So I’m a bit confused by your characterization of socialists as these pie-in-the-sky types, because it isn’t how I conceive of them (being one myself). A socialist, as I see it, engages in praxis and wants to help working class people now by campaigning for higher wages, public services, affordability, protections for immigrants and marginalized people, reproductive rights, etc. Socialists throughout history have delivered actual material benefits to people.
In late nineteenth and early twentieth century America, for example, there was a vehement progressive socialist movement that resulted in many of the labor and consumer protections we enjoy today. FDR’s New Deal took a lot of ideas from the socialists (e.g., social security, minimum wage, unemployment benefits, abolition of child labor). 1950s McCarthyism made socialism a bad word, but in reality socialism is a very democratic and practical tradition.
I can’t take seriously the people who just sit around all day reading theory and waiting for the revolution (that is, if they’re not doomers who deny any prospect of positive change). I sure as hell wouldn’t call them socialists.
I appreciate the goal of Effective Altruists, but where I’d differ is that I think the way “to do the most good one can” is through democratic political organizing. Giving X amount of money to the downtrodden or refraining from doing bad thing Y are great choices, but they don’t usually lead to the kinds of systemic changes that have, in recent history, drastically improved working people’s standards of living. Those were usually achieved by the collective bargaining of unions and the policies of progressive politicians.
For instance, I think it’s great that Carnegie donated hundreds of millions of dollars to build thousands of public libraries, but it doesn’t change the fact that he was a robber baron in an unjust economic system. The politicians, journalists, and workers who fought against him and his ilk did much more for human wellbeing than he ever did.
Yeah so I don’t necessarily want to get into a massive debate about socialism — the post is more of a statement of my opinions than an argument against socialism, there’s already a lot of those and some of them are even quite good (especially those from a moderate left perspective, which I found appealing back in the day).
But there’s a few things I’d say here. One is that it’s true socialists have delivered great things to people historically, but not all great things come from socialism. The washing machine, and AC, for example were all capitalist innovations that pushed human progress massively forward. Similar goes for reproductive rights. Socialists have been on _both_ sides of the fight for immigrants (at least in the US, it’s not as big of an issue in the UK where I’m from).
Also it basically it used to be the case that just a lot of smart intellectuals were socialist, so yes a lot of campaigns were often championed by those who were nominally socialist, but this isn’t decisive on the ideology itself, right?
I think today a lot of socialists end up being unfortunately confused and throwing their lot in with bad ideas as well as good, such as rent control, massive pushes for increases in unionization (just look at the 70s in the UK for where that can lead you) and perhaps some overregulation on the issue of worker rights (currently a big drag on europe’s gdp growth). For example, in the UK, socialists established the NHS. In principle, this is fantastic — free healthcare for everyone, but later on in practice it’s basically been shown that other systems that have some amount of costs for services just do function better, in health outcomes as well as cost-effectiveness. Because the NHS is the “Socialist way to do Healthcare” it becomes hard to get those on the left in the UK to see the case for reform (which is objectively pretty clear).
Then finally, on the systemic change point, I just kind of have to disagree. I think that often systemic change is not all its cracked up to be (if you mean redesigning your country around an entirely new system very quickly). If instead you mean advocating for policies on the margins that you think are effective, then sure I agree. I think Obamacare was a great example of this, for one, but so was the Inflation reduction act, child tax credits etc etc (margins really do add up). I think it’s also worth considering that there are people with much much less than you in other parts of the world who may be our allies in the fight for a better world, were they to survive their malaria infection, tuberculosis infection, tapeworm infection,… And to say to those people essentially “wait, before we can get to that, we need to first increase unionization rates/worker’s rights/etc in our home country” is I think kind of misguided.
The final thing I’ll say is that maybe there’s a mismatch between the Modern American left-wingers perspective on socialism and the Modern Centrist European perspective on socialism. We have all seen it actually tried. It was not demonized here in the same way it was in the US. It just… didn’t actually work that well. I mean there were good parts and bad parts, I don’t want to paint with a broad brush, but the ideological project as an overarching mission just seems to have not really panned out, at least as it would have been conceived of in the 20th century. I think Americans are kind of lacking this experience, and maybe on the margin more worker protections does make sense for America, I would just warn you to tread carefully, before you end up in a situation that isn’t what you hoped it would be (again, the UK in the 70s was a really bad time, and virtually everyone knows that this was because of the unions).
