"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.
I am trying my hardest to disambiguate ‘market/economic freedom’ from ‘unrestrained accumulation of wealth’. Europe produces a huge amount of tax revenue (see below; I don’t have an anticapitalism index at hand so this is as close as I could get in a 5 minute search) while maintaining similar levels of economic freedom to the US, and manages much higher life satisfaction and equality despite lower GDP per capita. That’s insane!
Anticapitalism in a strict economic sense is merely the opposition to unrestrained accumulation of wealth and/or concentration of ownership of the means of production in private hands. It doesn’t have to take a position on anything to do with markets. (Obviously, the popular Western conception of anticapitalism is also often anti-market, but actually-existing-anticapitalism in Europe is pro-market!)