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From The (In)Effective Altruism Diaries: The Case Of Centi-Millionaire Marxist
You possibly already heard about James Cox Chambers Jr.
He is character that would be laughed at and rejected outright in any creative writing class as crude, primitive and unfunny caricature of leftist written by hate filled right wing bigot.
And he is real.
Descendant of long line of distinguished WASP's. As close to hereditary aristocracy as you can get in today's world. Wikipedia article of your own is now what noble title used to be.
(Yes, pure Anglo Saxon ancestry, no documented Jewish ancestors, if you are looking for this thing, you can be disappointed)
Who is, since early age, dedicated Marxist devoted to fighting for revolutionary cause.
Now, his means are not negligible. 250M hard bourgeois bucks is nothing to sneer at.
Distinguished revolutionaries in the past used cash with great efficiency as weapon to hasten the demise of capitalist world.
Comrade Cox-Chambers is not one of them. In 30 years of struggle, he really achieved nothing much worth showing. The Berkshire Communists, The Berkshire People's Gym, The Butterfly Collective etc. are not up there with The Sealed Train.
Neither are Dakota pipeline protests or Cop City protests.
At least the Georgia commune members had some fun, while it lasted.
This shows once again weakness of premise of effective altruism and 80,000 hours movement that money alone is sufficient to change the world. It is not specific to communism/leftism, many cases of right wing money wasted in even more pointless way.
Now, if you are inclined to laugh at the outgroup, show how would you do better. Your homework, your hypothetical scenario for today is:
You are given 250M in USD.
Your mission is to promote COMMUNISM. Not some petty bourgeois hippy nonsense, but real, scientific and authentic Marx-Lenin-Stalin thought.
How would you get the greatest bang for the buck, how would you most efficiently use capitalist cash to bring forward glorious communist future?
Show your work. Best entries will be rewarded with eternal revolutionary glory and virtual Stalin Golden Prize.
This was not happening, and this shows that this forum is really elite discussion forum not like any other. Nearly everyone here recognizes JCC as idealist devoted to cause of liberation of working class of the world, and his case as more tragic than comic.
Just few people argued that Marxist activism of JCC is just excuse to gain fame and sex, but these arguments fail flat.
250M is lots of money. With such cash, you could build replica of Nero's palace in all of its ancient glory (yea, in less prestigious location and not up to ancient craftsmanship standards), then fill it with harem of catgirls and catboys and livestream the orgies.
This way, you could become one of the most famous people of the world (and also undermine capitalism by several magnitudes more than anything JCC was doing).
But this is not what JCC wanted.
Thread is over, the time for grading is now.
And the winner is ... anyone who mentioned human capital.
Old time communists won over one third of humanity because they were Elite Human Capital of the time.
This is not the case any more, EHC lost interest long ago, modern self identified communists are rather sorry bunch.
Could this situation be reversed? Could Elite Communist Human Capital be rebuilt out of nothing? Probably not, this historical moment really passed for good.
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the first 10 million would be spent funding a group of young scholars and researchers wielding AI to determine precisely how Marxism originally won. The answer is some combination of (1) popular agitprop and (2) compelling status benefits for successful Marxist activists. An ideology does not need to be true or proven to successfully proliferate, it simply needs to be fun to express and exciting to believe at first pass; almost nobody, and certainly no young person, considers the consequences of their ideology beyond the first pass. The end result of this phase would not be some worthless boring thinktank paper that no one would ever read, but instead a dozen or so pages filled with bullet points on rules and recommendations for practical utilility. I would pay careful attention to the social ecosystem of Marxists prior to the Russian revolution and during Mao’s cultural Revolution. There were very concrete social rituals that were promulgated to increase the motivation and activity of Marxists, which are interesting to read about.
the next 10 million would be spent determining who to champion as primary social influencers. One passionate social influencer can create 1000 passionate social influencers organically in turn, so this is the place to start. Ideally you would form small teams of one charismatic leader and 6 to 11 assistants; the assistants research all the information and implementation details while the charismatic leader focuses on honing his visceral persuasion skills. 2016-Trump and Obama are examples of charismatic leaders; in online spaces, Nick Fuentes and Dean Withers. The heyday of SJW occurred when the beautiful young elites signaled their allegiance; the decline corresponds to the ugly and unwell signaling their allegiance, and then being counter signaled by “Libs of Tik Tok” type accounts. There was never any rationality involved in either the rise or the decline. Just signals.
