Why care about money if you hate capitalism?

Let's get this out of the way first: personal finance is never going to be enough to escape capitalism. Amassing and hoarding personal wealth is not the same as liberation. And when I call myself an anti-capitalist, what I mean is that I want liberation for all of us.

So why care about personal finance, if we hate capitalism?

1. I don’t want us to lose too much energy to financial instability. It’s exhausting to be in financial crisis. And even if we’re not fully in crisis, I don’t want money to take too much energy from your life.

Ideally, putting some time and effort into financial planning will help you put your financial tools (money, debt, credit scores, insurance, accounts, property, etc) to use, with a strategy that makes the most sense for you right now. But more than that, financial planning should help money take up the right amount of space in your brain. I want you to feel confident about what you’re doing with money right now, and I want you to be able to recognize when you need to spend more time on financial planning again, with or without outside help. And then I want you to be able to reserve the rest of your energy to build up your community, grow your survival skills, and fight the good fight.

2. I want us to understand the nuanced ways in which our current financial systems are violent, so we don’t reinforce or repeat them.

While living in late-stage capitalism and under the current financial systems, we can find opportunities to reduce the harm of participating in these systems. For example, if we’re able to buy a home, we can be thoughtful about whether we’re participating in gentrification, and how we’re in relationship with the land we’re living on, and the Indigenous people of that land. If we’re able to invest in the stock market or a retirement account, we can take a harm-reduction approach to the stock market, and avoid investing in private prisons and military weapons manufacturing.

We can also find opportunities for creative mutual aid. Yes, venmo’ing each other and contributing to GoFundMes is part of mutual aid. But so is sharing a car. So is naming each other in our wills. So is cosigning each other’s apartment leases. But we need to make sure we have both the technical money skills and the emotional skills we’ll need when things don’t go perfectly. We can get creative about how we engage with these financial systems, as long as we’re careful to not accidentally exert power over each other when it gets hard.

3. I want us to practice the skills we’ll need in the next world.

Resource management, mitigating risk, future thinking, talking to others about challenging topics like money, & more are personal finance skills that we’ll need in any economic system. It’s worth learning and practicing these types of skills now in the capitalist world, so that you can put them to use in our post-capitalist future!

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