Echoing what others have said, forcing workers to tie their retirement to how well the stock market is doing was a deliberate way to obfuscate class interests and force inaction.
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
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"Just be rich"; rich people probably.
Moving workers' pensions from a defined benefit that was their employer's responsibility to an individual account floating in the big casino we call a market was a deliberate scheme to distort and obfuscate class interests
it's truly depressing. my step-grandpa who died at age 93 like 13 years ago had pension. i was like WELL THAT WOULD BE NICE. he did not die in poverty.
It's so ghastly to watch the campaigns for the same in Europe.
To me, it doesn’t exist in reality. It’s some fake money promise that I will never see.
If it’s there in several decades when I’m too broken to work and lets me rent a little more time on this planet then so be it. I would give it up for a socialist state in a heartbeat.
To me, it doesn’t exist in reality. It’s some fake money promise that I will never see.
for real, plus if the economy takes a total shit it can be halved or worse. it's very cool.
This shit is engineered to turn everyone into a reactionary.
Not saying you should not do it but on a society scale this is poison to working class solidarity.
I don't think not having a retirement plan is a particularly communist thing to do. If you have any sort of account at any financial institution you almost certainly are tied to the financial market anyways. The Chinese, the unions, hell even the DSA own financial assets.
The bad news is unless you're putting a good chunk (15-20%) of your earnings in your retirement account now you'll probably still only be able to retire in your late 60s lol.
ill add another layer, i work for a finance related company. I'm not in the finance department or anything, i'm in IT. But still, i live in a world of contradictions. Add to the fact that this is my best paying job in my life, and has the best benefits i've ever had. i dont think i could find anything better, esp now.
Dump it in one of those targeted-year Vanguard funds 
Or roll it into a Roth 
But Feral PAWGs, ~~I am Pagliacci!~~ target date funds' equity component is made up of S&P 500 and international equivalents!
But honestly I don't see what choice a worker has, if they are even fortunate enough to be squirreling away for retirement. "What is my actual class position as a worker in the imperial core" would would vex me as a question before "does investing for retirement make me bourgeois?" But I try to be open to criticism.
it's already invested in a bunch of vanguard stuff by default.
This system is severely exploiting workers, you have nothing to be ashamed of for taking full advantage of your compensation package. You'd be foolish not to keep contributing to your 401k while your employer is matching.
I understand the conodrum feeling though.
I haven't worked since Obama was president. Criminal aspirations, finessed and fronted my way to wealth with long shot get rich quick schemes. Most of them were really fucking stupid and didn't pan out but the one that actually paid off was something absolutely ridiculous like a 20,000% increase, I just had to wait a decade without any guarantees. I will pay more in capital gains tax this year than I ever earned in wages working a year back when I did.
I hate USD and I hate stocks/the market. Im divested from anything to do with either as much as I can. Keep the bank account as close to zero as possible. When I first started pursuing a life of crime I cashed out my 401k early and converted it into DMT.
crystal dreams > the market
Obviously that's a really dumb option if you plan to keep working. My personal ethos is investing in the market is investing in a future where these capitalist fucks run everything. My advice is divest where you can but don't throw away free money for your retirement pls
I'm chronically ill, non passing trans, disabled, no degree or skilled work experience so I have little trouble accepting my decadent and kinda obscene life circumstances. I mostly worked for tipped subminimum wages for all the years when I did work. I've been a crazy person on the street getting high and drunk in a tree in Washington DC when I thought my life was cratered.
Still I feel like a disingenuous mother fucker calling myself a communist at this point, I don't even feel human. Some kind of monster, elf demon prince. Keep telling myself I'll make it right in the future somehow but idk, I just feel like a mother fucker.
Consider that it is entirely possible the only reason we are able to have this conversation is because of engles
Owning a 401k makes someone a mini landlord and communists should be honest about this fact.
Yes they're making us all landlords. Yes they're making us choose between being a mini landlord and having less money.
But that's what a 401k is. Even if you have an index fund. If you follow the stocks long enough you are bound to end at some form of rent or exploited wage. It's just what it is.
I match my employers 401k. I have money in a 401k. I'm a mini landlord and I hate it.
Yeah I've got a little union pension slowly growing but I'm just operating under the assumption it'll get lost in some recession or scam or something
I put mine into china
If you have option to put it in treasuries or money market funds, do that. so many countries have these forced savings schemes to funnel workers' savings into capital gains for capitalists.
You just gonna loan your money to the US federal government?! J/k. Idk though because then people are just giving up so much potential return (compared to stock ownership) on the money that's supposed to hold them over after they're too old to work. I know "no ethical consumption" doesn't mean I can go out and do unethical things, but I think people are forced to participate and like others in this thread point out it's on purpose.