Perhaps the grass the greener on the other side. The American complex of privatized healthcare and insurance is notoriously unethical for its exorbitant prices and high rates of claim denial. Hence Luigi Mangione. Turns out that profiting from providing life-saving care can quickly become disastrous and cause widespread populist rage.
I did not know that about the UK in the 70s. I’ll have to look into it. I don’t know much about the socialism that’s been tried in the UK and whether or not it failed; I only know that the conditions in the US are different and that it’s about time we began loosening the death grip that neoliberalism has held on this country since the end of the Cold War. Socialism is becoming a lot more popular with young Americans. Just look at mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in NYC.
I think we can agree on systemic change, if we define it as policies that make things better at the margin. I’m not advocating for a sudden violent revolution. I also agree that capitalism has given rise to great innovation and efficiency. Marx himself knew this.
Not sure if you have more to add, but thank you for the discussion; this was interesting.
Agree that it's generally more debatable and less obvious. I think at the moment there's enough to go around before we start space-seeding though. Although if I'm honest, I do buy the AI stuff to a pretty large extent. But we don't have to agree, as long as you're trying to pick other low-hanging fruit, I think that's fantastic!
I really enjoyed the article! It largely resonates with my own views. Although I have to say that these views often lead to semi socialist (or at least largely leftist) policies.
My reading of Marx (and by extension classical Marxism, perhaps not so much Marxism-Leninism) is that his conception of socialism has less to do with maximizing a function of homogeneous goodness or attaining a wider distribution of goodness, and more with arranging society in such a way that freely associated individuals can achieve a state of pure subjectivity, through all other associated individuals.
This necessitates the abolition of social structures (such as the arbitrary subordination of labor to capital/property) and other moments of antagonism that hinder such an expression of subjectivity.
In the last analysis, it's a more abstract and subtle notion than a hedonic plea for "material well-being, now! Less pain now!"
So I’m a bit confused by your characterization of socialists as these pie-in-the-sky types, because it isn’t how I conceive of them (being one myself). A socialist, as I see it, engages in praxis and wants to help working class people now by campaigning for higher wages, public services, affordability, protections for immigrants and marginalized people, reproductive rights, etc. Socialists throughout history have delivered actual material benefits to people.
In late nineteenth and early twentieth century America, for example, there was a vehement progressive socialist movement that resulted in many of the labor and consumer protections we enjoy today. FDR’s New Deal took a lot of ideas from the socialists (e.g., social security, minimum wage, unemployment benefits, abolition of child labor). 1950s McCarthyism made socialism a bad word, but in reality socialism is a very democratic and practical tradition.
I can’t take seriously the people who just sit around all day reading theory and waiting for the revolution (that is, if they’re not doomers who deny any prospect of positive change). I sure as hell wouldn’t call them socialists.
I appreciate the goal of Effective Altruists, but where I’d differ is that I think the way “to do the most good one can” is through democratic political organizing. Giving X amount of money to the downtrodden or refraining from doing bad thing Y are great choices, but they don’t usually lead to the kinds of systemic changes that have, in recent history, drastically improved working people’s standards of living. Those were usually achieved by the collective bargaining of unions and the policies of progressive politicians.
For instance, I think it’s great that Carnegie donated hundreds of millions of dollars to build thousands of public libraries, but it doesn’t change the fact that he was a robber baron in an unjust economic system. The politicians, journalists, and workers who fought against him and his ilk did much more for human wellbeing than he ever did.
Yeah so I don’t necessarily want to get into a massive debate about socialism — the post is more of a statement of my opinions than an argument against socialism, there’s already a lot of those and some of them are even quite good (especially those from a moderate left perspective, which I found appealing back in the day).
But there’s a few things I’d say here. One is that it’s true socialists have delivered great things to people historically, but not all great things come from socialism. The washing machine, and AC, for example were all capitalist innovations that pushed human progress massively forward. Similar goes for reproductive rights. Socialists have been on _both_ sides of the fight for immigrants (at least in the US, it’s not as big of an issue in the UK where I’m from).
