Pragmatic Socialists Should Support Effective Altruism: Or How a Marxist Sociologist Undermined My Socialist Beliefs

Who is the true hero of Effective Altruism-style socialism?

In this post I ask two main questions:

1. Who is the most credible socialist thinker?

2. When we argue about socialism, what do we actually care about?

I will suggest that the answer to the first question is the Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright, and the answer to the second question is that pragmatic socialists should care about directing social power towards the common good, instead of caring all that much about democratic control of the economy or ownership of the means of production.

If you agree that pragmatic socialists should care about directing social power towards the common good, then I will echo the Marxist philosopher Jerry Cohen and ask: What about Effective Altruism?

Before getting started, I want to say that there are many, many different interpretations of Marx, many definitions of socialism, and approximately 6,000 different proposals for how we might achieve it. Inevitably, any post about socialism generates objections of the following form:

• Well, this is a misinterpretation of X

• Well, this ignores the literature on X

• Well, my preferred version of X addresses this problem

• Well, this is based on the wrong definition of X

It would take a lifetime to discuss every possible interpretation of Marx, every definition of socialism, every specific socialist proposal and policy, and every objection. So instead of attempting this, I want to sidestep these questions entirely and ask:

Who is the one true hero of EA-style socialism? Or put another way: Who is the Derek Parfit of socialist theory?

Derek Parfit's credibility is almost unquestioned in the philosophical community. He's famous for his relentlessly rigorous argumentation style, which involves considering objections and counterobjections to philosophical questions to an almost obsessive degree. If Parfit reaches a philosophical conclusion, you can assume he has already considered various definitions of key terms, potential interpretations of different theories, objections, counterobjections, and counter-counterobjections to his view. If Parfit makes a philosophical claim, you know you ought to take it seriously because it's Derek fucking Parfit.

So what would our equivalent figure look like? Our hero might have the following qualities:

• An encyclopaedic knowledge of the Marxist and socialist literature

• An unusually strong commitment to truth and clear thinking

• An unusual degree of epistemic humility

• An unusual willingness to follow arguments where they lead, even if this means revising your beliefs

• Knowledge of the broader social science and philosophical literature, including neoclassical economics and game theory

• Decades of experience empirically studying alternatives to capitalism

This is the EA-style socialist hero that I wanted to be. Alas, (as I explained in my previous post) I am not the one true hero of EA-style socialism. But I do know who is. His name was Erik Olin Wright.

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Erik Olin Wright was a Marxist sociologist at the University of Wisconsin. I never met the man, and only became aware of his work shortly before he died in 2019, but if you read the obituaries and tributes from around that time, you start to get a sense of an almost otherworldly figure who, in many ways, instinctively thought about the world like an effective altruist.

His colleague Pamela Oliver describes Wright by saying:

[W]hat stands out about Wright's work is its moral axis. "He really believed that the most important thing is to figure out how to improve human well-being," she says. "He identified as a Marxist but was always concerned about being realistic about the flaws in Communist—or what he and others would call State Socialist—governments, and as Communism collapsed, about being realistic about how economies work."

He had an epistemological temperament that would be at home within the EA community:

[T]he hope to transform the world collides with the impulse to understand it. But for Erik, this did not mean we throw up our hands and give up either our moral commitments or our scientific aspirations. It meant we have to be frank about our predicament rather than wishing it out of existence. The balance to strike is to recognise the appeal of motivated reasoning without letting it paralyse you.

And Erik lived up to it. He changed his positions when his arguments and evidence failed. As a quantitative researcher, sometimes his regression results just didn't support the hypothesis.

Unlike a lot of thinking in the social sciences and on the Left, Marxist hypotheses are clear enough and straightforward enough to be proven wrong. Yes, the world is complex, but if our theory were as complex as the world it would give us no purchase on it. For Erik, a dumb but common critique was the refrain, "Yes, but isn't it all more complex than that?" No, the point of theory is simplicity, its goal to isolate the causal mechanisms behind some social process.

