I’ve been poor, now I’m less poor, but “investing” in developing mutualism on the Web, with my time and emotional labour, isn’t working to provide for me, and the West requires I give it money in exchange for its resources. As I’ve learned that the people closest to me in these efforts have secretly held substantial sums of capital through investments they do not expect to benefit from and actively cause harm, I’m additionally frustrated in the relationship that I have formed with these people. While I have been all-in on removing kyriarchism from the world, it turns out that the people around me are actually invested heavily on the continuation of projects like petroleum-sourced energy and real estate development.
Cold math says that them working 40+ hours for the kyriarchy and reinvesting everything they don’t need to live back into the kyriarchy, is not going to be offset by them listening to me speak. I thought I was developing an audience that was ready to become a community, but now feel like I’ve developed an audience that wants moral guilt or absolution, depending on their emotions that week.
Although things may collapse, from the position of those with privilege, at any moment, apocalypses occur on the scale of centuries, and I need to do something to survive right now, and for the next few years. The American Left’s response to COVID has demonstrated they are not willing or capable of acting against mass extinction or climate change or fascism in any meaningful way, at a national or local level. Resistance, for the vast majority of Westernized people, is a hobby, not a way of life.
So, I’m accepting some new truths. The people I depend on for survival would rather get tear-gassed by police than divest from the surveillance state. That is… ridiculous. I cannot invest so heavily in a person or people who demonstrate such… such awful long- or even medium-term planning.
Unfortunately my limited assets and the threat of kyriarchism means that I’m not in a position to establish relationships with anyone else: the sheer cost of living means that to most people who are not already severely radicalized, I have nothing to give them except an emotional rush. (Excepting a very few people, I don’t think many Westernized people learn very much from listening to me, they just learn new ways of perceiving their morality that, like I said, they toy with for the emotional high.)
So the only thing I can invest through (through, not in) is the kyriarchy. That’s a tough pill to swallow, but as I said to someone I was discussing this stuff with earlier, “I’m only in this position because y’all won’t do more than performative occupations and seizures.” (I actually said something more aggressive that’s not really fit for public print!)
If we’re all performing capitalism until there’s no other choice, then fine: I will perform capitalism to try and ensure that there is no other choice!
What does that mean? You might notice that I’ve used the word “investing” here a lot. Well, I’ve been thinking on something that I heard a Lakota economic advisor talk about back in the fall, about how we Indigenous folk have assets, we just don’t see them, and so that doesn’t give us an interface in using our assets and the assets that already exist in the infrastructure and institutions of our society, and I’ve been thinking about, well, how can I earn enough money to do stuff like pay for healthcare. (Believe it or not but writing about how evil white people are doesn’t pay the bills!)
So what’s my performance under capitalism going to be? “Capital speculation.” Which is financial jargon way of saying I’m going to take what I have and put it toward things that I think will make life better, now and/or later, and the only way I have to do that right now is through capitalistic investment models, since I need to profit (or for someone else to profit and share some with me) in order to live.
My pursuit of decolonization and perspective on the upcoming global crises gives me an unusual perspective as an investor, and my focus on using these assets to weaken and divest from the West, both give me an unusual perspective as a forced participant in our market economy. My physical disability means I’m near news sources frequently, and my background actually gives me a greater familiarity with accounting and asset management than say, soil chemistry.
In practical terms this means I’m going to, with my limited about of cash I can scronge up, open a brokerage account and begin investing in securities. I’ll also speculate in cryptocurrencies and pretty much anything where it looks like people are trying to step away from, not into, kyriarchism. Hopefully the explanation above makes it clear why this is my choice. I still plan on, whenever the weather is good, working in my garden and producing soil. That, obviously, comes first. But with the time that otherwise I was trying to build a community on the Web that would provide for me, I’m going to do market speculation, with the goal of investing in things that I think will give me the space to divest from kyriarchism and reinvest in actual survival.
For those of y’all who read this newsletter, this actually will probably mean more consistent updates, as I stop engaging so much in tiresome and draining conversations with folk across the Web.
It also means I’m going to be setting up a second newsletter, emspeculation, where I’ll discuss in-detail my trading activity. As I talked about this pivot in my praxis over the last week, there were several privileged people who were interested in something like that, but more important to me, is there were poor working-class folk who said they’d tighten their belts today if it meant they could do something for the future, beside throw money at oil companies and real estate. (That newsletter is also going to be for paying subscribers (and costs a bit more to subscribe to than this one), but again, just let me know if you’d like a complimentary subscription. Seriously! Don’t be shy about asking for a comped subscription. I’d rather you receive it and ignore it than miss out entirely, I just have been told that basically, folk with money won’t give it to me unless I basically make them.)