I thought that it was mostly Ayn Rand / Austrian economists who used those terms so it’s odd to hear Adam Curtis make that an explicit part of his analysis.
Adam Curtis is a rabid anti-communist liar as you can tell from the podcast episode. From what I gather, the "collectivism vs individualism" "discussion" while not entirely incorrect, seems like it appears most often as an anti-communist talking point about how there's no free will or whatever "under communism" in order to distract from what communism is really about: worker power (which yes, is collective), anti-imperialism, and improving people's living conditions.
Only people living in the imperial core with all their needs met, not having to think about their living standards, get to talk about "individualism" or whatever instead of talking about healthcare and the work week and empire. Think of all those people who are essentially like "yeah communism reduced infant mortality so what who cares?" (I've directly interacted with them on Twitter and Reddit at least) as if its just a given that infant mortality is low automatically and that people aren't hungry or depressed, and so on. They will never appreciate communist movements in history because they can't wrap their head around how much misery their rulers create in the world.
And the actual debate isn't really collectivism vs "individualism". It's collectivism vs selfishness and domination. There are no communists that resent "the individual", people in countries like the US just think selfishness is individualism. And it makes people scared when they see Russians or whoever create a society that isn't so hyper-selfish and it makes people realize how gross this "individualism" actually is. "Collectivism" (i.e. community) is one of the things that people miss about the Soviet Union, and is something that Americans support in thought, but not when its associated with communism or when it means we have to actually make sacrifices.
This is all just my opinion though lol.
You've phrased it extremely well. I only ever hear this dichotomy from people in already comfortable positions who assume their comfort is due to some inherent magnificence they possess. So they assume any other arrangement would diminish their personal comfort or dilute their clear greatness. Just look at what they really mean when they talk about individualism. It's always wrapped in up in some kind of personal expression, like what types of words they should be allowed to say or what type of media they consume, or it's about their rights to extract as much profit as possible.
Also, nearly every single person I've talked to who talks about this dichotomy and takes the side of the individual will also possess a belief that more than 99% of other humans are complete vacuum brained robots and that only a select few people have the capacity to truly live properly. The Ayn Rand acolytes are the extreme example, with those books Anthem and Fountainhead showcasing what I mean. The assumption in her awful terrible novels is that there are simply inherently superior people walking among us disgusting hogs and we despise them out of jealousy and wish to use our collectivism to drown out their talents because we're just spiteful and evil and have nothing of our own to offer.
Which is why I'm skeptical of their calls for individuality, since those very same people are usually quick to categorize large swaths of humanity as slack-jawed rubes. Solipsism.
Anyone with any understanding of politics should see those terms as stupidly reductive.
They're contradictions so we could employ the dialectical method to them, but Curtis is not doing that because he is anti-marxist and is instead offering superficially deep criticisms which when investigated reveal themselves to be on par with Petersonisms.
How does the self exist without the contrast of the collective? You went to school at the behest of society. You work at a job because of society. Society made this website, it made the developments in medicine which allowed you to be born with very little risk. Society made you. And what is society but a collection of people more or less like yourself? Separating the individual from the collective is absurd. The individual is a cog in the machine whether they like it or not. When John Galt fled did he not leave his mark on the collective and did he not immediately set about reestablishing the collective, just with different relationships? Of course because he was made by society and he in turn remade society. The greatest individualist to ever be conceived was a product of the collective and played a role in it.
And what is Curtis's idea? That we have become subordinate to one "side" of this process? Conveniently the "side" he dislikes? Nonsense. It is a process. It has no sides
I'm on episode 3 of the new Adam Curtis series, it's provocative and he really does stress individualism vs collectivism. Fair enough. What seems missing from his analysis is class. He seems to be saying all revolutions fail because human nature is to be swayed by emotion not rationality. But there are class issues where the wealthy are manipulating emotions via mass media to keep the proletariat fighting each other instead of working towards a collective.
He does give a nod to the coal towns, I wish he'd spend more time on how organizing has fixed things.
Definitely. For someone who is fascinated with power, he seems to make a point of ignoring class and the power dynamics it creates.
MediaLens highlighted something similar when they interacted with him after The Century of the Self was released, and they critiqued what they felt was an over-emphasis on Freud and Bernays role:
https://www.medialens.org/2002/the-bbcs-the-century-of-the-self-sp-89086145/
People often accuse me of being a lefty. That's complete rubbish. If you look at The Century of the Self, what I'm arguing is something very close to a neoconservative position because I'm saying that, with the rise of individualism, you tend to get the corrosion of the other idea of social bonds and communal networks, because everyone is on their own. Well, that's what the neoconservatives argue, domestically. [...] If you ask me what my politics are, I'm very much a creature of my time. I don't really have any. I change my mind over different issues, but I am much more fond of a libertarian view. I have a more libertarian tendency [...] What's astonishing in our time is how the Left here has completely failed to come up with any alternatives, and I think you may well see a lefty libertarianism emerging because people will be much more sympathetic to it, or just a libertarianism, and out of that will come ideas. And I don't mean "localism".
-adam curtis
Also: https://symptomaticcommentary.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/a-rant-the-brief-discussion-of-the-birth-of-an-error/
the term is reductive but if we're talking reductive terms I prefer "selfish vs empathetic" because the way I see it leftism is an ideology where everyone will win, everyone will be bettered and it's for the majority of the people, while capitalism is an ideology where there will always be a loser, there will always be oppression, and it only works for a select few selfish people.
For me, the job of liberalism and the capitalist mode of production is to completely blow away the old feudal relationships people had of mutual obligations. Liberalism destroys community, society, the proposed collective in deference to an individual liberal subject whose every action including his own body can be made into a commodity and create capital.
I see collectivism as belonging to the old feudalist world and individualism belonging to this new capitalist world. The world of socialism to come will be the dialectical synthesis of these ideas - it wasn't "good" to be a cog in a collective machine and it's not "good" to be an individual adrift on the winds of fate. We can take what is good from each and forge a new world.
it wasn’t “good” to be a cog in a collective machine and it’s not “good” to be an individual adrift on the winds of fate. We can take what is good from each and forge a new world.
Almost word for word what Adam Curtis said at the end of his interview on Chapo but he couldn’t be bothered to use the word “socialism” or “communism”
As long as you live in a society :jokah: you have to enter into relations with other human beiings. Communism and Capitalism are just two different ways of organizing those relations. In capitalism, the material relations between people and their labor's produce is not direct, but appear as social relations among those products. Those objects then dominate the social lives of people. Under communism, the relations between people are direct and controlled by themselves.
So "collectivism vs individualism" is a false argument. The only way to be truly individualistic is by living in a forest all alone. As long as you interact with other people, the question is no longer about that dichotomy, but how those relations are organized is the real question.
But good luck making your average lib understand this.
The only way to be truly individualistic is by living in a forest all alone.
Humans have collectivism so deeply ingrained into our being that even this isnt likely to be true for long, as humans have and will domesticate or forge symbiotic relations with the animals around them. Mutual aid is a factor in every being's evolution :kropotkin-shining:
I have never read a piece of leftist literature or policy that talked about suppressing the rights of individuals in favor of some collective. In fact, I think the only time I've ever even seen the word collective is when we're talking about agricultural policy.
Leftists typically frame the struggle as between two pre-existing economic interest groups (the details about how discrete the groups are depends on the particular school or whatever) that you're going to belong to one side of unless you've completely fallen out of society and live in the woods
It was something dreamed up by "apolitical" reddit debate bros trying to "hack" politics by coming up with some immutable categories they can dump shit into.