And his friend and colleague Michael Burawoy describes Wright in the following terms:

Erik leaves us with both a way of thinking and a way of being. Let me be blunt. I know of no one who thought more lucidly, more cogently, more speedily, more effortlessly than Erik; no one who so effectively cut to the chase as to what was at stake in any issue, any paper, any book.

Gentle and cogent though he was, exposure to him was both elevating and intimidating. He took your own claims, arguments, facts more seriously than you did yourself.

When he argued with others he never resorted to exaggeration, distortion, or oversimplification. Instead, he zeroed in on the best in his opponents' arguments, often better than what they could offer themselves. He brought all these gifts to the legions of students he taught, calling on them, too, to be logical, rigorous, and imaginative, but no less important, to be decent and honest, to give others the benefit of the doubt.

We can't be like him, but we can be inspired by what he has laid down, to follow in his footsteps, guided by his map, refashioning it as we move forward.

[He] was a sort of Modern Prince, a permanent persuader, an indefatigable builder of community that enabled people to flourish or, as Marx would say, to develop their rich and varied abilities. As one former student wrote to Erik: "You are always yourself in a way that invites all of us to be ourselves too." He was a great conductor not only in life but in music. But he didn't go solo, at the end of every party he'd get out his fiddle and have us all square dancing together in unison. And I've no doubt, wherever he is, that's what he's doing right now—a sparkling stardust in the heavens.

There are dozens of other tributes you can read online about his intellectual abilities, integrity, generosity, and warmth. The general tone is one of disbelief that a man like this existed. I've read a lot of his work and can confirm that Wright has an unusually strong commitment to truth and clarity, and that this level of respect is deserved.

I understand it is asking a lot to put so much trust in one Marxist sociologist. For some readers, the phrase "the world's most credible Marxist sociologist" will inspire less than zero confidence anyway. Meanwhile, readers who are more sympathetic to socialism might notice that Wright's sociological framework only looks like traditional Marxism if you squint, his definition of socialism also only looks like traditional socialism if you squint, and most of his proposals for getting towards a socialist future are not socialist, even if you squint.

My rather flippant response is that this is because Wright has extensively studied Marxist theory and concluded that traditional Marxist theories do not do a particularly good job of explaining social phenomena. He has considered different definitions of socialism and concluded that "worker ownership of the means of production" does not actually capture what we care about, and he has evaluated many socialist proposals and found that almost all of these proposals are either undesirable, unviable, or unachievable.

I think his work is credible, but I understand if you're sceptical. Please bear with me for now.

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Julia Galef popularised the idea of a scout mindset within the effective altruism community. The idea is that when we're trying to understand the world, we ought to behave like scouts instead of soldiers. We should try to create an accurate map of the world so that we understand the obstacles in our way and the most effective way to navigate them. We should avoid acting like soldiers who reflexively defend our beliefs at the first sign of a threat.

Interestingly, Wright frames his search for alternatives to capitalism in similar terms. We need to create a map of socialist alternatives, act as scouts to map out the obstacles on the landscape, and use a "socialist compass" to guide us around the obstacles and towards the future we desire.

First, we need to decide where we want to go. Wright thought the answer was socialism, although he defines it in a fairly non-standard way. I'm usually against this kind of definitional creativity. I would prefer that when people refer to socialism, they mean worker ownership of the means of production and only worker ownership of the means of production. But that might just be because I am a tiresome pedant.

In any case, I'm willing to make an exception for Wright because I think his definition is useful and captures what we actually care about better than a definition centred on worker ownership of the means of production. I also suspect that it's a definition of socialism that even the most die-hard anti-socialists will find reasonable.

Wright's definition of socialism doesn't depend on any particular institutional framework or economic arrangement. Instead, it focuses on the general distribution of power in society. Wright claims there are three primary locations of power in society:

1. Political (state) power: the effective capacity to impose rules and regulate social functions over a territory

2. Economic power: control over the production and distribution of resources in society

3. Social power: the capacity for collective action through voluntary associations such as clubs, political parties, unions, churches, neighbourhood associations and so on

His aim is to nurture these kinds of voluntary associations within the constraints of contemporary capitalism to the greatest extent possible, because these voluntary associations have the potential to promote social welfare in ways that can mitigate problems resulting from the concentration of political and economic power.

