Don't fear "collectivism"
While recovering from New Year’s Eve, I had the pleasure of watching Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration. I found the event, punctuated with soaring speeches and serenaded by labour songs, quite moving and — whatever may lie ahead for this administration and the broader American left — its significance should not be understated. Indeed, Mamdani hit the ground running in auspicious fashion on his first day and looks determined to show the world what ambitious democratic governance can achieve. Among the many memorable turns of phrase in Mamdani’s speech was one that went decidedly against the grain of America’s mainstream political culture:
“We will draw this city closer together. We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it. Because no matter what you eat, what language you speak, how you pray, or where you come from, the words that most define us are the two we all share: New Yorkers.”
“Collectivism” is a word that accrued plenty of baggage during the Cold War. In the right wing lexicon, in fact, it’s among the scariest descriptions of anything you can find. Naturally, then, the usual suspects (and some who, whatever else they may be up to these days, should really know better) had a meltdown about Mamdani’s choice to invoke it.
What follows was originally written for Jacobin in 2024 and takes the question of collectivism head on.
The capacity of the reactionary mind to invent catchall signifiers of supposed left-wing depravity sometimes 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. 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 as well.
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 — if twenty-first-century Ivy League progressivism and the USSR are ultimately traceable to the same thing, words might as well mean anything — there is nonetheless a unifying principle here.
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 social and economic 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 most 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.
Seasons don’t fear collectivism, nor do the wind, the sun or the rain.
Something that has always stuck with me is the Margaret Thatcher quote "There is no such thing as society, There are individual men and women, and there are families." and I think I never really bought the "...and there are families." part. I have a decent relationship with my familiy, but my parents didn't feel like it was fair of me to ask them to pay for college and it was the most consequential decision of my life that I had no say in.
The reason I go out in the street as a part of a weird socialist organization is because it is the thing that makes the most sense to me in order to fight for broader change in society, but also because It's the best bet for making my life better. The way I get healthcare is if everyone gets healthcare, the way I get the war in Gaza to end or to stop the government from kidnapping presidents is by convincing people that it's our collective responsibility *as workers* to end it.