cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2409929

Everytime I here individualism brought up by someone from Hexbear or Lemmygrad, it gets talked about as if it’s categorically bad and wrong. Why is that?

This goes against everything I’ve learned in the states, where we consider individualism a necessary part of being a responsible and moral person, whereas collectivism strips us of our humanity and turns us into subhuman insectoid creatures incapable of thought.

  • Kaffe@lemmygrad.ml
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    7 months ago

    I think this Roderic Day thread is relevant: https://x.com/RodericDay/status/1784207317187051909

    The general discussion of “Individualism vs Collectivism” is expressed incoherently as just ideas apart from existing social-class relations. In essence, the debate is Idealism. What’s actually going on is that the petty bourgeoisie, a large section of society, have class-wide interests (making money off of their property/providing services/maintaining prices) that have to be expressed as an individual decisions. The price of milk goes down so each individual dairy farmer starts dumping their supply to force a scarcity, and because holding the supply would be an unacceptable individual cost. They compete with each other and anarchy of production forces them all into similar despotic behavior. That is, the petty bourgeoisie can’t seem to align their class interests, which are individualized interests as property owners/service providers, with organization (there are caveats). The proletariat, as workers forced to sell themselves to capitalists, are already put into collectivized work relations because as the means of production develop, co-dependency between workers increases. Proletarians’ labor is already collectivized, but is owned and constrained by individual bourgeois interests. The struggle for the proletariat to gain control over their individual interests is to express their collectivized behavior into the realm of property, to take off the individual who rides on their collective backs.

    The petty bourgeoisie can only squabble (cartel, state intervention, Imperialism, dumping) over the contradiction between their class existence and their individual interests, while the proletariat can overcome this contradiction by collectivizing property, because their labor is already collectivized.

    • Nakoichi [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      7 months ago

      ooooooh this is a reallly really fucking good explainer, I might have to adapt some of the language a bit but this is exactly what I needed for a friend of mine who keeps agreeing with me on practically everything and I keep just being like “bro you are a communist you just don’t realize it”

      Wish Roderic Day wasn’t such a combative asshat sometimes, I genuinely like a lot of his stuff.