the final 10 million would be spent funding the above groups so that they can spend all their time on persuasion and induction into the social ecosystem. The flowchart would be simple: someone comes across the attractive and compelling ideologue, and then are filtered into the social ecosystem, and later becomes an ideologue themselves. This is literally how Marxists grew originally, and how the Chinese cultural revolution became so energetic: there were thousands of “agitators” which would persuade new members to gradually become agitators too. Marxism et al is especially dangerous because it is such a primitively attractive ideology based on instinct: people have more than they need, so they should give it to those who need it. Hunter Gatherer tier feelings. This is how you would behave in a small group of friends, so why wouldn’t it apply generally and collectively? And it shifts the burden of (dis)proof to the capitalist, and it takes so much longer to explain why things are more complicated than Marxist ideology, meanwhile the Marxist can just repeat his slogans endlessly. (Today, we have the opposite problem where the capitalists lean into primitive feeling maxxing with their slogans revolving around the notion that “a person deserves what they can create”. Just as instinctive, and also a dangerous simplification, and again shifts the burden of proof to the opposition).
I would not need the remaining $220,000,000; I would donate the remainder to the poor.
To add to your first point, the third factor of most successful movements is that you can reduce the philosophy or economic system or social movement to some single sentence meme. In religion, you get things like 5 pillars of Islam, 5 Solas of Calvinism, the Buddhist Noble Truths. In politics, it’s stuff like slogans (in Marxism it’s “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, in Woke it’s generally “Love is love.”). Or maybe some simple that you can spend on a poster or meme or in an elevator pitch. Nuance is poison to the popularity as it makes it hard for a person to easily understand and explain it to others. Love is Love is easy to understand and explain, it fits on a poster.
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1: Take 245 million and live like John MacAfee
2: Pay five hundred academics ten grand each to say that all my pronouncements are True Marxism.
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The very simple answer is to claim that all Lenin-Stalin thought is actually deviation from authentic Marxist Stage Theory. To develop a Plain Reading of Marx that advocates for capitalism as a matter of development and productive capacity as a further step towards actual Marxism.
You take credit for every advance in GDP. Whenever a country implements market reforms and grows that's Actual Communism. When a country flounders that's Deviationism. Cheap electricity? A sign of future Marxism. Rising house prices? State deviationism away from Marxist overabundance. Ozempic is Marxist. High Speed Rail is Marxist. Forests are Marxist. Breathable air is Marxist. You take credit for all the gains of capitalism but disavow any ownership local tensions. You conflate development with historical destiny, you disavow all failures as tragedies of our age will will, eventually, at an unspecified time, be overcome once The Next Stage of History comes into being.
You buy the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index to keep your 250 million alive. There is no contradiction. You use some of your proceeds to pay people to write books, science fiction, and fan fiction. You live a quite life. Your goal isn't to build a gym and show how change is possible now. Your goal is to entice people with a possibility of the future. Your friends call you Fabius. No one gets the reference. Nothing should ever be available now. Communism will arrive "Like a thief in the Night" and "No one knows the time or hour". The uneducated will find these phrases self-evident, although they can't quite place why they find them intuitive.
Yours is not a Vanguard Party of action, but a vanguard party of thought. Whose goal isn't to instantiate communism, that of course is a historical necessity driven by new Modes of Production whose being isn't conceivable yet but which the capitalist mode must eventually create, but rather your goal is to keep alive the communist dream among some educated few because it is beautiful. You turn theory away from the drab of Actually Having to Do Something. Instead your society becomes a society of dreamers, a society of romantics who feel self assured in their inevitable destiny and who want to spread the word not out of revolution against capitalism, but out of love of the vision. You avoid all communist iconography. You avoid the Red, the hammer and sickle, the Socialist Realism. Those are deviations and you won't be tarnished by them. You indulge in a little identification by calling yourself "historically Parisian in outlook". No one gets the reference.
