Apologies if this post doesn’t fit well here, this has a personal element but is ultimately a moral and political discussion.
Personal context:
I’ve lived with no/low income as a disabled person my whole adult life with no end in sight. I try to follow best personal finance practices to try and ensure my survival as I can’t simply look to make more money. As I understand it, the advice I’ve read would be to begin investing (commonly in equity ETFs) once you have saved enough of an emergency fund and are ready to put away assets for the long-term. Due to a unique situation, I might manage to save enough money to begin investing before I go back to living paycheck to paycheck.
Concerns:
A) Is it unethical? On one hand, I’d be investing into truly evil companies. On the other, there’s no ethical survival under captialism and my minuscule investment won’t make or break a megacorps’ ability to do evil shit. Taking a silent stand won’t have an impact and I may just be hurting my own personal finances in the process. In turn, that ironically may make it harder for me to safely save and spend money on things like community organizing.
B) Isn’t it contradictory and unsafe? Investing in equities means I'd be betting on continued “growth” for decades to come. This is the system I’d be working to dismantle and investing in it would be like I’m betting against myself. Considering the impending climate crisis and foreseeable global instability, investing in equities feels like more of a gamble and less of a sound financial decision, but I’m not sure what that means for how I should manage my finances.
From an anarchist perspective, nearly every company is evil to some degree. I did consider trying to avoid the supremely evil companies such as the fossil fuel industry, arms industry, mercenaries, private intelligence companies, factory animal farming, etc. But it'd require a lot of labor on my part which I can't perform and it doesn't seem like it'd have an impact when it comes to ETFs anyways.
I might look into ESG investing but my assumption is that it'll be a bunch of liberal whitewashing. I do wonder if people could develop some sort of community-focused investing which prioritizes worker cooperatives which produce a somewhat ethical product?
Not to strongly recommend a particular ETF too much since I'm far from an expert, but there is a fossil fuel free S&P500 index and and there is a ETF that tracks it (SPYX). There's still going to be plenty of companies in there that are doing all sorts of bad things, but at least you know it's not fossil fuels and it's a broad index so it should be a relatively "safe" investment.