... “Collectivism” and its sibling, “collectivization,” are trigger words for, well, people like me. In the academic and philosophical literature, “collectivism” is the blanket analytical term for certainly most and arguably all forms of totalitarian ideology.
The term came into the English language in the 1850s—probably borrowed from the French collectivisme—where it battled with competing terms for basically the same thing: communism, socialism, cooperation, corporatism, solidarity, etc.
But it wasn’t until the 1930s that it got separated from the solidaristic adjectival herd. American journalist William Henry Chamberlin, a communist sympathizer until he lived under actual communism in the Soviet Union, wrote Collectivism: A False Utopia in 1937, which solidified its negative connotations. On the first page, Chamberlin writes,
A question that, in my opinion, far transcends in importance the precise point at which the line may be drawn between public and private enterprise in economic life, is whether the people are to own the state or whether the state is to own the people.
“Collectivism, both in its communist and fascist forms” falls on the wrong side of that question, according to Chamberlin.
After Chamberlin, Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, and countless other heavy hitters established “collectivism” as the acceptable term for a political orientation that stands in opposition to the individual and individual rights.
Colloquially, the reason collectivism acquired a bad odor that sometimes even communism did not emit was because of collectivization. At least when one denounces communism, communists spout the usual “but true communism was never really tried!” Precisely because of its bloodless academic nature, the word “collectivism” evades such defenses. No serious person can claim that “true collectivism was never really tried,” in part because, again colloquially, collectivization is the fully realized act of putting collectivism into practice.
The Soviets used collectivization to describe their effort to transform agriculture, and they killed millions in the process. In Ukraine in the early 1930s, collectivization led to such mass man-made starvation and cannibalism that Soviet authorities had to distribute posters that read, “To eat your own children is a barbarian act.”
When I first heard Mamdani refer to the “warmth of collectivism,” I immediately thought of Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag: A History. In one scene, she describes how a slave-laborer fell in the snow from exhaustion. The other slaves—and they were slaves, owned by the state, as Chamberlin would put it—rushed to strip the fallen man’s clothes and belongings. The dying man’s last words were, “It’s so cold.”
Collectivization under Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” led to millions more Chinese famine deaths from 1959 to 1961—from a lowball estimate of 20 million to a high of 45 million.
Now, I don’t for a moment think Mamdani has anything like that in mind. Moreover, even if he did, nothing like that can be orchestrated from New York’s City Hall.
.... The inability of many people on the American left to understand why millions of decent, rational, even quite progressive, people are turned off by radical communist—or communist cosplay—rhetoric is one of my great obsessive fascinations. I have no problem with people who think Hitlerism was worse than Stalinism or Maoism—there are good and persuasive arguments on that score. What I cannot fathom, or credit, are people who can’t understand or acknowledge why it’s a fairly debatable question, a legitimately close call.
.... Go ahead and argue that Hitlerism was worse than Stalinism. I think that’s correct. But Stalinism was close. And yet, communist kitsch—hammer and sickle T-shirts, Maoist caps—are transgressive fashion statements (in a boringly conformist sort of way), but the swastika is taboo (or was). I’m all for the swastika being taboo, I’m just at a loss why communist swag shouldn’t be too.
(There is much more to this article, and it expresses my views exactly. To continue reading, follow this link. Rod)
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