly risky investment that doesn’t pay off and when I try to cash out they’ll say “no lol”

>>2109480
>who live pay check to pay check
you ever gonna stop talking about abstractions or?

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/se/abstract.htm

"paycheck to paycheck" is such a vapid term that always captivates these low brainpower leftoidists

lets take two people living "paycheck to paycheck": a factory worker who would be homeless if he missed one, and a management consultant whod have to move into a cheaper home

>>2109479
>who earns just enough to eat and have a roof over their head
This is 0.0001% of poor people. Usually people who can't stop having sex and have 6 kids while also on minimum wage. Most poor people even on minimum wage easily have enough to invest but they waste it on fast food and other pointless things. You name a city and I will find you $15 an hour minimum wage jobs and cheap rent. I can usually find $20+ hour jobs with no experience needed too. What's the excuse?

>>2109482
You're just investing in the S&P 500 usually in a 401k.. No one is touching that money. You can open a brokerage account and invest on your own. I usually recommend that anyways.

>>2109488
>this is just cope
Haha I wish
https://jacobin.com/2025/01/private-equity-biden-trump-retirement

>>2109486
That's my point.
> factory worker who would be homeless if he missed one
This doesn't really exist anymore in the 21st century as I said above unless it's a single income household where the mother and father can't stop fucking and now have to raise 6 kids on a minimum wage income but who's fault is that?

>>2109491
Yeah I know many poor people. They like to waste money because no one taught them about saving.

>>2109495
>>2109498
Lol, amazing thread. -> >>2109493

>>2109494
>they're coming for your savings!!
Lmao Jacodustbin truly is the magazine for the neurotic petit-bourgeois.

>>2109459
>a history performance
>graph begins in 2012
>1 million dollars
It isn’t the 80s anymore, you cannot go into retirement on just low six figures if you hope to live off of it for the next decades, inflation will worsen and keeping it in the stock market will wipe out all your gains.

>>2109498
A lot of people live one day at a time. Short-term gains loom larger than long-terms risks of some big disaster. These are normal human tendencies (just look at the very rich people being burned out of the Palisades because they bought $4.5 million homes in a high-risk fire zone) but can be exaggerated among people who grow up in chaotic environments, poverty, etc.

I think it is good financial advice to invest in low-fee, broad-market index fund, but the stock market is also like a casino and retail traders lose their ass / get the rug pulled out from under them all the time. I put money into an index fund and only occasionally play around with individual stocks. I sold the only one I had last week at a high before it plunged with the market and now people are losing their ass on it.

>>2109545
>just look at the very rich people being burned out of the Palisades because they bought $4.5 million homes in a high-risk fire zone
Its worse, it is wooden houses in a xeric bushland that has yearly fires. Or more like, were houses.

Also blame individuals all you want, but the way capitalism works is that there are all kinds of predators who exist to take advantage of people, rip them off, and so the everyday experience of working people becomes trying to navigate a hostile environment of scams and fees, while they're also constantly being bombarded by advertisements for expensive junk food saying BUY ME!!! Entire codes of law are written and constructed to serve the interests of businesses out to take other people's money. So it takes some really strong willpower for any individual to navigate, and trying to hack the system often goes badly (like with stock trading) when you're competing with insiders who are operating in an organized way with vastly more information than you about the real value of the company compared to the share price which they're about to dump after the pump.

>If you put only $500 a month into the Nasdaq 100 ETF which anyone can do you would have one million dollars in 25 years. Knowing this how is it possible be to poor?
Simple. Most people can't afford to spare $500 per month for investment.
https://fortune.com/2023/05/23/inflation-economy-consumer-finances-americans-cant-cover-emergency-expense-federal-reserve/

Capitalism simply wouldn't work without the impoverishment of a portion of its population, lol.

>just save $500 every month bro!
Fuck, I wish I lived the kind of life you live if you believe that's a meager amount of money.

>>2109459
>If you put only $500 a month
That's like 30%+ of an average wage here

>>2109532
The market is doing better now than it's ever been. You're more likely to be rich now than before.