From this framework, we get three different types of political arrangements:

• Statism: political power controls the economy and the social sphere

• Capitalism: economic power controls the state and dominates the social sphere

• Socialism: voluntary social organisations control the state and the economy

In reality, there is no pure system and all of these locations of power are interrelated in complex ways, but I think this definition and typology is useful for structuring our thinking. One reason I find this framework useful is that most of us don't actually care very much about the specific details of economic arrangements. What we care about is having the power to influence the things in our lives that we actually care about, so the focus on power instead of any particular economic arrangement makes sense to me.

Wright argues that statism is unlikely to promote social welfare for well-understood reasons. The interests of political leaders are often different from the interests of society, and they will often pursue those interests at the expense of social welfare. Even if the interests of political leaders were aligned with society, there are generally multiple layers of principal-agent problems between setting a policy and its implementation. And even if we can avoid these principal-agent problems, state control over the economy will be enormously inefficient for reasons explained by Hayek. Wright is therefore extremely sceptical of any political system involving state control of the economy.

Wright also argues that capitalism (economic power being dominant over political and social power) is unlikely to be the best system for improving social welfare. Wright's reasoning is again based on basic economic principles. If economic power is dominant over the state, then economic interests will oppose regulations to address market failures and will instead try to engage in regulatory capture. This will not be optimal for social welfare.

So that leaves socialism (as defined by Wright). Wright admits that we don't really have a working model for how voluntary organisations might successfully wield political and economic power at scale. Instead, we should try to find working models that demonstrate the effective use of social power and try to expand them throughout society. Perhaps one day, the effective use of social power could be the dominant form of social organisation, and we will achieve a socialist future.

My understanding of Wright is that his support for socialism has less to do with support for any specific institutional arrangement, and more to do with a recognition that concentrations of political and economic power are generally bad for society. We should try to find social arrangements that promote social welfare without these concentrations of power.

Hopefully this all sounds like a reasonable political orientation—one that those on the left will largely agree with, and those on the right will respect at the very least. Wright isn't calling for any radical changes. He wants to empirically observe which kinds of social arrangements allow for the effective use of social power, and gradually expand these forms of organisation throughout society. I'm fully on board with both the intention and the proposed strategy.

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Okay, so now we have a general direction in which we want to travel. The question becomes: where exactly do we want to travel to, and how do we get there? Now we need to propose specific forms of social organisation that will promote social welfare while minimising the downsides that come with concentrations of economic and political power. But which ones? As I said, there are thousands of them. We can rule out any proposals that involve command economies, so that narrows things down a bit, but that still leaves us with an awfully large number of potential proposals.

Ideally, we could use some kind of heuristic to narrow down our search. Luckily, Wright has already developed this heuristic. Any promising socialist alternative should have the following three properties: it should be desirable, viable, and achievable.

These are all fairly obvious points. Obviously, the alternative should be morally preferable to the current system. It should not be vulnerable to unintended consequences or misaligned incentives that will undermine it upon contact with the real world, and it should be achievable. It's a waste of time to fight for an alternative that would be impossible to implement.

There are some parallels here with the cause prioritisation framework used within the effective altruism community. There are many ways you might try to make the world a better place, but only some of these will be large in scale, tractable, and neglected, so we ought to prioritise them. Likewise, there are many potential alternatives to capitalism, but only some of these will be desirable, viable, and achievable, so we ought to prioritise them. Although Wright doesn't insist that we ought to focus on the most effective approaches to improving social welfare, it seems like this is his default mode of being in the world. It almost seems unstated because it's too obvious for him to mention.

At this point I want to emphasise that Wright spent decades thinking about alternatives to capitalism. He published 15 books and over 100 journal articles during his career. By all accounts, every student and colleague he worked with (who were themselves generally Marxists or socialists) had immense respect for his intellectual capabilities and moral integrity. If there is one Marxist or socialist thinker in the world whose opinion should be taken seriously on the subject of alternatives to capitalism, I think it is Wright.

He strikes me as a one-man GiveWell of alternatives to capitalism. Someone who knows the literature and has spent his life earnestly trying to find socialist policies that are desirable, viable, and achievable.

