effective altruism is not applied communism, because charity is not applied communism, because charity can be voluntarily withheld, and if someone can voluntarily withhold resources you need, you are in a state of dependence on them.
this doesn’t mean EA is bad. it’s telling people who have the right to withhold such resources: “choose not to withhold! furthermore let’s do some analysis on how to not withhold most effectively.” this means people living when they might have died, living happily when they otherwise might have lived miserably, and that is Good.
and furthermore I don’t at all buy the line, which I think is put forward in good faith but is nevertheless dangerous, that this ultimately serves to actively prop up an unjust system. healthy, literate people are better at standing up for themselves than unhealthy, illiterate people, and social radicalism actually tends to be stronger in periods of economic growth.
but where charity exists - where charity must exist - we do not yet have communism.
The point of EA is to make itself unnecessary and impossible. That is very much the main difference in EA versus traditional charity; instead of doing things that look good and keep people dependent, make it so that people can’t do such things anymore, by removing the need. Every time the cost of saving lives increases, it means that lasting change has been achieved. When malaria is eradicated, nobody is dependent on bednet handouts anymore. When direct cash transfers let people obtain their own means of production with which they don’t need to rely on outsiders anymore, well, they don’t need to rely on outsiders anymore.
I don’t see why the means of achieving a goal would be more crucial than the goal itself; if Elon Musk builds free chargers for electric cars everywhere, or Bill Gates releases free textbooks for anyone to use, there is a commons where there previously wasn’t. In fact, this can be ad-absurdumed quite thoroughly: if one accepts the idea that change brought voluntarily is not the same as change brought coercively, the collective decision by every single capitalist in the world to redistribute their capital to the rest of the population would not count as communism. Thus the word loses its meaning as “the means of production are shared” and intead merely means “coercively seizing them”. Of course, if the intent is indeed to define the methods, not the results, the word may mean it; but in that case I’d suspect that quite a many people have been thoroughly misled about its meaning.
And even more: the boundary of voluntary and coercive is itself fuzzy and impossible to define. An EA suffering from scrupulosity may be voluntary on paper, while practically all coercion is actually done with acquiescence to a threat of violence, not the direct application of violence itself (and even then it could be argued that any form of resistance that does not reach the most desperate extremes is in itself “voluntary” submission as one “could” have “chosen” to escalate even further and it was simply that the actions we call choices happened in a certain kind of a context). So what ultimately differentiates pulling the levers of the clockwork world by speech, and pulling the levers of the clockwork world by guns? All is clockwork in either case. And when social pressure comes in everything gets even more muddled.
Furthermore, there is no ideal state of emptiness and non-dependency on others in a world with more than one person. As the failures of the welfare states have shown, using the state apparatus of violence to seize property from Adam to Steve doesn’t make Steve not dependent on someone else, Steve just simply becomes dependent on those who control the state apparatus of violence, instead of Adam’s charitableness; and when the controllers of the apparatus of violence decide to withhold their seized property from Steve it doesn’t help one bit. Or if the property is collectively, ~democratically~ controlled, one’s dependency on individuals, or the state apparatus of violence, has simply been replaced with a dependency on a mob, which can just as well withhold the resources if it so wishes with the scorned individual having no recourse against the popular opinion because such genuine recourse never exists as long as people can’t both satisfy all their material needs and wants on their own and unassailably defend themselves from the entire rest of the world while being unable to turn the means of that defense against others. In other words, never ever in reality.
Underneath there is always the twins of naked force and human goodwill, the two faces of clockwork, no matter what pretty narratives and constructs are set up on top of them. Sure, one can write a constitution saying that all resources shall be collectively owned and shared, but what is constitution but a piece of paper (or in modern days, simply a number) which gains all its strength from the willingness of people to enforce and keep up the fiction they share? So, what is the fundamental difference between the mob choosing to let me use the “shared” 3d-printer, and some individual choosing to let me use “their” 3d-printer? Certainly, withholding it may be more difficult in the first case, but it’s merely a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one. When a certain number of people reject the idea that I may use it, I de facto lose my ability to use it and in the end there is no jure, only facto.
Certainly, build technologies that make denying access to resources more difficult (as in reality there is ultimately no “withholding” even; as property itself is a construct built to determine who is denied access to what and it all reduces to whose word on the matter reality ends up reflecting, all is clockwork with thick layers of fiction on top); write your constitutions in blockchains instead of mere paper; let people get used to shared 3d-printers and become violently unwilling to give them up should anyone ever seek to deny them them; let them feel entitled to what they need, not merely to exist but actually live, and demand it in a world of plenty; but in the end there still is no qualitative difference. The dependence never goes away entirely, only its exact form and extent can change.
So what is the difference between a family now “having” a cow because some people sent them “money” to “buy” it; and a family now “having” a cow because a mob “took” it from the herd “of” someone else? What is the difference between a family now having a cow because a number of people decided that such should be the state of the world, and a family now having a cow because a number of people decided that such should be the state of the world?
Or to taboo the C-word itself: what is the difference between a reallocation of capital achieved by people speaking things, and a reallocation of capital achieved by different people speaking different things? And if one seeks to reallocate capital, shouldn’t one be equally happy in either case? As far as a reallocation of capital is what some people seek, I see no reason to not tell them that something has actually resulted in a more substantial reallocation of capital than what they were previously doing, if they truly do value the reallocation of capital instead of the speaking of the different things.
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1 month ago · tagged #is the libertarian seriously arguing to the marxist that magical ontological distinctions between voluntary and coercive don't exist #this isn't normal #but on bayesianism it is #clockwork people · 37 notes · .permalink