>>2109574
Who? There are high paying no experience jobs in every city. Mexicans cross the border and are making more than most Americans. Janitors are making $18 an hour

>>2109560
I would like to see what percentage of those people own iPhones and eat at Applebees 5 times a week

>>2109593
>America is the whole world

>>2109581
>average wage
Useless metric.

$500 is the minimum wage here.

>>2109599
From what I read the whole world invests in US stocks because it's safer and more profitable than keeping their money in their own countries.

>>2109599
Also have you tried Runescape I read about Venezuelan grandmas playing Runescape because they made more money on there than working any job

>>2109595
What fucking planet do you live on man? You talk like you walked out of a retarded boomer meme on Facebook.

>>2109602
Just take a boat to the first world man. If millions of Africans can make it to Europe so can you

>>2109605
We can do a real world test… I will do some financial planning. Name a city. Name a job. Name if it's a husband and wife or just a single man and then write out how you think this person is incapable of getting out poverty and then I will show you how they can easily do it

>>2109624
You know real numbers exist on the internet right

>only $500 a month
is this supposed to be very little money in america? that's all i make in a month

How much money exists currently?
How many sophonts, human or otherwise, exist on earth currently?
Would this mechanism of weath equisition handle the pressure of everyone using it at once?
Would the economy as it currently exists function if this was levelled?
What would happen after?

>>2109589
It's not. If it was, China wouldn't be taking over the world

>>2109833
>become a finance capital parasite
I can't tell if you're moralizing or not.

>>2109853
Playing the stock market is parasitic, you’re making money without doing work, either mental or physical

>>2109853
stocks are essentially claims (which can be bought and sold, and their prices can be subject to speculation) to a share of a certain percentage of the future profits of a company that it produces through production (which it gets by paying workers less value than they produce, which is the same as them doing some amount of surplus labour for the company)

>>2109863
>>2109863
Sure, but you seem to be implying that a middle-class worker that can invest in stocks shouldn't do it for whatever reason.

>>2109867
right, my criticism was more about this idea that some people have that all we need is to just have more "class mobility", it would be like saying the problem with slavery was that there wasn't enough class mobility for slaves to become slave owners

>>2109871
Nah sorry I misread you then. Yeah OP is an idiot and fucking delusional.

>bulk pack of green crayons: $5
>printer paper: $15
Knowing this how is it possible be to poor?

>>2109589
>number is highest now
>high = good
Fucking hell u stoopid

>>2109459
>anyone can have 500 extra dollars a month on subsistence wages
wrong
>anyone can go 25 years without an emergency that bankrupts them
wrong
>how is it possible to be poor
because class society is structured in such a way that it is necessary for some people to be poor.
>you can do that even on the worst minimum wage job
no you cannot. also some people are chronically unemployed or under-employed through no fault of their own. see the concept of the reserve army of labor, where bourgeois governments deliberately ensure that a significant portion of able bodied working age adults stay unemployed so they can be brought in as scabs in case the employed start to organize and make demands
> Think next time you see a poor person with an iPhone or eating out at a restaurant they could be investing and becoming rich instead of blowing their money.
this is going to blow your mind but cell phones are considered a necessity in today's economy. people use them do gig economy work or check their bank account or check their emails or check on their job applications etc etc.etc

>>2109471
>he admits that class society is structured in such a way that poor people are not taught how to become capitalists
fascinating

>>2109478
>The market is not a casino
it absolutely is. Robinhood for example had multiple outages when people try to panic sell their stocks. Banks will loan out or invest depositor money so that they can't remunerate funds when there is a "run on the bank" and then get bailed out by the government. The market is structured in such a way that not everyone can win. Most people must do useful labor for society to even function.

>>2109489
>describing temporary conditions in the imperial core
won't last long, and doesn't reflect how most people live around the world. The children mining the cobalt in your computer do not live the same as people in the burgerreich.
>minimum wage is 15
it's still $7.25 federally.
>20/hour no experience needed.
only in cities where the cost of living is very high

>>2109489
>Usually people who can't stop having sex and have 6 kids while also on minimum wage.
In the USSR you could have as many kids as you wanted and you were always guaranteed to have a place to live. If you had more kids you would get a bigger apartment, and eventually you started getting awards and payments for it. How is that not a better system than one which economically coerces you into doing things you don't want to do?

