Don’t Fear “Collectivism”

 https://jacobin.com/2024/04/collectivism-individualism-socialism

~~ recommended by collectivist action ~~

Striking telephone workers and union supporters in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 15, 1989. (David L. Ryan / the Boston Globe via Getty Images)

The capacity of the reactionary mind to invent catchall signifiers of supposed left-wing depravity often seems limitless. But in the canon of conservative epithets, there is probably none more common or enduring than “collectivism.” Spend any time immersing yourself in reactionary writing or literature and you quickly discover that collectivism can be virtually anything. Taxation and regulation are collectivist. So are social welfare programs, trade unions, and Medicare. The various mid-twentieth-century experiments in economic planning were collectivist, as was Keynesian economics. These days, the term is frequently invoked in reference to identity politics.

In the 1960s, Milton Friedman could be heard warning that the collectivist menace was on the march, and “welfare rather than freedom” had become “the dominant note” — not only throughout the Eastern Bloc but also in the world’s liberal democracies. Today, the Daily Wire warns us that collectivism is “the most broadly promoted theme throughout courses at America’s highest ranked colleges and universities.” The National Review, meanwhile, finds it rampant in the ranks of a leadership class that seeks to “make group identity the dominant category in our thinking about and practice of politics.” The Mises Institute, for its part, deems modern progressivism a “collectivist, anti-individual” philosophy out to “destroy civilization itself.”

Collectivism can thus be liberal or socialist, modern or postmodern, economic or completely unrelated to material realities. It is a scourge infecting America’s academic and political institutions, and a defective pathology peculiar to intellectual and cultural elites. Though you’d be hard-pressed to find any deeper consistency at work here — if twenty-first-century Ivy League progressivism and the USSR are ultimately traceable to the same thing, these words might as well mean anything — there is nonetheless a unifying principle.

On the Right, collectivism has always been the great enemy of its more noble opposite, “individualism.” The Left (or so the story goes) sees the individual as subordinate to, and defined by, the group, whereas conservatives extoll the sovereign and self-governing person, able to enter into voluntary relations with those around them in the absence of constraint.

As Nick French observes, it’s tempting to respond to this wrongheaded narrative by pointing out the many obvious holes in conservatism’s foundational bootstrap myth. Human beings, after all, don’t enter the world on an equal footing or start out their lives equipped with the same set of economic and social opportunities. Society is not a tabula rasa onto which individuals simply inscribe outcomes of their own making, and much about a person’s fate is shaped by forces entirely beyond their control.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that people have no agency or that we should concede the incorrect premise that collectivism and individualism are necessarily opposed. Contrary to what the Right asserts, the Left is not animated by a rigid determinism that seeks to stamp out the individual or deny her autonomy. The socialist project isn’t about imposing homogeneity or sameness, and the socialist critique of capitalism isn’t that it affords too much freedom and latitude to individuals. If anything, the opposite is true.

In an unequal society structured by class hierarchy and defined by vast differentials of wealth and power, most people must invest inordinate quantities of time and energy just to secure the bare necessities of life. This task is hardly liberating. For many, it is degrading and exhausting.

The more you have to worry about where your next meal is coming from, what will happen if you get sick, or whether there will be a roof over your head next month, the more difficult it is to flourish as an individual. To be shackled to the hamster wheel of grinding wage work, crippled by debt, or beset by endless financial anxiety is also to be deprived of personal sovereignty and the necessary prerequisites for making of your life what you wish.

The socialist objective of securing these prerequisites for everyone — shelter, leisure time, economic well-being — is fundamentally about creating a foundation upon which everyone can pursue their individual dreams, curiosities, and ambitions without having to constantly worry about their mere survival. Such a world, however, can only be achieved through the kinds of social cooperation conservatives deride as “collectivist”: public housing, education, and childcare; free and universal health services; economic redistribution; widespread social investment in shared goods.

In the Right’s barren conception of freedom, each of these is the enemy of individual autonomy and self-government. In our own far richer one as socialists, they are the collective means through which every person can spend less time simply tending to life and more time actually living it.