ziq wrote (edited )
Reply to comment by ziq in For those of you where the individualism-collectivism debate exists, what is it all about? by An_Old_Big_Tree
I should also mention -
Can you give an illuminating example or two of how an individualist or a collectivist would act differently?
Individualists don't aspire to create a rigidly structured society. Individualists don't want any one-size-fits-all rules that will dictate how they live their lives. Most individualists shun the idea of an organized society and instead wish to co-operate with others when the need arises, but otherwise be left to their own devices.
ziq wrote (edited )
And individualists don't dream of 'revolution'. They don't aspire to attain the unattainable - to create order out of chaos. They believe in living an everyday anarchy in the here and now rather than pining for a permanent anarchy; a global society of enlightened communists that is too far out of reach to be plausible.
An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote
Thanks ziq, I was hoping you'd respond here since I vaguely remember you having mentioned individualism before. This cleared up quite a bit and I have some further thoughts.
So, it seems to me immediately that if that's what collectivism is about then it is shit. (when we think about its majority-rule nature. However, it's hard to imagine that there are anarchists who believe kind of justification of imperialism - as is done small-scale in the bicycle mining example. Though I suppose there are?)
But also it seems like there is a lot more options than collectivism and individualism, if individualism is defined as you have. It seems you can be anti-majoritry-rule while not having the mindset that "if we won't help ourselves, no one will." Just by considering proposals of gift economies and mutual aid that is typical of anarchists. While it might be the case the humans act selfishly, I'm not sure how that implies judging the individual or the collective as primarily valuable, since we can selfishly care about others.
And then other problems seem to arise when we think about how the collective is made up of individuals, and how an individual is bound up in the collective. It might be that, how the distinction between the two is clearer in some parts of the world and that seems to be why this debate doesn't exist where I am.
I'm also tempted to consider individualism, as the belief that strangers won't meet your needs if your needs clash with their own, as a reflection of understanding human nature in a fixed way, (not accidentally) in a way that we're socialised to by capitalism.
Are there collectivist arguments against individualism?
ziq wrote (edited )
I'm sure every anarchist has good intentions, but the practical application of theory doesn't always go as planned.
There are no utopias in this world, and the struggle for anarchy isn't something that we'll ever 'win'. We'll always be fighting for it, and anyone that convinces themselves there's a finish line waiting somewhere in the distance is going to be in for a rude awakening.
The bicycle miners story is what happens when ideology is made sacred. All of a sudden, the collective-will and some dusty old books can be used to justify any atrocity as long as its done by 'the people'. That's the biggest setback of collectivism. History has repeatedly shown how any principles can be warped beyond recognition to suit the whims of the moment. People branding themselves as anarchists aren't above doing fucked up things to make their lives easier. That's why most individualists reject the concept of ideology or hard and fast rules.
You mention that we've been socialized by capitalism, and that's something we'll always have to live with. Even if you believe in violent anarcho-communist revolution; all the people that fight the revolution and shape the new world will have been influenced to varying degrees by capitalism and war. The society they craft won't be immune to their failings, no matter how good their intentions are going in.
Humans and their systems will always be fallible and vulnerable to both internal and external forces. The struggle for anarchy happens first in our minds, and we have a LONG way to go before we can even claim to be ahead in that fight.
..Letalone the fight to win over the minds of the majority of the population who are more interested in applying bandaids to the status quo than abolishing it. Even our own comrades are helplessly attached to the idea of making friends with the boots pressing down on their skulls.
A good example of this is that r/@ thread the other day where everyone was lecturing KZ to not alienate someone who was essentially a military recruiter advising queer kids to enlist in the US military to "protect America".
They all consider themselves anarchists, but their dedication to their utopian ideals won't let them see that talking down to a comrade for their decision to yell at an imperialist is horrible praxis.
In their minds, the military promoter is queer and thus a potential comrade. But in the minds of anyone being crushed by imperialism, there's no reason we should coddle a proud imperialist just in case they one day decide to read Kropotkin and 'convert' to anarchist ideology. It won't change anything for the victims of imperialism.
That is essentially the biggest battle between collectivist and individualist aka lifestylist thought. The collectivist is always working towards their utopia, while the lifestylist is just trying to live in as free a manner as possible. Whether that means building a commune, community garden, squatting, opening a free shop... these are all individualist/lifestylist pursuits. A pure collectivist would consider these pursuits a waste of time because they function within the system rather than abolishing it. Crimethinc especially gets a lot of flak for their lifestylism, but are Internet collectivists really doing anything so revolutionary that they should feel entitled to talk down to them?
The more arrogant collectivists will browbeat any comrade that breaks from their 4 step plan. "You're making anarchists look bad, you're being divisive, you have to use more tact, you're not going to win them over if you don't respect their opinion, everyone is a potential ally".
To an individualist none of this makes any sense, because they have no aspirations to convince liberals to convert so they can build a communist utopia together. They're just struggling to maintain a morsel of autonomy in the here and now and not focusing on distant theoretical futures that they have no power over.