>>2110080
This is an especially good point. Under capitalism, we are simultaneously told that the economy must grow (which means so must the volume of variable capital, i.e. living labor) which means so must the population of people who will both work and consume. Population growth either in the form of reproduction or immigration is essential to the growth of profit n a capitalist economy, yet the workers are shamed for the act of creating and raising children, which is often not only an incredibly difficult job, but a job for which one receives zero payment, assistance, or gratitude. On the contrary workers are shamed for creating the future supply of labor power by the very people who benefit from it the most. The wealthy oscillate between being Malthusians who shame the poor for reproducing and behaving like farmers who insist that their proletarian "livestock" reproduce as quickly as possible.

>>2110080
>>2109489
Society sympathises with minimum wage workers who have kids without any survival skills far too much.

>>2109478
>The market is not a casino.


Optimal strategies are only optimal if most people aren't doing them. You see this in online video games when players speak of the "current meta."

. Optimal strategies are often considered "optimal" in the context of a given set of assumptions, but these assumptions can change if everyone adopts the same strategy. This is because the dynamics of the situation often change when players adjust their behavior in response to others. For example, in the "Prisoner's Dilemma," from Game Theory, the optimal strategy for each individual is to betray the other, assuming that everyone else is also acting in their self-interest. However, if everyone adopts this strategy, the outcome is worse for everyone than if they cooperated. So, in some cases, a strategy is only optimal if others aren't adopting it too. When a strategy becomes widely adopted, it can lose its effectiveness or lead to suboptimal outcomes for the group. In real-world situations, this can apply to things like competitive markets, politics, or even social behaviors. If everyone uses the same optimal strategy, it can create new challenges or alter the payoff structure in a way that requires reevaluating what "optimal" really means.

Let's apply this train of thought to the notion that the working class can buy their way out of poverty if they all invest. The idea that the working class can "buy their way out of poverty" through widespread investment hinges on the assumption that everyone can benefit from investing in financial markets (stocks, real estate, etc.). However, when everyone adopts the same strategy, it can lead to unintended consequences, like the creation of speculative bubbles, which often result in people being worse off than they were before. And this goes without even beginning to touch on the questions of inflation, natural disaster, disease and sickness, war, etc. which hold way more influence over the fortunes of individuals than investment portfolios.

>>2110126
They sympathise with breeders but not workers

>>2109489
>Usually people who can't stop having sex and have 6 kids while also on minimum wage
Did you look at the fertility rate of the world? There isn’t a single county in the US with a fertility rate above 2.5, with 90% under 2.1, are those six kid families living on minimal wage in the room with us?

>>2110121
Don't dodge the question. Even if what you're saying is true, you're basically telling me that anybody can have financial security as long as they live like some medieval monk. Don't have kids, don't go out to eat, don't go to the movies, don't go to school for something you're actually interested in, etc. So why is this a better system than one which guarantees all your needs no matter what? Where you can have as many kids as you like, study whatever you want in school, go out and socialize frequently, etc. without ever having to worry about losing your home or not being able to afford groceries?
>inb4 you couldn't buy things in the USSR
Well apparently you can't buy things under capitalism either since according to you if any poor person spends their money on things they want then they deserve to suffer.

>>2110122
>And this goes without even beginning to touch on the questions of inflation, natural disaster, disease and sickness, war, etc
Or the fact that if everybody is investing any spare income they have instead of spending it the economy will inevitably contract and those investments will plummet in value.

I agree with you anon though it isn't that complicated, the problem is all the suffering to get there. 25 years of being exploited is enough to drive people insane.

>>2110449
I'm kinda surprised uber is relevent in current year. Like clearly the money I've "saved" by not touching it has allowed me to do the networking that I can get a friend to pick me up if I a trip is beyond walking distance.

