this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
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There is a certain size of the stock market. A minuscule slice of it is yours, and it operates mostly the way the rest of the stock market does. Would it work any differently if any different if you opted out, or even if you and 10,000 other communists opted out?
The big question is not whether you are involved, it is what you do with it. People have been commanding the resources of other people in a thousand different ways since the beginning of civilization, possibly even earlier than that. If you are a vanguardist Marxist, you already embrace the idea that some people should be making decisions for an amount of wealth that is disproportionate with what they generate from labor; you may even think that the majority of the economy should be steered by a specialized committee for the good of everyone.
So what do you plan on doing with your 401k? If you plan on using it as M-C-M', or just living comfortably off it, or saving it for your retirement, you are functionally identical to any other person with stock market holdings, and you are using it the same way everyone else uses it, making the financial aspect of your life ultimately something that props up capitalism.
But if you have an ambition to put the money to a revolutionary cause, you can do that. Ultimately, you are taking the money that other people might spend on self-indulgence, and spending it on revolutionary purposes instead. In my analysis of the world I see the potential for acquiring real estate and ownership of the means of existence that allow people to leave the market. That is my life goal, to build these oases where people opposed to the abuses of capitalism can live a life outside of it, for most practical purposes. You could call it communes, you could call it intentional communities, you could call it strongholds, you could call it Land Back, call it whatever you like. The objective is to have a longitudinal attachment to the land and to each other that is not the atomized, financialized, mode mediated by legal persons in the bourgeois state.
If you live on the land, own and manage it collectively, and interact with the economy at large to the tune of less than $5000 a year, you weaken the economy and strengthen the counter-economy. You can practice silviculture and permaculture, build off-grid earthen buildings, and be mostly invisible to the formal economy while living much better than the average person while using less than 1/5 of the water and electricity that the average person does.
I have a six-figure portfolio that I've been mostly pretending doesn't exist (except for divesting from weapons companies a few years ago), while I make well below half the GDP per capita and always have. At first I had some conundrum about it as an anarchist, but by this time the path is extremely clear. At some point I will pivot to putting it to active use. I will use the financial tools available to me, and I will steadily build up tangible pieces of people's power. Anyone can call me a lib for this, but chances are they are contributing to the economy more than I do, and have no prospects more elaborated than a moon-shot solution that they're holding out for.
yea i used to have that dream too, but property and land prices is it feasible for me? probably not. sure if i had a bunch of people to go in on it with me, but will i find those people? I even did my final college paper on utopian socialism in America. Unfortunately those projects never lasted. The longest lasting was maybe the Shakers, but they died out because their kids didnt want to live that way. Intentional communities have existed where they tried to not have money as a concept, but that's tough to do when you're surrounded by a society using money.
That depends on whether you have ambitions/desires that are directly received from bourgeois ideology, like a suburban white picket fence single-family house. There is a lot of humid land in this country where you can get an acre for $8000 or so, sometimes less if you're willing to be a bit unconventional.
I found them, and then I found them twice more, in a span of just 8 years. I would dare to say a large fraction of Hexbear would be good prospects. And if I hadn't found them, I would still be looking for people IRL to team up with. Most people have this inclination; they just don't pursue it any further than finding a spouse, at which point they then prioritize the building of their own family and individual wealth in a zero-sum game with everyone else.
History is never made by people who sit on the sidelines, thinking that all the possibilities have already been conclusively hashed out. "Every revolution seems impossible, until it happens." And let's not forget that for the majority of human history, we have existed in communities that operated without the use of anything remotely like currency as we know it today.
Also it doesn't necessarily have to be full-fledged intentional communities. City-level federated cohousing and gardening projects are what I'm hoping to do, with the rural communes as a fallback plan if I fail.
Or you can dump money into a party or revolutionary org, like Fergie Chambers does. I wouldn't knock you for doing that, sectarianism sucks and I will always favor a diversity of tactics. But one way or another, we'll have to either risk what we've got by making a push for something, or give up and turn to self-serving narratives as we drift into a liberal praxis. And damn it, I'm going to try, and I'm never going to stop trying.