> Collectivism involves deciding for others.

That may be true, but that's not sufficient to define collectivism. There are many other forms of societal structures where "deciding for others" exists as well. Unless you mean to lump all these together, and say that companies and tyranny for example are the same as collectivism?

> If it’s fully voluntary it’s individualism.

If I _voluntarily_ decide to join a "collective", am I individualist or collectivist?

> If I _voluntarily_ decide to join a "collective", am I individualist or collectivist?

An individualist, if you are free to leave it at any time. There's nothing wrong with forming a collective in the US, I think like 20,000 of them have been formed over the last 240 years.

You don't hear about them much because they all failed. You're free to start a collective anytime in the US and try to make it work.

Isn't freedom great?

They haven't all failed. I hear about REI quite a lot. Rainbow Grocery is quite popular in SF. I hear good things about Organic Valley. Equal Exchange is in Massachusetts. It's popular to bank at a credit union instead of a bank.

The NCBA maintains a list of several thousand collective/coop businesses.

https://ncbaclusa.coop/

I was using collective in the sense of being a commune. Sorry about not being clear.

Communes haven't all failed. There are a number of them that continue to exist to this day. That the rest of us haven't been forced into living in one of them doesn't mean they don't exist. Portland has a bunch of co-living co-housing communities that are thriving.

https://www.eastwind.org/ is just a few miles from me. It's quite successful, they even operate a business that grosses ~$2M/year and they provide their members with health insurance. I'm not keen on giving up my possessions to join the collective but I can think of a lot of worse ways to live.

Most definitely not a failure.

East Wind has high turnover:

https://rootstalk.grinnell.edu/past-issues/volume-vii-issue-...

https://www.linkedin.com/company/east-wind-community

I couldn't find out how high that was, but I've seen another "successful" commune with an average stay of 2 years. It takes people an average of 2 years to discover they don't particularly care for communes.

Two years sounds about right in 2024, doesn't it?

Sorry, that question was purely rhetorical.

That divide between individual and collective as stated above was very sketchy, and I merely wanted to indicate that.

If one take the strict definition of individualist and collective from a dictionary (well, which one, to begin with?), of course they are opposite, just looking at the idea conveyed by the word radicals (ie individualist -> individual, vs collective).

As always, we all start talking about things without first defining the terms we use to discuss those things, and of course confusion, anger and frustration ensue.

The whole point this thread seems to be missing is the collectivist vs individualist debate that this relates to is about how society is governed. People assembling to address their needs/wants collectively might be collectivist in the broad sense, but it requires individualist governance framework to exist, because under a collective governance framework such freedom of association would not be permitted.

Just like how a large company is essentially governed in the same way as a planned economy is, but nobody’s under the impression that JPMorgan is a socialist institution.

Collectives are when people share equally in the work and the results.

Has China failed?

If you count mass starvation with collective farms?

It's a good thing China switched to free markets.

China has a free market? Since when?

Remember: when a private organization massacres a population, or a democratically elected leader invades a country and steals all its food, it's "freedom" so it's good.

It’s collectivist if you can’t opt out

So everyone in OpenAI or google decides for themselves what they want to work on and is detached from hierarchies?

Why be obtuse? Advocacy for open-sourcing or at least opposition to the forced set of San Franciscan millennial ethics is not analogous to abolishing voluntary hierarchies.

Collectivism says there is one collective, if you are allowed to go and found a new collective then that isn't collectivism any longer.

Yes, they can quit any day they want and that company cannot impose any restrictions on them.

Ah so my family was collectivist as I just ate what my family served. I’ll be sure to tell my mother of her evil collectivist policies for giving me a peanut butter sandwich for dinner when I was five instead of letting me self actualize and choose my own meals.

You weren’t required to eat it. I’m not sure what is so difficult to grasp here.

I was required by biology to eat and had no choice over the available food. The requirement for energy might be discountable as a fact of reality to just deal with, but my parents decided what food I got to eat.

To be clear I don’t think this arrangement is a problem, and if you were describing this in academic terms I mig even agree with you and have been too harsh. Unfortunately the word “collectivism” is used as a perjorative dog whistle and so I was pointing out how common behaviors most people would think are fine or even ideal can be cast in a “collectivist” light to point out that it’s not bad.

I’m assuming by the vote difference in our two comments that multiple people had the same assumption