I think that's the big difference between the two sides. One is trying to live anarchy right now, while the other is waiting for the right opportunity to present itself for revolution. And in the meanwhile, both are building awareness through propaganda and recruiting other disillusioned people to join the struggle.
Personally, I think its all semantics and anarchy doesn't need any prefixes attached to it. The collectivists won't have their utopia in their lifetime and the individualists will lose more and more of their autonomy everyday as life takes its toll. In the end, we're all just anarchists and arguing over a hundred years of conflicting theory isn't going to free us.
EDIT: btw the conflict between original flavor anarchism and social anarchism doesn't exist where I'm from either. It's largely an American thing. I've always heard that most non-American anarchists are better described as individualists rather than collectivists tho. Social anarchism started with Kropotkin and Bakunin in Europe and was quickly exported to the US, but indiv. anarchism existed in Europe from much sooner and social anarchism never unseated it, but simply added to it. In America, they found indiv. anarchism much more recently in the form of post-leftism and egoism, so it created a fork in anarchist practice that doesn't exist elsewhere.
An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote
I agree with a lot of what you've said - I'm just going to say what I need to to get to the most interesting bit for me.
I do think that we'll have to deal with the ways that capitalism has fucked us up for our whole lives. But I also think of anarchism as a multi-generational project of unlearning the old world. This seems somewhat implied when you say "The struggle for anarchy happens first in our minds, and we have a LONG way to go before we can even claim to be ahead in that fight." So if individualists understand people now as mostly selfish in a "if we won't help ourselves, no one will" way, that makes more sense, but I don't really understand why it seems like a kind of fixed position.
I get the sense that collectivists are authoritarian and that individualists as you've described them are good except for a kind of selfishness implied by their view of people.
I wonder how different worlds look when they're based on seeing yourself as co-constituting with and interdependent on all people versus a world understanding people as focused on themselves in a way that is cut off from that, which again seems implied by a "if we won't help ourselves, no one will" perspective. I'm getting confused also because it seems in conflict with your your relationship to the cosmos and everything seems to be at odds with this, where you seem to be saying that seeing ourselves as unrelated to everything is a mistake. Or are you saying that though we want to feel a part of everything again, our purpose at the moment is to be individualists focused on life as individuals, before the cloud is lifted?
All that said, I haven't thought of post-leftists like Crimethinc as individualists, so I'm going to have to think about how that fits in with everything.
ziq wrote (edited )
I'm too tired to reply properly but I'm not an individualist, I'm an anarchist-without-adjectives.
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/cleyre/ts205.html
An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote (edited )
Ah. That makes a lot more sense now. Somehow I had not processed that anarchism without adjectives bit because I'd not thought of individualism/collectivism to be among the adjectives involved for some reason. Thanks, and sorry for the confusion!
ziq wrote (edited )
Individualist anarchist: illegalists, mutualists, anarcho-primitivists, lifestylists, post-leftists, nihilists, egoists.
Social anarchist: anarcho communist, anarcho collectivist, anarcho syndicalist, social ecologist, bright green, anarcho-transhumanist, platformist.
Both: anarchist without adjectives, postciv
Either: Insurrectionist
Neither: post anarchist
An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote
Ah, thanks, this is interesting.
ziq wrote (edited )
Henry David Thoreau was an individualist anarchist and his book 'Walden' probably gave most modern anarchists their first taste. I started out reading that before moving through the different social and individualist factions, but his simple living ethos will always be a big part of my anarchist make up. The rejection of society is a big part of his praxis so anyone that lives that lifestyle is going to struggle to fully embrace collectivism.
The form of social anarchism I've most flirted with is social ecology.
ziq wrote (edited )
So if individualists understand people now as mostly selfish in a "if we won't help ourselves, no one will" way, that makes more sense, but I don't really understand why it seems like a kind of fixed position.
The thing about most individualists is they refute the idea of any kind of fixed positions. But they also hold as truth that all animals serve the self first, and any other considerations come after. You could call it a contradiction.
If we're talking about egoists - they might be happy to die to save the life of another, but they don't consider this an unselfish act. They'd be sacrificing their life for a selfish reason - be it for love or dedication to some sort of ideal.
They see love, heroism, etc as being selfish because we do these things primarily for ourselves. Mutual aid, we do it because it feels good to help others. So we do it to satisfy the self; which is a selfish act. Hope that's clear.
I get the sense that collectivists are authoritarian and that individualists as you've described them are good except for a kind of selfishness implied by their view of people.
This is how individualists feel about collectivists, yes. They feel that any attempt at global social anarchy will result in yet another failed Bolshevism-esque experiment because they see a collective as a form of power that can be corrupted. They don't believe that anarcho-communism would be that different in practice than Bolshevism.
Anticivs, for example, are certainly right about that, because any industrial society would fail their desires, whether it's fully communist or not.
