Every time I hear someone say that now is the “best time” to invest in the stock market, I am simultaneously dismayed and enraged. To invest in the stock market (first financially, but then necessarily politically as well) is to undermine the solidarity with working people that this pandemic reveals we need now more than ever.
Investing in the stock market is harmful first of all because what was spent on stocks could have instead been sent to support a local mutual aid collective or a food bank. More importantly, however, investing is harmful in that it makes a person invested politically in the success and growth of big companies. Jon Schwarz, of The Intercept, says it best: “Once you own even a modest amount of stock, you’ll likely find yourself ambivalent about companies squeezing as much money as possible out of their employees, even if you’re one of them…[because] you’re hoping to get your teeny-tiny personal share from the ravages.” But as this pandemic has made clear, big companies and the extremely wealthy are doing far more damage than any number of small personal gains obtained through the stock market could justify accepting. The wealthy are not on the side of the people who bear the brunt of this pandemic’s negative consequences, and in fact, many are sucking up the very resources designated for the hardest hit people in this country. Amazon has doubled the prices of essential goods, such as hand sanitizer and face masks, since January. At the same time, at least 22 million workers have been laid off (some estimates say as many as 26 million), while U.S. billionaire wealth has increased by $282 billion. This should come as no surprise once one learns that some of the biggest corporations have been first to receive money from a $349 billion government bailout intended for struggling small businesses. In one instance, a private, member-only community called Fisher Island (where the average income of residents is $2.2 million) has received as much as $2 million in ‘aid’; a demonstration that the wealth of the wealthiest keeps on growing.
What these facts in part show is that this pandemic did not have to be as devastating as it has been or will be in the coming months: we had the money to bail out the most vulnerable but chose not to. The wealthy are not suffering economically from this pandemic like the vast majority of people in this country are. This pandemic is far from ‘the great equalizer’ it was said to be. Covid-19 reveals and exacerbates the inequalities that have existed for decades and decades. The fact that a select few of the wealthiest are profiting from this health crisis only makes plain what has long been true: the wealthy are the most protected and subsidized people in this country.
Investing in the stock market “shred[s] our instincts for social solidarity”, as Jon Shwarz says. We become distracted by the rise and fall of little numbers on a screen and forget that when we prioritize those numbers we do not prioritize the needs of the human beings around us. Although investing in the stock market is presented as a benign activity, it is far from benign. Those of us from middle and upper class households need to wake up and realize that choosing our own personal share of wealth at the expense of workers and the planet is what brought us this pandemic in the first place. We can either accept that and act in ways that actively undermine the exploitation of the environment and the poor, or we can pretend that this pandemic and our love for the individual wealth the market brings us are unrelated. To be clear, the latter is called denial.
