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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.
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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