>>2109459
>If you put only $500 a month
bruh thats alot of money especially for poorer people. Also one million dollars isn't even enough to retire on, its not even enough to buy a house nowdays

>>2110454
1. you don't go out often
2. you have a ton of friends willing to drive you places
3. you have one driver friend that wants to have sex with you really bad
it's one of these three 100%, i guarantee it

>>2110139
>REAL workers don't have children!!!1!

yeah I'm thinking you're stupid

>>2110491
Reserveless workers don't. Children are reserves since you can sell their organs / traffic them / make them do labor (chores) at home.

This is part of why it's way more useful to define proles as on average reserveless. Telling people they're petit bourgois for having kids they could slaughter or pimp makes you sound insane / malthusian.

>>2110496
proletarians ARE reserveless and propertyless, no averaging here
>Children are reserves since you can sell their organs / traffic them / make them do labor (chores) at home.
lol you cant actually be this intellectually dishonest and expect to be taken seriously

child labor happens BECAUSE youre immiserated, not to avoid immiseration

>>2110499
>intellectually dishonest
Not intentionally, where's the line of reservelessness drawn then?

>>2110496
> Children are reserves since you can sell their organs / traffic them

And people say that it's the elderly who are dehumanized.


>>2110491
Why are people so willfully ignorant here?

I'm saying that society sympathises with breeders because of the moral fetishisation of procreation.
People think that having kids makes you a "real adult."

>>2110509
The nature of the reserve of the middle class person over the proletarian might be of manifold nature, and there are more determinations, like the content of the work, whether it is manual or mental labor, etc. There is no single hard and fast rule. The reserve need not be property, although it often is.

There are many people that play fast and loose with the meaning of "own nothing but labor power" - i.e. that take it to mean solely the ownership of capital that is employed as such.

>>2110509
>>2110520
Any kind of relative security over the reserveless proletarian leads to impotence. This is why the mood of the middle class tends to be anxiety, while that of the proletariat tends to be passion.

I doubt a person having to send their child to the sweatshop or whatever is in a position where they have a stake in maintaining capitalism.

>>2110520
>>2110522
That's fair. Especially that last bit.

>>2110449
>The idea of profiting from usury disgusts me on such a core level that I've never even bothered trying to understand how the stock market works. Especially after 2008, the whole economy seems fake and ghey to me.
I mean technically if you put money in a savings account that's also "usury" because the bank is paying you interest on the money you deposit, since fractional reserve banking works in such a way that the bank gambles with depositor money.

The thing with usury is there's a big difference between a loan shark giving out a loan to a desperate person who they know can't pay it back and then paying goons to break their legs and repossess their house, and a depositor "loaning" money to the bank by simply depositing it in an savings account.

And furthermore, if you loan someone money at 0% interest, it's definitely not usury. But I would argue further that if you loan them money at an interest rate between 0% and the rate of inflation over the period of repayment, it's also not interest, since the money they get back will have less purchasing power than the money they lent out. Historically before people understood rates of inflation they argued about the "natural" rate of interest, as if there were a rate beyond which it goes from mere lending to usury. I'd argue that percentage is the rate of inflation, since you're cucking yourself if you lend money at 0% interest in an inflationary economy.

>>2110449
>morals
555-come on now

>>2110536
>I mean technically if you put money in a savings account that's also "usury" because the bank is paying you interest on the money you deposit
you are correct, the whole of capitalist society depends on the extraction of surplus value. even proletarians buy products made by other proletarians, moralizing is useless

>>2110537
Savings accounts dont extract surplus value

>>2110540
where do you think all money comes from?

>>2110499
>proletarians ARE reserveless and propertyless
on average
>no averaging here
it absolutely is an average. Marx explains in Capital and other works that wages vary even in the same industry, and that some workers are even paid piecemeal. It is a needless limitation of the definition of proletariat to stress that literally every last proletariat must make exactly subsistence wages since

1) anything less than subsistence is essentially "starvation" wages

2) anything more than subsistence wages makes someone "not a prole" according to you, perhaps even petty bourgeois

3) subsistence can be calculated itself as an average. The average cost of the necessary number of calories, rent, electricity (sorry electricity is not necessary for subsistence and is a petty booj luxury commodity according to people such as you), water, etc. needed for a given payment period (i.e. paycheck) But different people have different heights, weights, metabolisms, etc. So if people have objectively different needs in terms of bare minimum for survival, some will objectively make "above" or "below" their own personal level of subsistence even if wages are uniform. This is another reason why insisting that every worker makes exactly subsistence, no more, no less is idiotic and not borne out by any empirical evidence, either today, or from Marx's time.