A useful comparison is how Freetown Christiania no longer serves the purpose it set out to and has just become a place to buy weed. The founders got older, they lost interest in the experiment, and the whole thing is now barely a footnote in anarchist history.
But because it's just one community, its failure won't affect any of the other anarchist communes around the world.
In a global collective; failure of the system could spread like root rot and all of society could collapse like the Soviet Union did.
We would theoretically make every attempt to have Anarcho-communism be decentralized. But in practice, when billions of disparate people are involved and not just a small group of well-read radicals... And there are millions of hostile actors working to sabotage our efforts and return the world to capitalism... Any number of things could go wrong. If the people perceive global anarchism as having failed, that would be the end of it. Individualists would rather keep things on a small scale, build their small communities (or not) and exist despite the outside world.
It's also a given that the most dominant personalities would have the most influence over an ancom society. People would put their trust in leader figures - looking to them for guidance. There's a definite threat of a personality cult arising, and the personality then deciding to change things for the worse, with their followers backing them up.
There's no reason to think a global ancom society would be invulnerable to the cult of personality mentality that destroyed the USSR when today's anarchists are so infatuated with Bookchin or Chomsky and will attack anyone that criticizes them. And these are just a few thousand people, when you take anarchism to the wider population, the vast majority of people aren't going to be conscious of traps like personality cults. They wouldn't even care to reject hierarchy. Expecting billions of people to act super-enlightened and maintain an anarchist purity that they have no concept of is a fools errand.
I'm getting confused also because it seems in conflict with your your relationship to the cosmos and everything seems to be at odds with this, where you seem to be saying that seeing ourselves as unrelated to everything is a mistake. Or are you saying that though we want to feel a part of everything again, our purpose at the moment is to be individualists focused on life as individuals, before the cloud is lifted?
This is going to get a bit out there, which is why I made that reply a separate comment; it's not really related to anarchism and there's no science to it other than intuition.
When I said "when the cloud is lifted" I meant: when we die.
I think we take human form because we have stuff we need to work out. We can only address these issues if we isolate ourselves from the whole so we can focus on working through them. Every time we remove ourselves from the universal consciousness and take human form, it's to address the questions that arose from our previous lives.
For a very simplified example - if we were arrogant and brash in the last life - in this life we would work at being more humble. Every time we take solid form, we do it to reach a greater understanding. When we die and return to being one immense body of energy, we bring back those lessons we learned to the collective and its better for it.
But while we're human, we feel as if we're severed from the universe - the collective energy - and its difficult for us to see beyond the self unless we strive to reach that state through meditation or psychedelics.
But I also think of anarchism as a multi-generational project of unlearning the old world.
Totally agree.
dele_ted wrote
They believe in living an everyday anarchy in the here and now rather than pining for a permanent anarchy
How can an everyday anarchy be possible when we are, to be sure, being dominated by the capitalist state almost no matter where we go (unless we abandon society completely and go to live on our own, which would be hiding from the government, a sort of revolution in itself)? How can you be free when you definitely aren't?
NEOalquimista wrote (edited )
See the War of Canudos that took place in Brazil in the IXX century. The people didn't like the new republic, so they built a community in the middle of nowhere, a place to be known as Canudos afterwards. What was the plan? To be independent from a government that didn't care about them. They grew their own food, they made their own security and, obviously, they tried to bring more people in by walking to far villages telling about Canudos.
What did the new government do? Tagged them as dangerous, a threat to the country that was formely under a monarchy. Those people didn't want a republic. The republic turned out to be worse. It only favored the privilleged of society. They started making propaganda for people to stay away from Canudos.
Canudos already had tens of thousands of people living in it. It was simply HUGE and popular. It was working so well. The people were finally happy there.
But then... they were ordered to strike that "threat" with violence. The authorities raided the community and shot, raped and slit the throats of every last survivor, even children. Some heads were taken back to the city to be displayed. Canudos was over... just like that.
ziq wrote
Look at anarchy as a state of mind rather than a form of government. How everyone else is choosing to live their lives shouldn't impact your own struggle for anarchy.
You can't control the lives of others but you can set an example by the way you live.
crapshoot wrote
There are ways to work around it. It's not easy or obvious; there's a reason why most people don't do it; but it's possible. For instance, if you walk around your area, you may find some nice sheltered areas where you can hide a sleeping bag ... you see how much you can fit into a few bags you can carry ... gradually, eventually you think 'maybe living without a house isn't so bad after all'. And viola, now you can ditch your job.
True, you won't be completely free, but there are ways to be freer than you are now; ways that society has encouraged you to look away from. Find them.
Limitations? Rules are merely tradeoffs!
Some things are worth the price!
'Cos this life is just a game
Exploit the loopholes and you'll find:
That the good times CAN last forever!
You don't owe the world any time or favours
Responsibility? Just say 'it's not for me'
And we'll have freedom and playtime, identity, friendship and passion and joy for the rest of our lives!
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