(The latest version of this page is at Pattern Descriptions. An archived copy of this page is held at https://www.patternsofpower.org/edition02/623.htm)
Collectivists believe that individuals should surrender some liberty in order to support the wellbeing of the community. They see government as being an agency expressly created to take some collective responsibilities, including ensuring that everybody is provided with basic socio-economic rights (4.2.4.3) and public services, using funds collected by taxation. This book uses the term ‘collectivism’ to include utilitarianism,[1] communitarianism, socialism and its most extreme form: communism. In Western Europe the prevalent terminology is 'social democracy'. In America, collectivism is often referred to as 'liberalism' – and the term 'socialist' is used as a term of abuse.[2]
Marx and Engels described a utopian collectivist position which required people to give their best efforts without any property rights.[3] This was unrealistic. Much more wealth is created when people have the incentive of being rewarded for effort in a system of private ownership (3.2.1).
Collectivism requires the imposition of the ‘general will’ upon everyone else,[4] and there is a danger that this control might extend beyond the minimum necessary scope to ensure social justice. In its most extreme form – communism – the State is authoritarian.[5] The communist ideal was that the State would eventually "wither away",[6] on the basis that a central government would no longer be needed once collective ownership had been fully implemented, but that concept fails to take into account the need for organisation: someone has to take complex decisions and lead, particularly with a planned economy (3.3.6), and there is always someone who wants to be the leader. No national implementation of communism has ever gone beyond the point of requiring a central administration, and in practice an all-powerful party oligarchy emerges.
Many writers, including Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, have pointed out that government control can easily mutate into an oppressive dystopia[7] – and this has happened in practice, most egregiously in Stalin’s Russia and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Surveillance and a ‘Police State’ are not isolated malpractices by a few misguided leaders but can be seen as almost inevitable consequences of the enforcement of absolute communism.
A collectivist leaning doesn't have to result in authoritarianism. A government can achieve collectivist objectives, providing public services and ensuring that people have a chance of flourishing as well as their talents permit, without itself being monolithic. It is possible to provide a robust social safety-net without trying to plan the economy or infringe civil liberties. Western European social democracy allows considerable freedom to markets, uses private providers for some of the services funded by the State, and has an above-average record on tolerance and human rights.
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[1] The term ‘utilitarianism’ is used here in the same sense as described by John Stuart Mill in his essay of that name. It can loosely be described as ‘the greatest good of the greatest number’, though that is a crude oversimplification; it declares collective benefit to be the guiding principle of policy. Utilitarianism was available in May 2014 at http://www.utilitarianism.com/mill1.htm.
[2] As an example of American use of the word ‘liberal’, Paul Krugman, in his book Conscience of a Liberal, indicated his approval of President Roosevelt's New Deal: which included taxing the rich, making it easier for workers to join unions and instituting a minimum wage, with what he described as positive effects:
“These decisions dramatically reduced inequality and, far from having the cataclysmic effects on the economy predicted by conservatives at the time, they led to the postwar boom.”
This quotation was cited by Michael Tomasky, in his review The Partisan, in the New York Review of Books; it was available in May 2014 at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20813.
Examples of American dislike of the term ‘socialist’ appeared in the 2008 presidential campaign. Barack Obama was accused of being socialist and was also accused of having denied it. An Internet search in May 2014, using the three separate words ‘Obama’ ‘denied’ and ‘socialist’, yielded over 10 million hits. One example was by Aaron Klein, entitled OBAMA DENIES HIS ECONOMIC POLICIES 'SOCIALISM', which was at http://www.wnd.com/2010/02/126318/.
[3] The Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Marx and Engels, proposed the “Abolition of private property” (Para. 12 of Part II). It was available in May 2014 at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61.
[4] Rousseau defined the ‘general will’ in his book The Social Contract, and he justified its enforcement in the last paragraph of chapter 7:
“In order then that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence. In this lies the key to the working of the political machine; this alone legitimises civil undertakings, which, without it, would be absurd, tyrannical, and liable to the most frightful abuses.”
His argument is that the citizens are ‘free’ because they are in control of their own governance, so enforcement of the ‘social compact” can be seen as a protection of that ‘freedom’. ‘Freedom’, in this sense of the word, is not the same concept as ‘liberty’ as conceived by individualists and described in the previous section. The work was available in May 2014 at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/RouSoci.html.
[5] The Manifesto of the Communist Party, which was available in May 2014 at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61, proposed a major role for the State:
“5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.” [At the end of Part II]
[6] Lenin quoted this passage in chap. 1, sect. 4, of The State and Revolution. It originally came from Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring: Herr Eugen Duhring's Revolution in Science, pp.301-03, third German edition. The full wording is: "The first act by which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — is also its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not 'abolished'. It withers away.” The English version was available in May 2014 at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm.
[7] The whole of Friedrich Hayek’s book, The Road to Serfdom, is devoted to the topic of government control leading to totalitarianism and oppression. In Chapter 10 (p.168), Hayek makes this statement about collectivism:
“From the collectivist standpoint intolerance and brutal suppression of dissent, the complete disregard of the life and happiness of the individual, are essential and unavoidable consequences of this basic premise, and the collectivist can admit this and at the same time claim that his system is superior to one in which the "selfish" interests of the individual are allowed to obstruct the full realization of the ends the community pursues.”