You spend half of the returns from your Index position on your project. the other half remains with you personally. You die 30 years later a Billionare.
The Real Communism is when the workers collectively own the means of production... In their 401K or pension plans. Wait, it already looks like that, even if the asset distribution isn't exactly equal (ask not why Party Members get nicer apartments and Ladas, comrade!).
Imagine a world where Marxists ardently claim that Index investing is the next "Stage of Investment" that "Rearranges the Mode of Investment", and which "Structures Capital in its latest stage, making new Social Relations possible" (investing in the first place)
Meanwhile the culture war continues and anti-marxists claim index funds prevent entrepreneurial spirit in individuals and therefor must be avoided at all costs.
I've heard both these arguments made by niche liberal and market socialist figures, so it is this world.
What a time to be alive
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I'd invest all the money in tech, focusing on AI companies. Look, AGI is our best for fully-automated luxury space communism (with optional homosexuality), if we don't have that, then communism ain't for me.
How likely is it for AGI to lead to communism, if achieved through corporations? I can imagine governments deciding to nationalize it, or the achieving company to become a de facto communist government. But there are other outcomes possible, and $250M isn't going to shift the needle much on which outcome is most likely regardless.
I think if your terminal goal is communism (as opposed to personal security, widespread material prosperity, etc), you'd want to do a variation of this. Invest in AI, but target a broad portfolio of research programs that aren't currently in vogue and saturated in capital, betting on the possibility that current approaches aren't sufficient. They probably are, but if they are, you can't change their trajectory much; so you assume they aren't and try to get get there first.
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Yeah, I think that if some companies invent AGI and are able to produce nearly unlimited goods or services at very little cost, then there's actually a pretty good argument to be made that the people -- acting through the government -- should seize the means of production and distribute the benefits evenly.
I mean, one of the fundamental flaws in communism is that when the government controls the means of production (1) it does a lousy job maintaining them; and (2) it disincentivizes the development of better means of production. But if the means of production can maintain and improve themselves, this is (arguably) much less of a concern.
Depends on how much "alignment" programs work out. If it's possible for the government to align AI and control it, you still end up running into public choice and Hayekian flavored failures of communism.
Can you be a little more specific about the scenarios you are envisioning here? I'm not saying you are wrong, I just would like to understand the issues you are raising.
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In the grand scheme of things it probably wouldn't add up to more than the People's Gym, but I felt for a while that open source gaming was a low hanging fruit that the left refused to pick. They have enough transbian furries between them to source both the coding and the art from within the community, they used to have the Breadtube trend that they could have used for promotion (I think they could still pull it off with Hasan Piker alone), and they could market copyleft licensing and the FOSS development process as examples of collective ownership and what Real Communism™ would look like. If all went well, it could even be self-sustainig, and wouldn't need more cash injection past the first few projects.
The big threat is that if they leaned in too much into the "collective ownership" thing and "muh democracy", so much money slushing around would almost certainly mean entryist sociopaths taking over, and running the whole thing into the ground. Best bet is to learn from history, skip the hippie-dippie phase, go straight for Stalinism, and manage the project with an iron fist.
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Picture this: January 6th but the protestors bring guns and launch a real coup.
$250 M is peanuts in terms of 'marketing campaigns' but it is a lot of guns and ammo. Obviously you'd need to wait for a good time, during some kind of major crisis when govt authority is weakened. But then you drive in with your comrades and do some shooting and see how it goes from there. If opposition is limpwristed, divided and feckless enough maybe you can get away with it.
Marxism-Leninism is an ideology of shooting, not theory. The Vanguard Party and democratic centralism ideas are almost overtly anti-theorycel. Vanguardism means 'we know better than the plebs how the country should be run and we're going to take over forcefully', democratic centralism means 'shut up and obey the Party Line'.
If you let people vote all you get is democratic socialism not ML. Nobody is going to vote to lose their SUVs and WFH lazygirl jobs. You don't give them the chance to vote, not if you want ML. Nobody ever voted in a communist regime that did real communism (collectivization and nationalization communism), bullets are the way to go.
