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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.
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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