From: "John Glastonbury" <jglastonbury at gmail.com>
"Do you have a 401k? Or any assets in the stock market? If not, I'm sure there at least a few marxists who do, especially academics with 401k plans and the like. We will all need to retire, or at least we all deserve to have that right... and it seems wise both financially, and politically, to try and enter the 'arena' of the market; not just to get better returns (which, I would think that marxists would be able to do, as they tend to understand capitalism MUCH more clearly than the typical i-banker or asset manager) but to also build workable prototypes of socialist banking, and 'liberate' capital, especially our hard earned capital, from those who use it to do us harm."
I have a 401k just to get the matching funds. That's my profit. If my employer did not match, I would not have a 401K. The money that accumulates is funneled into the most stable, lowest risk fund there is, or T Bills.
I think to make money in the market you either have to have inside info or you have to devote a lot more time than you and I have. I think 401Ks are proving to be....and will prove to be a big scam. There are huge fees and there are these periodic crises that leave all but the insiders high and dry.
"Haymarket doesn't give away their books for free; and, yet they're still serving a public good even if they charge for them, a much higher good than other publishers who disseminate right wing ideas, but they need to make enough money to continue surviving.
Or, perhaps, the pre-1914 SPD in Germany; it had services like gymns and cinemas that charged money, but not just to make money, not just for the sake of profit."
Providing education, credit unions, and the like would be a good thing, but it would not affect the larger picture.
"More broadly, I think that we need to take our economic fate into our hands in ways that unions and political reformism haven't done for us in a long long time. If that means marxists small business people or bankers, then so be it."
The problem is our economic fate is indissolubly tied with political reality. We are poor because the ruling class appropriates most of the surplus and because it owns the means of production. That's not an economic problem; that's a political problem.
Joanna