Over at Jacobin, Luke Savage explains and counters the Right’s misunderstanding of “collectivism.”
Here is a taste:
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.
Read the entire piece here.