I invest because it’s inevitable that anyone with capital must invest. I am a socialist because I feel a kinship and sympathy with other human beings, and I do not want my economic life to alienate me from others.
This blog is partly about cultivating a state of mind which I hesitate to name for fear of reducing to it to dust. Let’s say it’s something like a humane clarity, although it must also encompass and reflect experiences that are neither humane nor clear.
The specifics of investing and of socialism, among other subjects, will get their turn. However, this blog will not be about socially conscious investing, which I do not recommend. Socially conscious investing (or sustainable investing) is an effort to do two complicated things at once: change society for the better, and make money investing. One of the advantages of investing as a mental discipline is the frequency with which opinions and preconceptions are destroyed by markets. But socially conscious investors never have to confront that experience, because their poor returns are never clearly due to mistakes—they may just as easily be the price of social progress.
We cannot cultivate a humane clarity if we never have to face and correct our own confusion.
The Socialist Investor 
This sounds serious, with some fun mixed in with it. I like it.
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I do not recommend “socially conscious investing” either. It has an element of “scam” that I find very off-putting.
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I don’t have any direct experience with it, but if you’re actively investing in something that you think will improve the world, like wind farms, then that might work—it’s a clear vision, anyhow. But if it basically comes down to a list of things you *won’t* invest in—but you still want to make money—then you almost have to be Warren Buffett to make that work. It’s hard to find good ideas. Also, sometimes people get the cause-and-effect wrong. Most of the time, when you buy a company’s stock, the company itself never sees a nickel of your investment. So if they’re developing death rays for dolphins, you are not contributing to that activity, ordinarily. Yes, you might make money off killing dolphins, and that could be weird, but you aren’t making it more likely that dolphins will die. Personally, I invest in anything, except stuff I really really can’t stomach. Then I back off.
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When you buy a company’s stock at the time of Initial Public Offering, the company receives all of your investment dollars, less a 2 to 5% amount in fees that goes to the offering syndicate whose brokers actually sell the stock to people. As a stockholder of shares bought on the secondary market, post-IPO, the company continues to benefit from those investment dollars that were raised at the time of the IPO, although the shares may have changed hands.
The company most definitely DOES see almost ALL of your investment. Stockholders receive dividends and vote in corporate actions by the company. They own equity in the company, i.e. they are part owners. If what you said were true, that when you buy a company’s stock, the company itself never sees a nickel of your investment, then why would the company pay dividends to you? Why would the number of shares of the stock you own double whenever the company did a stock split?
There is a trend, e.g. started by Google, Facebook, and Amazon, where stockholders do not have voting rights or receive dividends. In that case, it is unclear what a stockholder actually owns, if anything! They just have a means of speculating, with true ownership retained by the pre-IPO owners. Now THAT is what I would call billionaire capitalism! It is very bad because it undermines the entire idea of stock markets.
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