When Marx Meets Moloch
Lessons from an Intellectual Self-Defenestration
The EA Forum essay Of Marx and Moloch is a rare artifact: an ideologue documenting, in real time, the collapse of their own ideological certainty. The author set out to prove to Effective Altruists that socialism offered the real “root cause” solution to global poverty. Instead, they dismantled their own argument — publicly, methodically, and with a level of intellectual honesty that deserves respect.
The journey matters because it captures something that both socialists and Effective Altruists tend to miss: how much of our politics is psychological coping, not causal reasoning. Yet, even after the author’s conversion away from orthodox Marxism, one fundamental error remains: their framing of poverty as something capitalism “causes.”
Let’s unpack what they nailed — and expose the remaining failure modes.
What the Essayist Gets Right
Root Causes ≠ Solvable Problems
They admit that knowing why a problem exists doesn’t mean you can solve it. Recognizing that capitalism “causes” poverty (in their original view) is not the same as having a concrete, feasible plan to eliminate it. This is a devastating blow to most utopian political arguments, which stop at diagnosis and never reach implementation.Sociology’s Track Record Is Awful
The author discovered that academic sociology is either so abstract it’s useless, or so unfalsifiable it’s pseudoscience. This echoes the EA ethos: look for empirically tractable levers, not elegant theories divorced from action.Moloch, Not Conspiracy, Runs the Show
They reject the idea of a coordinated capitalist cabal oppressing the masses. Instead, they frame social problems as the product of misaligned incentives, competition, and coordination failures. This is the core insight of Scott Alexander’s “Meditations on Moloch” — and it’s far more compelling than conspiratorial thinking.Classes Are Bad Predictors of Behavior
Within any given “class,” individual cognition, preferences, and strategies vary so widely that reliable collective action is almost impossible. This recognition detonates the Marxist assumption that the working class is a coherent revolutionary agent.Political Beliefs Are Psychological Tools
They see that ideology often functions as a way to maintain self-esteem or reduce cognitive dissonance, not as a truth-seeking process. This isn’t just true of socialists — it’s true of libertarians, conservatives, and Effective Altruists alike.
What the Essayist Still Gets Wrong
Poverty Is Not “Caused” by Capitalism
The most fundamental blind spot is definitional. Poverty isn’t something a system “creates” — it’s the default state of humanity. In the absence of ongoing productive effort, everyone is poor.Wealth must be generated, coordinated, and preserved.
Poverty is simply what you get when nothing is done.
Capitalism can reduce poverty when it fosters production, innovation, and trade; it can fail to do so when incentives or institutions break. But it is not the source of poverty — and this reframing matters, because it changes what we’re looking to “fix.”
Underestimating Non-Economic Drivers of Prosperity
The essayist now acknowledges misaligned incentives, but still frames their thinking almost entirely in economic terms. History shows that culture, norms, and institutional legitimacy often determine whether productive systems emerge or collapse — sometimes more than material arrangements themselves.Implicitly Retaining a Zero-Sum Mental Model
Even after rejecting class struggle as a predictive tool, the language and structure of the essay still imply that the rich have what they have because the poor don’t. In reality, wealth creation is overwhelmingly positive-sum when institutions work — a truth Marxism obscures and Molochian thinking can sometimes also underplay.
Why This Matters
By the end of Of Marx and Moloch, the author has shifted from revolutionary certainty to a kind of sobered realism: systems are messy, incentives matter, and ideology can mislead. That’s good progress.
But without recognizing that poverty is the baseline and wealth the anomaly, even sharp post-Marxist analysis risks slipping back into moralistic anti-capitalism. If you believe capitalism causes poverty, then dismantling it feels like a solution. If you understand that poverty is the default, dismantling capitalism without a better mechanism for wealth creation is just dismantling your own lifeboat.
Key Lesson for Effective Altruists:
If you want to fight poverty effectively, stop treating it as an injustice that must be “eradicated” like a disease, and start treating wealth creation as an ecological process that must be cultivated, defended, and scaled. Systems fail when they forget the difference.