"Since effective altruism is committed to whatever would maximise the social good, it might for example turn out to support anti-capitalist revolution." (Srinivasan 2015)
In this peer-reviewed article for Moral Philosophy and Politics, I explore this suggestion. This connects with my EA forum piece 'Why not socialism?' but is more thorough and more focused on longtermism in particular.
ABSTRACT: Capitalism is defined as the economic structure in which decisions over production are largely made by or on behalf of individuals in virtue of their private property ownership, subject to the incentives and constraints of market competition. In this paper, I will argue that considerations of long-term welfare, such as those developed by Greaves and MacAskill (2021), support anticapitalism in a weak sense (reducing the extent to which the economy is capitalistic) and perhaps support anticapitalism in a stronger sense (establishing an alternative economic structure in which capitalism is not predominant). I hope to encourage longtermists to give anticapitalism serious consideration, and to encourage anticapitalists to pursue criticisms of capitalism’s efficiency as well as its injustices.
Great paper & a strong argument. I would even take it further to argue that most EAs and indeed, longtermists, probably already agree with weak anticapitalism; most EA projects are trying to compensate for externalities or market failures in one form or another, and the increasing turn to policy, rather than altruism, to settle these issues is a good sign.
I think a bigger issue, as you’ve confronted on this forum before, is an unwillingness (mostly down to optics / ideological inoculation), to identify these issues as having structural causes in capitalism. This arrests EAs/longtermists from drawing on centuries of knowledge & movement-building, or more to the matter, even representing a coherent common cause that could be addressed through deploying pooled resources (for instance, donating to anticapitalist candidates in US elections). It breaks my heart a bit tbh, but I’ve long accepted it probably won’t happen.
This opens a bit of a can of worms. FWIW, the World Inequality Database (founded by Thomas Piketty, and OWID’s main source on wealth data) reports Sweden as having a top-10% wealth share of 58.9%, on the lower end and much less than the US’ 70.7%:
I looked at the source for the infographic you linked, which is UBS’ Global Wealth Report (presumably from 2023, but undated). [Here’s the full data](https://rev01ution.red/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/global-wealth-databook-2023-ubs.pdf). Table 4–5 reports Sweden’s top-10% share at 74.4%, wh... (read more)