: : : SDF: Let's ask this: Why is the model for the "individual" under capitalist society always the white, European, property-owning (see C.B. MacPherson's POSSESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM), dominant male, swathed in a mythology of "rugged individualism" (see Stephanie Coontz' THE WAY WE NEVER WERE)? : : WW: Because capitalism developed in Europe first. Good lord man, any ten year old knows this!
: : SDF: No, the point is that the dominant Euro white property-owning male has continued to be the model for "individuality" even though such individualities, such people, have had to recognize the real individualities of, for instance, the 1/6 of planetary human population that starves to death, or the victims of American imperialism as it crushed those in the world who espoused alternative ways of conceptualizing individuality, or the 500,000 non-Whites who died in Rwanda (with the help of the West) over the past few years... the point is that the stupidity about individuality has persisted not only among those who own and rule, but their ideological dupes as well.
: I agree that it's stupid - but so what? Replace it with collectivist ideology? This would be an improvement? It's still just ideology - material forces would remain the same.
SDF: The point about individualism was that our model of "individuality" is an ideology representing a power-formation with white property-owning males on the top (for the most part), and that recognizing the "individuality" of the membership of the underclasses doesn't do anything for them.
(Part of me wants to imagine a pregnant mother who believes in Gee's ideology, who would charge her baby for rent for the nine-month stay in the womb, plus a surcharge for mother's milk, hard cash, due immediately...)
As for collectivist ideology, the question at hand is one of which form of collectivism does one want to encourage. Collectives are the rule rather than the exception in modes of social organization throughout human history -- the corporation is a collective, the family is a collective, the government (indeed the nation, when it is mobilized) is a collective.
So we should be asking questions along the lines of; do the collectives we create involve hierarchies, with a few on the top enjoying the benefits of "socialism" while the majority are required to perform as their servants? Do the collectives we create encourage everyone to work for the benefit of all? (Here I would urge readers to look not at the history of experiments in state socialism such as the USSR, but rather at the history of experiments in corporate management such as Total Quality Management which use forms of collective management as a tool for corporate profit, or also at the history of small "collectivist" rural communes.) Do our collectives encourage a "caste system" where some individualities are granted more privileges than others, using as their basis marks on the human bodies of the individuals? How do our collectivities take seriously the "equality" that they grant to their constituent individualities? Do our collectives decide issues of collective importance democratically? Do our collectivities create situations where there is a "balance of power" (a la THE FEDERALIST PAPERS, an outline for a collective if I ever read one) so that no group of individuals may permanently dominate another?
The people who are trying to discourage the discussion about collectives are, IMHO, those who wish to spread the myth of "rugged individualism" while trying to hide their own dependence upon actual collectives. Those of us who exist out in the open, dependent upon collectives, are thus potential victims of the "anti-communist" brigades.
This is a very important issue in an age where machine technology has made it possible for society to support everyone, without everyone having to work 40 hours a week to "create wealth." The question at hand, in today's capitalist economy, is one of how to collectivize the "unemployed".
It's better to discuss things this way, in terms of the arrangement of situations with the collectivities we form, than to assume that our ideology of possessive individualism creates no issues of power, while expecting that collective issues in a possessive-individualist society (such as ours) would work themselves out "naturally" if we only abolished That Old Debbil Government, that people will just naturally be kind and loving and egalitarian with no concrete social framework encouraging them to behave thusly.
None.