90% of this is 'waiting for the right time' though. Being lucky is also very important.
The protesters on January 6th only made it as far as they did because they were "unarmed" (I'm not going to say they didn't engage in violence, but I still have yet to hear of a single gun charge for the incident). There was a lot of room for escalation by local and federal authorities earlier that wasn't taken because of some combination of rules about unarmed protesters (yours are not) and confusion of executive/legislative authority (which you don't have). The National Guard could well have shown up with bullhorns and 50 cals ordering everyone to leave or be fired upon, but for the optics of the situation, which I think are much clearer in your situation. And even beyond that, I bet the same folks who showed up unarmed for "stop the steal" (arguably self-described counter-coup) protests would be easily persuaded to show up as an armed countercoup to a real regime change.
I don't think communism is popular enough in the US for this to work at the present. I'd suggest trying to swing local elections, but Soros' DAs seem to be pushing centrist voters towards "at least self-described fascists don't immediately let murderers out on cashless bail" faster than convincing them of the merits of progressivism.
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Do you imagine you could have gotten the human capital present on January 6th to carry guns, let alone use them, in the Capitol? It's one thing to convince ten thousand people to go protests at the Capitol. Doesn't take much to get 10% of them riled up and caught in peer pressure to
stormpeacefully walk in the door.But carrying rifles, towards the sound of (even friendly) gunfire? No way you can do that with random normies. You need to indoctrinate them, train them, and establish a chain of command. This is, of course, the point where you pull every single fed in a 100 mile radius, and now your chances of even getting onto the Capitol grounds go way down, if they don't flat out raid you while you wait for your timing.
Do you really think it would be? I can't imagine a crisis so severe that it would stop attack helicopter to be there within the hour. At which point you either reveal that the vanguard already has infiltrated the armed forces (realistically, all branches and the DC National Guard, because they all have bases close by), or... I guess you can play hard ball and bring out your hostages and guys with MANPADS while assets from the single USM base you've infiltrated start bombing all the other bases in the area?
There's just no way, right? You'd need an overwhelming majority of the (local) armed forces on your side before you even start.
It really depends on it being the 'right time', delegitimization of traditional authorities and persuading a good chunk of the military to join up with the People. The US security forces have certain leftist leanings and maybe the upper officer class too.
Maybe drones democratize combat power such that you can take on any reactionary forces that move in too quickly...
I don't think this plan is desirable or workable really. But how else are you supposed to bring back a dead ideology like Marxism-Leninism?
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Yeah like the attempted ICE ambush last year where they missed the first salvo then proceeded to immediately shit themselves and surrender. Getting people to participate in actual violence with a real chance of retribution is hard
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Most historical Marxist-Leninist orgs would consider this proposal to represent irresponsible left-deviationist adventurism (well, unless you actually really succeed in getting a revolution going, obviously).
How so? I remember that everyone shunned the Leninists because Marxism specifically said there would be no revolution in Russia because the industrial working class wasn't developed, hadn't fully reached capitalism. But then Leninism worked while revolution in Germany and Britain was a total failure. All the orthodox Marxists died out and Marxism-Leninism replaced them. Isn't this a relatively straightforward Leninist approach?
I guess there's a big element of 'waiting for revolutionary conditions' but I emphasised that already?
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Seems to work pretty well for China, TBH. Even right-wing political scholars in the US like Paul Gottfried refer to themselves as "right-wing Leninists," owing to how the Leninist party apparatus addresses the grievances of the population at a local level.
I don't deny that Leninism works, it clearly does. All the theorycel anarcho-syndicalism and similar kinds of socialism never got off the ground.
Also, is it really Leninism that results in state responsiveness to issues or is that just proficient administration?
I’m less squared away on the history of syndicalism, but if I had to guess from what I know, it didn’t have a great deal of opportunity to succeed or fail completely on its own merits.
With Leninism (or Vanguardism if you like), you could argue it’s simply one way to achieve proficient administration. China has been known for that for millennia anyways, since back in the days when bureaucrats had to pass the Confucian imperial examinations to serve in political office.
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It cant work! The Master's tools and whatnot!
