Effective altruism is not effective

Let's go back to Politics 101 - Etymology : The English language bundles several concepts under the term "politics". Let's go back to the Ancient Greeks, to whom we owe many of our concepts, they had 3 different words for it : 1.) Politikos = community life 2.) Politeia = organization & management of the society, its Constitution, its government 3.) Politika = the power struggle

In modern terms, every time that you do something that has an impact on the world outside of your nuclear family, you're doing politics. (Note that this is a somewhat artificial separation, because, for instance, the way that you raise your children is going to eventually have a pretty big impact on the rest of the society !)

Now there are several ways to organize a society (= "polis") - these days we tend to consider that democracy (= political power equally spread among all* citizens) is the "worst of all, excluding all others".

EA clearly doesn't trust democracy to do its job (otherwise they would tell you to donate to the government instead), and considers that some people know better than others, and should wield this power instead (in this case the power is coming from donations and the people wielding the power are the donors and the people deciding where to apply it). This kind of social organization is plutocracy and/or aristocracy = "the rule of the wealthiest and/or the best".

This goes farther than just money though - the more you spend your time & thought on a separate political structure, the less time & thought you do on normal society politics. One of the effects is that it's going to reinforce your feeling that the normal political structure lacks legitimacy, resulting in a vicious circle of separatism.

Okay, this got a bit longer than I intended so I split it up into different points:

1) But society has already been fully restructured into something completely different. It's foolish to believe that we can get from one local optimum to a higher point without interruption if the only reason we're at the local optimum is that the previous one was violently interrupted in the first place. It's also foolish to believe that history is a linear trajectory towards something good or better, though this is indeed what most schools tend to teach because it avoids the difficult questions.

2) The status quo is unstable and will inevitably lead to accelerationism. You can not overthrow injustice without violence as those benefiting from the injustice have no interest in giving up those benefits without violence. Maintaining the status quo if it is unjust is in itself a violent act. The status quo isn't stable, most of us are just sufficiently detached from its injustices that it feels stable and safe to us.

3) That political action is violent doesn't mean it has to manifest as a revolution or civil war. We like to glamorize the suffragette movement as a non-violent political struggle that mostly consisted of women holding up signs but suffragettes were literally performing actions we would today label as terrorism. We like to appeal to MLK as the voice of reason and imagine that he ended racism by talking in a kind voice but his protests were literally portrayed as riots at the time no differently from how we portrayed the 2020 BLM protests today. The US itself was created in a violent revolution and had to fight a war against its own people to prevent a secession only a century later. Not every instance of social progress requires a complete overthrow of the entire system but the more intrinsic an injustice is to a system, the more violent will those benefitting from it defend it against anyone trying to change it and the more violence will be necessary to overcome this resistance.

4) Revolutions and civil wars are often not caused by a desire for things to better but as a reaction to governments actively making things worse. Cambodia is actually a great example in that the sharp turn to the ultra-right was a direct response to incremental progressivism that preceded it and this in turn necessitated a violent revolution because there was no way to recover from this shift without it. Incrementalism had not only failed but was violently halted and reversed by those benefitting from the existing power structures. By trying to undo the incremental changes they drove progressives into the arms of the Khmer Rouge who had positioned themselves as the opposition and were now seen as justified in overthrowing the system as a whole.

5) The question isn't whether we should oppose charity, the question is whether charity can solve problems created by the power structure that enables a tiny minority to engage in charity in the first place. And the answer is clearly no because it hasn't and there's no reason to believe it will. Charity is a form of wealth redistribution but it is extremely inefficient in more ways than just the obvious bureaucracy involved in maintaining charity organizations to develop and implement social works projects to actually help people in defined and limited ways. That's just food stamps with extra steps. The problem is that charity is itself replicating the top-down hierarchical dynamic by forcing "interest groups" to compete for scraps: whether the money goes to breast cancer research, education for people living in poor areas, treatment of AIDS patients, or exterminating the mosquitos that spread Malaria is entirely up to the market, i.e. the few extremely wealthy shopping for a philanthropic cause to support while saving taxes, indirectly transferring money to business partners, or legally bribing officials.

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I don't oppose harm reduction in itself. Voting for the less bad political party is probably better than allowing the more bad political party to win. Billionaires funding technological innovation is probably better than billionaires spending the same money on union busting or propping up totalitarian governments. But the question isn't whether we want the revolution or not, the question is when the revolution will come and who will win. And how we prepare for that.

That's why I said intersectionality is distinct from identity politics. IDPOL is actually the norm in most modern politics (e.g. NIMBY).

As for Marx, Engels and the Irish: their position wasn't that Ireland was only divided along class lines which merely "happened to" mostly follow the British-Irish divide, at least not as they learned more about Ireland and British colonialism in Ireland. Instead they argued that Ireland should be granted independence and then join a socialist Wales, England and Scotland as a socialist federation. This is literally an intersectional understanding of the problem: Britishness and Irishness played a part, but so did the class divide.

BTW, you're mixing jargon by referring to Marx while also talking about "the lower classes". Marx only knows two classes: the working class (who have to perform wage labor to survive) and the owning class (who rent out their private property or pay workers to use it to produce goods for surplus value). The distinction of "citizens" and farmers is as meaningless in a Marxist context as you claim other distinctions to be.

You're right that capitalists will try to pit groups against each other and this is what IDPOL is. But there is a significant difference between liberal IDPOL and leftist intersectionality. Division is not created by pointing out the existence of differences but rather the creation of power imbalances along those dividing lines. It's naïve to think that racism will automatically go away if we can overcome capitalism even if capitalism is actively reinforcing racism to divide the working class.

To pick up on your example of All Lives Matter: the claim of BLM isn't that Black Lives Matter And Others Don't. Their claim is that Black Lives Matter But Others Treat Them Like They Don't. The slogan "All Lives Matter" was intentionally pushed by white supremacists as a counter to remove the focus on "Black Lives" specifically. The point wasn't to say other lives don't matter, in general, but that right then, right there, this is putting "Black Lives" front and center for once because nobody is paying attention to their suffering. "Blue Lives Matter" went even further: since one of the core complaints of BLM was police killings of Black people, the substitute of "Blue" for "Black" was a direct inversion shifting the support from the oppressed to the oppressor. MLK most certainly wouldn't be rolling in his grave.

FWIW

> It's foolish to believe that we actually know a surefire to fix injustice

That's why I'm not an accelerationist. I think (specifically in the US and most Western countries) incrementalism is preferable and building dual power is a more fruitful path than attempting a revolution. But when incrementalism fails, direct action can become necessary. Incrementalism wouldn't have achieved universal suffrage, wouldn't have abolished racial segregation, wouldn't have decriminalized homosexuality and will not end capitalism.

Incrementalism rarely manages to topple hierarchies, it mostly just shifts them or tips them in one direction or the other.

I'm an anarchist but I don't fully believe a purely anarchic society is possible at a global scale today. I think mutualism or democratic confederalism is a more pragmatic goal but that's certainly not something we can jump into just by overcoming one power structure alone.

But as the saying goes, "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" (or unjust hierarchies in general, for that matter).

Thanks, I appreciate it.