I think as the parent poster was saying, this is possible with smaller groups. I think the best example would be townships in the US. Different townships decide on the level of tax and investing (especially into school systems.) Then, individuals self-select themselves into groups by choosing where to live.
I have friends upset about how not all schools are "top-tier" schools. I quote "top-tier" as it is in the eye of the beholder what that means. The thing is, not everyone wants their kids to have 5hrs of homework a night. Nor does everyone want to pay 20k+ in annual property taxes. Some would rather home-school or send their kids to private or parochial schools.
People often achieve this by joining a township that agrees with their appetites in spending and other political choices.
In the first, you decide to accept the general will in order to maintain your individual credit, hoping that by cooperating on this occasion you encourage people to encourage with you later. Alternatively, you can protest the decision, hoping in doing so to encourage your fellow townspeople to change their mind, or to raise the reputation cost to them of proceeding down that route. And if you don't like that either, you can leave (highly visibly or otherwise).
Not all collective decision-making processes are coercive, either, FWIW. There are systems built on unanimity where your issue doesn't even arise: if you dislike the decision of the other group members enough then you can veto the decision. This creates other issues (and doesn't scale very well) but it does happen.
You guys wrote 5 walls of text just dodging the easiest question on Earth.
Now stop bringing up absurd examples. Just living in a state exposes you to state violence, e.g. for not obeying the (tax) law.
If you wanted a realistic example of non-violent society, there are only few, mostly small remote tribes in deep jungle. Not surprisingly, those are very collectivist societies. The standard response to repeated badly non-conforming behavior in such societies is eviction from the community. Yes, that can be done non-violently.
If this was supposed to be a 'actually it all comes down to the threat of violence' gotcha then, sure - if you insist on your property rights, don't pay your taxes and then decide to fight the bailiffs you're going to have a bad time. Sorry.
Presumably, you could buy another home in the same township, and go thru all the above processes again. OR you could choose one of the original options given by a parent post:
1. Go to town hall and influence decisions
2. Exit township, find one that you agree with
3. Bear with it and stay in the township.
So, this is your "non-violent" collectivism?
Thank you very much. This is all I needed to hear.
The process is not coercive, but the product is. Laws tend have punishments and are enforced through various levels of force or violence.
In rural areas, this is typically how it works. Laws are more of suggestions, and unless you are causing a big problem for someone you are likely to be left alone.
As a native English speaker myself, I urge you to get into etymology and understand socius and collective and community and thereby inoculate yourself against a weird strain of anti logic parading as American political discourse and often used by folks who know better sponsored by the federalist society and Cato institute and such… typically for lowbrow crowd appeal.
No society, by definition, is free from a collective aspect.
I cannot believe that you went on insulting large groups of people while being unable to answer a simple 6 words question.
P.S. I speak relatively fluent Latin, so the etymology play made me chuckle a bit.
Now, could you explain how this is collectivism and not voluntaryism?
You’re missing the point. You don’t force anyone. If someone doesn’t want to do the thing, you don’t make them. You find a different way to accomplish your goals.
Capitalism is almost completely coercive and controlling, but direct violence is mostly reserved for minorities and for war adventures in distant countries.
At home it's coercive through financial violence (especially income restriction and forced debt), extreme economic apartheid, and overt and covert behaviour modification narratives in the various media.
"The crowd" is very much not in charge of any of this, but is persuaded that it is.
Arguably all of this is better than a more overtly dictatorial system where any form of dissent attracts direct violence. But it's not necessarily less coercive - just less obvious. And more efficient.
You can scale that back and have collective systems which rely on a tradition of consensus. It's not even all that unusual on a smaller scale. Teams/groups make decisions, some people disagree, but when consensus is reached everyone works towards the same goals even if they have misgivings.
This works if you allow feedback, goal monitoring, and resets so the system is responsive and self-correcting. But it also requires all participants to be rational, reasonably intelligent, non-sociopathic, and capable of adult decision making.
Which is why it doesn't work at scale. Only about half the population - at best - has those abilities, and as soon as your group includes at least one sociopath they will destroy that dynamic and replace it with a toxic one which relies more on coercion than consensus.
Do those examples work for you for people being physically punished for refusing to take on debt? Because I'm also happy to include sick people who need medical care and people who need money for food/heat/shelter/clothiers as being punished physically for refusing to take on debt by being deprived of those things
Violence comes in when one small privileged group wants to maintain power.
Also, by definition, anarchist collectivism has no strong central authority. People who aren't compliant probably shouldn't be living in an anarchist collective in the first place, but choice of social/economic system is sadly not granted as an option. In so much of the world today, people are forced to live under capitalism, like it or not. And people claim that this is "freedom"
It’s a lot easier to commit violence against people when you can outsource it to someone else, so collectivism requires a strong, central authority. The less local that authority is, the less culpable we can convince ourselves we are when it goes wrong. The reason we keep building these large, dysfunctional political systems is because taking responsibility is hard, and most people don’t want to put in the effort.