But more seriously, I don't think it can work. Real communism is too boring and stale at this point for $250 million to be enough to get the movement sparked. Netflix's annual revenue is $45 billion, youtube's is $50 billion. You are talking a drop in the bucket next to a lake when it comes to media influence and the like. That could work if it was something new and compelling that could meme itself into mainstream, like Looksmaxxing or Fursexuality (a hypothetical new thing), but with boring Marxism? Meh.
In any case, all the smart commies already moved on. They realized Facism is better anyways, you get 99% of the control over things that you would have had under socialism/communism, but still get to blame the capitalists when things go wrong.
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Pitch: identify male communism influencers and try very hard to boost their sex appeal to insane levels. The rest follows from there.
Details: they need to have real street backgrounds, like be artists or bartenders or woodshop owners and show promise at building a following. Then I would start hosting these conventions/parties that are communist adjacent that are really just a cover to invite these guys to hang out and give minor talks. Very important: ensure these things are like 70% female and plant a few very hot women to be all over the influencers. Leak some photos of them together getting drunk. In the early days the goal is to make these influencers think they're God's gift to women.
Once they're properly motivated and thinking with their dicks + feel the communism flow through them, from there, continue growing the conventions/parties, always maintain the high female to male ratio. Make the parties invitation only but in a hipster kind of way (you need to know it even exists). The parties need some kernel of grassroots appeal to actually take off and not be lame. Has to be something fresh. You can hire women at first to come to these but at some point you need something sensual or cool that brings women out willingly. Things like climate justice or black lives matter are tired. This is probably the hardest part though you can try a bunch of concepts with $250mm to burn through.
Anyway as these grow bigger gradually make the communist male influencers more center-stage, giving keynotes, etc. always ensuring they're surrounded by tons of women and that their high sex appeal is not in question. And start making it easier for wannabe communist guys to come to these and maybe get laid.
I give it 5-10 years before this counter-culture becomes a political movement with real weight.
Testosterone injections and mandatory communist waifus, then you might be able to put the average male communist on track. And no Hasan Piker doesn't count, hes a nepo baby "influencer" and for a split second I don't believe a word coming out of his mouth.
Testosterone makes men feel less conformist and agreeable. You would likely have a massive problem with defections.
And Piker believes every word that comes out of his mouth. It's just that those words are all narcissistic retard slop.
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Taking notes, but substitute transhumanism for communism. Unfortunately, I don't happen to have $250m to spare, but I can manage something at a dive bar and bribe the local bar bunnies to show up.
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I would pay the Mondragon people to consult on the creation of a parallel institution in America - basically, run a startup in some field related to national defense. Socialist left-wing SpaceX is a market niche that is begging to be filled: I'm sure that MIC dollars would be poured into a non-chud rocketry program even if it never produced a working rocket. Anyway, the point isn't to make a working rocket, but to spread Communism: and funding it off venture capitalist funding rounds and government subsidies sounds like a great grift to have. If we actually produce something of consequence, bonus!
This scheme is already in place in the Linux and Firefox foundations. (All credit to Lunduke.)
Nothing is stopping leftists from establishing some American equivalent of a kibbutz. Attempts at communes have been made, most failing for the standard reasons communism fails at scales larger than Dunbar's number: everyone wants to make lattes and write poetry, nobody wants to wake up at 0400 to milk cows, plow fields, and fix septic systems.
I agree with you, but the prompt is to spread communism, not make an effective widget or increase milk production. I'm basically treating the core mission as superfluous while stealing as much money as I can to give to my friends before the whole thing collapses.
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One of the main premises of effective altruism is that some forms of altruism are vastly more effective than others. Some people wasting vast sums of money ineffectively is very much compatible with that.
Many effective altruists have also specifically been wary of political giving (like Scott's article Beware Systemic Change), especially when it takes the form of picking a side in a mainstream left-vs-right tug-of-war rather than finding niche "pulling the rope sideways" issues that are disproportionately important compared to how much the public cares about them. Yes the controversial issues also matter, but they believe those are generally not where you can most effectively spend a marginal dollar (or even a marginal 250 million dollars).