4) Proletarians can seen to be widely varying in lifestyle, having different numbers of children, some of them addicted to smoking, drinking, gambling, etc while others aren't. Some can be seen to work more hours or less hours than others. They even lend money to each other based on both needs and wants.

So the idea that the proletariat must be reserveless on the individual level rather than the class level is idiotic.

5) I would argue they don't even need to be reserveless on average. Marx was writing in the victorian era. the era of social democratic compromise in the imperial core countries established a slightly-above-reserveless standard of living as the norm so that proletarians could save and invest money, while still retaining their (in general) lack of ownership of the means of production. This was genius of the bourgeoisie because it allowed them to obfuscate class relations and claim that "anyone can make it.".

>Children are reserves since you can sell their organs / traffic them / make them do labor (chores) at home.

Children ARE NOT reserve, even when Marx was talking about subsistence wages, that still included the cost of raising the average number of children since the bourgeoisie needs

1) a future work force

2) a future reserve army of labor

which requires

3) general growth of the population in proportion to the greater capacity of manufacturing means of subsistence (i.e. improvements in agriculture, preservatives, freezing, jarring, canning, etc.

Basically, you are wrong.

>>2110543
Marx was not stupid enough to subsume everyone not acting as a functional capitalist under the category of proletarian, and took great care to make distinctions. It is embarrassing for supposed communists to want to throw wealthy people into the same boat as the reserveless.

>>2110546
>if you have 1 dollar saved up, you are now "wealthy" because you have "reserves"
>if you are 1 dollar in debt, you are "starving" because you are making below subsistence
>you must have the exact average height, weight, caloric intake, wage and have exactly zero dollars no more nor less at the end of every day to be a proletarian
>even 1 cent over and you are now petty booj

stupid stupid stupid

>>2110540
1. the bank takes depositor money (collectively)
2. they loan it to capitalists (fractional reserve banking)
3. those capitalists buy means of production and labor power
4. commodities are produced and sold for profit using the principal that was loaned.
5. surplus value is generated
6. some of that surplus value is reinvested in expanding production, but some of it is used to pay rent and loans the capitalist took
7. those loans had a rate of interest.
8. the portion that was used to pay back the interest on the loans was taken from surplus value
9. a very small fraction of that interest is deposited into your savings account since the bank essentially gambled with your money
10. the reason you are able to withdraw your money even though the bank is gambling with it is because the bank is essentially betting against everyone withdrawing at once. It's called fractional reserve banking
10. If everyone does try to withdraw at once the bank gets bailed out by the government OR goes bankrupt.
11. Therefore money in savings accounts profit from surplus value, albeit fractionally and indirectly.

>>2109478
>The market is not a casino.
lol it absolutely is and its rigged even harder than actual casinos. they literally set up the game so poor people cant make money. look up the minimum deposit for futures contracts or the pattern day trader rule. the market is manipulated to hell by bots owned by banks that have a fiber line running across the road and into wall street that literally sell their order books to professional manipulators called makers that front run you and steal your money with their faster ping. imagine playing blackjack where the minimum buy in is six figures and you get locked into betting the same amount and then on top of that the other players get to know the cards for the last round of betting while excluding you. counting cards at stocks is actually really fun but you can only do it in unregulated bucket shops because legit exchanges will rob you blind legally.

>>2110541
Money isnt surplusvalue so who cares
>>2110552
At no point does bank create surplus-value

>>2109611
>I will show you how they can easily do it
You can always show how one individual can easily do it but that doesn't mean that everyone can do it. Everyone could become doctor lawyers but then nobody would be left to farm the food. You are ignoring that poverty is a systemic problem that is necessary under a capitalist mode of production.

>>2109589
you should take a look at that inflation adjusted purchasing power lol

>>2110623
>At no point does bank create surplus-value
you didn't follow the argument