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And here is where the story starts to take on elements of a tragedy.

Suppose GiveWell is a credible organisation that does competent research identifying effective interventions to reduce global poverty. And suppose after many years of research GiveWell published a report on the most promising interventions to reduce global poverty. And suppose the interventions they selected just... didn't seem all that promising. You might wonder: if these are the best options, what were all the other ones like?!

This is kind of how I feel about the work of Erik Olin Wright.

After all of this research and analysis, the proposals Wright selects as being the most desirable, viable and achievable means to promote the effective use of social power are:

• Universal Basic Income

• Participatory Budgeting

• Worker Cooperatives

• Voluntary organisations like Wikipedia

And my reaction to this is: if these are the most promising proposals to promote social power, what were all the rest like?! Of all the socialist proposals Wright considered over his career, these are the ones that are the most desirable, viable, achievable?

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It is at this point that I want to make a controversial suggestion. If what we care about is the effective use of social power, rather than ownership of the means of production per se, and we ought to use empirical methods to study organisations that effectively wield social power to improve social welfare, and the effective altruism movement is an example of the use of social power to improve social welfare, then one promising pathway towards socialism, as defined by Wright, is through something like effective altruism.

You might notice that Wright's definition of socialism is actually pretty malleable and doesn't necessarily have to look like what we traditionally think of as socialism. I think this has the virtue of being a more plausible vision of socialism at the expense of diluting the conventional meaning of the word almost entirely.

And so this is what I meant in the previous essay when I claimed that the analytical Marxists, exemplified by Wright, accidentally undermined the socialist political project. If you take Wright's premises and methods seriously, if you take unintended consequences, misaligned incentives, and second-order effects seriously, and you follow Wright's reasoning to its logical end, you end up being drawn to an incredibly weak version of socialism in which maybe, just maybe, effective altruism is an excellent example of socialist praxis.

Maybe Will MacAskill was the one true socialist hero all along?

I make this suggestion in jest, of course. But there is also a point here. The effective altruism movement is part of the social economy as Wright defines it. The social economy:

is the pathway of social empowerment in which voluntary associations in civil society directly organise various aspects of economic activity, rather than simply shape the deployment of economic power. ... Its hallmark is production organised by collectives directly to satisfy human needs not subject to the discipline of profit maximisation or state-technocratic rationality.

This sounds like effective altruism. In fact, the charity sector in general is part of the social economy. Expansion of the social economy is one potential pathway in which Wright envisions a transition to socialism. It probably isn’t enough on its own, but suppose we kept expanding the social economy throughout society, at a certain point it starts to look like a significant proportion of economic resources are being directed through non-market means. Given that the effective altruism movement is part of the social economy, expansion of the effective altruism movement gets us closer to a society in which economic production and distribution is not disciplined by the logic of profit-maximisation.

But if that isn't enough, we could make a democratic socialist version of effective altruism if we wanted to. Instead of individual donors voluntarily contributing to individual causes using their own discretion, we could require donors to contribute to a centralised pool of funds. We could then use deliberative democratic processes to collectively decide where funds should be distributed and democratic elections to decide on community leadership positions. This seems like it would be at least as desirable, viable, and achievable as any of the proposals identified by Wright. We could do all this, but do we actually want to? Is the juice worth the squeeze?

At this point, you might be starting to find these kinds of debates about what is, or is not socialism, and what will or will not, fundamentally challenge capitalist social relations kind of tiresome. I would agree and this is kind of my point. I think these kinds of debates are almost entirely pointless.

Instead we should be asking: what do we actually care about?

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Which brings me to worker coops, the only genuinely socialist proposal on Wright’s list. Personally, I have nothing against worker coops. They exist. They work. Mondragon Corporation exists. Wright uses it as a case study of how worker coops might be expanded throughout society.

