"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.
Impressive work, but it is not difficult to convince people of the risks of capitalism when it comes to facing longtermism challenges. We have the "social market economy", in which there are supposedly democratic controls on capitalism.
But from an imaginative perspective, an alternative to capitalism based on a purely altruistic economy is not inconceivable. An altruistic economy should not be confused with a socialist economy (legislation for the common good), but rather should be related to individualistic cultural conceptions such as the ethics of caring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_care