See, this is when the altruism is not effective. The issue is that politics controls vast amount of money. Soros and his organizations are famously very effective in leveraging their money to 10x or more: build basic system and organizations and then use public money to push your projects. Imagine it as having a think-tank that will help towns and villages across EU write projects that can tap into structural EU funds to improve temperature in chicken farm or any other pet EA project, pun intended. Imagine what you can do if you can actually influence politicians to provide subsidies for that, and include a specific fee for animal welfare in each meat purchase, something like renewable surcharge to electricity. All you need is to just make sure to promote some friendly technocrats who can influence some of the byzantine EU regulation creation process. Amazing ROI.
That would be effective, but imposing new taxes isn't "altruism" anymore.
It definitely is a multiplier on altruism, plus this ship already sailed. EA calls this incest with public money as policy enterpreneurship. There are other projects that require cooperation and schmoozing with governments, be it AI safety or many medical programs. Heck even the famous malaria nets are distributed in cooperation with African governments. We cannot have simple things like a little schmoozing with local politicians preventing us from saving of millions of lives, can we?
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Most obvious answer is supporting young communists, right? Find the politicians who might make it into the big leagues, give them a helping hand, make introductions.
Internships for young communists that require them to be just communist enough in public that they would have trouble walking it back.
Make educational materials available. Do the boring stuff that other orgs don’t want to do for them. Provide templates for charity constitutions and licenses.
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hecto-millionaire
Sorry, but this is the officially used term.
100M+ net worth put you safely above the rules of classical grammar.
Just wait until you hear about biannual.
On a sidenote, I'm going to start introducing myself as a centimillionaire now, or maybe a microbillionaire.
I still do a double-take everyone time Americans say 'biweekly'.
Biweekly means twice a week, you silly people! We have a perfectly good word, fortnightly, that means 'every two weeks'.
I've never seen fortnight used like that.
What's wrong with bimonthly? Okay, it means something slightly different, but it's close enough for practical purposes.
'Fortnight' is a normal, everyday word in Australia. In America I was shocked that people responded as if it was quaint. I hear it's in A Game of Thrones, so to some people it sounds archaic or medieval?
Yes, over here it's a vocab word; something you would expect to see in Shakespeare, like "wherefore" or "betwixt".
I wouldn't quite put it to the level of Shakespeare words. Fortnight wasn't a common everyday word when I was a kid in the 90s, but most high schoolers would have been familiar with the word and what it meant, if memory serves, likely due to its usage in history class when reading documents relating to Revolutionary War or the Civil War. Which were only about 150-250 years ago, not 400 like Shakespeare.
I do wonder if kids these days know that Fortnite is a play on that word and what that word means, or if they just think it's some nonsense made-up word.
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US perspective here, but in business usage it’s common to use “bi-weekly” to mean every two weeks and “semi-monthly” to mean twice a month. Common example: Wages paid in 26 bi-weekly pay periods vs. 24 semi-monthly pay periods.
I once had a middle aged female British client brusquely correct me on this usage. She invoked “THE QUEEN’S ENGLISH” and everything. I’m not sure if she was just annoyed at me asking her for more paystubs or if there’s actually a difference in usage. I think she was suggesting something like bi-monthly meaning twice a month whereas I would understand that to mean once every two months.
There's some ambiguity in the etymological inference: Is it '(bi-month)ly' (as in, 'occurs once in a period of time comprising two months') or 'bi-(monthly)' ('twice monthly'). 'Bi-(monthly)' seems more intuitive to me, but (at least in the US), it seems I'm in the minority. I certainly wouldn't have the temerity to 'correct' someone else's usage.
Though either way, I think there's enough confusion that you basically have to just guess from context clues what 'bi-[time period]ly' means. This is certainly the worst of both worlds.
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Huh. Never thought of it like that. I always thought it was strange that McDonald's has an item called a "double quarter pounder." You mean a half a pounder? "Can I get a double half a pounder, please?" It's a perversion of language.
I'd say there is a meaningful difference between two quarter-pound patties and one half-pound patty.
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Isn't that two patties that each weigh a quarter pound?
Yeah. Which is a half a pounder.
I think there's value in specifying that it's two patties stacked, instead of one giant one.
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