At the same time I don't have any interest in being part of one. If, somehow, we could magically convert the economy to worker coops, what would happen? First I would lose any money I have invested, as that would go to the workers of the respective companies instead. Then I would gain part ownership of the company I work for. But I don't really want both my wages and my investment tied to the same company. It's too much risk—what if the company goes broke? Probably the first thing I would do is sell my ownership stake in the company, become a wage labourer instead, and use the money to invest in an index fund. Basically the situation I was already in. This is a rational decision from the perspective of risk diversification although it might be the least revolutionary sentiment in the history of the world.

If we achieved socialism tomorrow Moloch would quietly whisper: "Workers of the world untie! Divest your short-term income from your investments for retirement. Sell yourself into wage labour and buy into an index fund."

I understand there is a large literature discussing how we might solve this problem. We could try to incentivise people to maintain an ownership stake in the company they work for. We could implement policies that distribute risk amongst various coops in a way that looks like purchasing an index fund with extra steps.

The problem is, I don't actually care about my relationship to the means of production very much. I care about having the power and capacity to live a good life and pursue my interests. I care about living in a society in which social organisations direct social power towards the common good. The definitions don’t matter and the means of production are simply a means to an end.

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I took no pleasure in arriving at these conclusions. As I mentioned in the previous post, my identity and self-esteem were, to some extent, tied up with my socialist beliefs. The search for alternatives to capitalism was a large source of motivation for me to complete university and actually engage with the world. I tend to be a bit of a recluse otherwise. And I had been planning on pursuing an academic career. I don't want to brag, but I think I would have been pretty good at it. Better than the average sociology professor at least. If I'd wanted to, I probably could have written articles like: "The Biopolitics of Effective Altruism in the Neoliberal blah blah blah." Instead, I dropped out of my PhD programme and now I'm doing manual labour again. I don't really mind. It suits me and I like the fresh air.

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While discussing this essay with my partner, she noticed parallels between Wright and Sir Galahad. In Arthurian legend, many knights tried and failed to find the holy grail. Only Sir Galahad succeeded in finding the grail and experiencing its divine vision, because only he was pure of heart. But even he could not bring it back to Camelot, because Camelot was deemed unworthy of it. I think Wright managed to achieve something of a socialist utopia within his own life. He managed to create a community dedicated to searching for a better way to organise society. One that was built on fundamental socialist principles of mutual aid, equality, and solidarity. He was beloved by his colleagues, friends, and family. In a way, he found the holy grail.

But the holy grail of socialism is not for mere mortals. If everyone was like Erik Olin Wright, we would have achieved a socialist utopia centuries ago. But I think we have been deemed unworthy, and even Sir Erik could not bring the grail back to the mortal realm. I, for one, would sell it and invest the money in an index fund.

I think there is some kind of tragic irony in the fact that the man who dedicated his life to demonstrating the feasibility of socialism, and who successfully achieved a microcosm of social power directed at the common good within his personal life, is also the man who, perhaps more than anyone, has demonstrated its infeasibility for us mere mortals. I guess that is the risk you take when you do good work.

However, even as he was dying of leukaemia, he never gave up hope that a better world was possible. He continued to write and teach and his final book was published posthumously, titled: How to Be an Anti-capitalist for the 21st Century.

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I've been meaning to write something like this for a couple of years. I feel a vague sense of guilt for not having written it earlier. I understand the appeal of this kind of quest, and feel some degree of responsibility to warn others about what lies ahead. But I'm not entirely sure what I can say that will persuade anyone. I doubt I would have listened when I was getting started. I think the best I can do is to stand at the trailhead and ask would-be adventurers: have you heard the legend of Sir Erik, the greatest knight of the Marxist roundtable? Have you studied his maps and suffered his trials? Have you thought about unintended consequences, misaligned incentives, and second-order effects? Is your heart pure? Are your eyes unclouded? You haven't reified the concept of socialism as independent from the use of social power within voluntary associations, have you? Have you?

If they have heard the legend and studied the maps, I will wish them well and hope that they are the one true hero of EA-style socialism that I wanted to be. But if they have not heard the legend or studied the maps, I will try to tell them the legend of Sir Erik and ask them to study the maps. I will tell them that I was drawn to this quest for emotional and psychological reasons beyond my understanding. I will tell them that I spent years in the desert without finding anything of value and that one of the better decisions I have made in my life was deciding that I'm going home.