Also it basically it used to be the case that just a lot of smart intellectuals were socialist, so yes a lot of campaigns were often championed by those who were nominally socialist, but this isn’t decisive on the ideology itself, right?
I think today a lot of socialists end up being unfortunately confused and throwing their lot in with bad ideas as well as good, such as rent control, massive pushes for increases in unionization (just look at the 70s in the UK for where that can lead you) and perhaps some overregulation on the issue of worker rights (currently a big drag on europe’s gdp growth). For example, in the UK, socialists established the NHS. In principle, this is fantastic — free healthcare for everyone, but later on in practice it’s basically been shown that other systems that have some amount of costs for services just do function better, in health outcomes as well as cost-effectiveness. Because the NHS is the “Socialist way to do Healthcare” it becomes hard to get those on the left in the UK to see the case for reform (which is objectively pretty clear).
Then finally, on the systemic change point, I just kind of have to disagree. I think that often systemic change is not all its cracked up to be (if you mean redesigning your country around an entirely new system very quickly). If instead you mean advocating for policies on the margins that you think are effective, then sure I agree. I think Obamacare was a great example of this, for one, but so was the Inflation reduction act, child tax credits etc etc (margins really do add up). I think it’s also worth considering that there are people with much much less than you in other parts of the world who may be our allies in the fight for a better world, were they to survive their malaria infection, tuberculosis infection, tapeworm infection,… And to say to those people essentially “wait, before we can get to that, we need to first increase unionization rates/worker’s rights/etc in our home country” is I think kind of misguided.
The final thing I’ll say is that maybe there’s a mismatch between the Modern American left-wingers perspective on socialism and the Modern Centrist European perspective on socialism. We have all seen it actually tried. It was not demonized here in the same way it was in the US. It just… didn’t actually work that well. I mean there were good parts and bad parts, I don’t want to paint with a broad brush, but the ideological project as an overarching mission just seems to have not really panned out, at least as it would have been conceived of in the 20th century. I think Americans are kind of lacking this experience, and maybe on the margin more worker protections does make sense for America, I would just warn you to tread carefully, before you end up in a situation that isn’t what you hoped it would be (again, the UK in the 70s was a really bad time, and virtually everyone knows that this was because of the unions).
Perhaps the grass the greener on the other side. The American complex of privatized healthcare and insurance is notoriously unethical for its exorbitant prices and high rates of claim denial. Hence Luigi Mangione. Turns out that profiting from providing life-saving care can quickly become disastrous and cause widespread populist rage.
I did not know that about the UK in the 70s. I’ll have to look into it. I don’t know much about the socialism that’s been tried in the UK and whether or not it failed; I only know that the conditions in the US are different and that it’s about time we began loosening the death grip that neoliberalism has held on this country since the end of the Cold War. Socialism is becoming a lot more popular with young Americans. Just look at mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in NYC.
I think we can agree on systemic change, if we define it as policies that make things better at the margin. I’m not advocating for a sudden violent revolution. I also agree that capitalism has given rise to great innovation and efficiency. Marx himself knew this.
Not sure if you have more to add, but thank you for the discussion; this was interesting.
The part of Effective Altruism that’s all about picking the low hanging fruit as hurriedly as possible is great. How could you go wrong?
The future-facing longtermist / AI / space-seeding side of things is much more debatable
Agree that it's generally more debatable and less obvious. I think at the moment there's enough to go around before we start space-seeding though. Although if I'm honest, I do buy the AI stuff to a pretty large extent. But we don't have to agree, as long as you're trying to pick other low-hanging fruit, I think that's fantastic!
I really enjoyed the article! It largely resonates with my own views. Although I have to say that these views often lead to semi socialist (or at least largely leftist) policies.
My reading of Marx (and by extension classical Marxism, perhaps not so much Marxism-Leninism) is that his conception of socialism has less to do with maximizing a function of homogeneous goodness or attaining a wider distribution of goodness, and more with arranging society in such a way that freely associated individuals can achieve a state of pure subjectivity, through all other associated individuals.
This necessitates the abolition of social structures (such as the arbitrary subordination of labor to capital/property) and other moments of antagonism that hinder such an expression of subjectivity.
In the last analysis, it's a more abstract and subtle notion than a hedonic plea for "material well-being, now! Less pain now!"