I don't consider Treasuries to be a loan to the Government, nor does it fund the Government in any meaningful sense, interest on it is free money offered by the Government to the holders. It's interest bearing cash, no one has any qualms holding currency or working for currency (even though that too is Government debt, one which loses more purchasing power over time). Think of sovereign bonds as interest bearing money instead.
Thank you for this explanation. I hope I have not wasted your time by "getting an answer by being wrong on the internet."
You seem pretty on-the-ball on this, may I ask what you think of the argument that municipal bond measures act as kick backs to rich investors? That cities should just raise taxes to pay for whatever the thing is, instead of selling bonds investors will make profits from that will be paid by future taxpayers? This is an argument I heard all the time from a Trot friend way back when I was lil' lib.
Cities are financially constrained (unlike the Feds) so if the city wants to fund something useful for the public (like free bus), they have to issue bonds if in deficit, they are actually borrowing money.
Of course, taxing the rich is always preferable as it reduces interest payments for the financially constrained city which may be forced to cut spending if interest payments become too much. But even borrowing by issuing bonds can be a solution (it's better mobilization of rich peoples' hoards) if higher taxes on hoarders isn't possible (due to political situation) since tax revenues tend to go up over time depending on economic activity (because of Federal Govt deficits and bank credit creation) and inflation so the debt service becomes lower. All of this depends on the interest rate. Though taxing the rich is always better looking at it from city's perspective, the rich peoples' hoards are better used by the city/state Government (except for the police and all).
I was reading this book yesterday and found something new, Chapter 23 by Michael Hudson where Canadian provinces went so far as to borrow in foreign currencies with lower interest rates but with exchange rate risk and ended up paying 25% rates effectively.
Thank you for taking the time to explain this, seeing it as cities borrowing at a favorable rate puts it into perspective for me. I had not thought of it from the angle of coaxing the burghers to put their hoarded lucre to productive use. Your sharing your knowledge will genuinely make me less of a curmudgeon next time a bond measure comes up.
That's a good anecdote, jeez I love being a state government and big brain financial engineering myself into paying credit card APR.
Isn't that leaving a lot of money on the table over time?
I have about half my money in vanguard index funds. I don't like being so invested in Tesla and Microsoft, but any time I look at alternatives, the returns or fees change my mind because over time the difference ends up being a ton of money.
I get that treasuries are safer, but I feel like the stock market is propping up America so much that any long term failure of the stock market would mean the end of America and thus treasuries as well.
index funds are the only thing worth investing in, unless you feel like micromanaging this shit, and i certainly don't
True, my view is that if they are forcing me to save I would rather save in something reliable and gamble with whatever remains from my actual salary.
But I understand some people won't have much remaining savings. Nothing against anyone either way.
Figure out what can you do in order to make yourself less dependent on it or how can you build a better world that wouldn't require it.
Don't just throw out what you have, figure a way how to utilize it.
Communism is all about the community (if only the name would make more sense), ask yourself how safe are you if your savings lose all value overnight? Who do you have to lean on? Have you lived a life where the community will come to your aid? Is there any community left?
Edit: Well if the stock market crashes then y'all are gonna say: Ah, so that's what Богданова was talking about. And it will bring me no satisfaction.
Just don't think about it.
I would rather a comrade have the money than some chud. Nothing you can do about it will materially effect anything.
Just let a comrade enjoy a little motion
Not sure how it works in burgerland but it’s mandatory where I live so what can ya do.
We’re never seeing that money anyway, retirement age will be 90 by the time millenials or younger are 65 lol.
Also given the trajectory of collapse I doubt anyone is gonna be paying out.
We’re never seeing that money anyway, retirement age will be 90 by the time millenials or younger are 65 lol.
if that happens i got other plans. not great ones, mostly revenge fantasies.
I am going to make a claim that where we are in the west the material security of a comrade is more praxis done than convincing any number of liberals to read a book.
It has to be more than that though.
The benefit comes not in the convictions we hold, but the roles we play in society. Everyone's looking out for their own material security; we need to be doing more than just that with our lives.
Also, you can achieve material security in the United States for as little as $10k of expenditures per person per year, with the right framework. If you get a bunch of people together, you can do it for much less.
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.
That is my life goal, to build these oases where people opposed to the abuses of capitalism can live a life outside of it,
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.
but property and land prices is it feasible for me? probably not.
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.
sure if i had a bunch of people to go in on it with me, but will i find those people?
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.
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.
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.