Collectivism vs. Cooperation

I've been told that my cooperative processes sound like socialism or communism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Cooperation is not an ideology, like socialism or communism or capitalism for that matter. These ideologies are just collectivism in action. Cooperation is a process. A process that promotes voluntary consensus. Collectivism demands coercion to enforce the ideology of the collective.

What does it mean to act collectively? We do it all the time. A corporation is a collective. A football team is a collective. Much like other loaded language in the political arena, a collectivist has come to be equated with communism, nanny states, & totalitarianism. These are forms of collectivism, but they are not the only examples of collectivism. If we think of a collectivist mentality, it is one where the individual’s needs & rights are subordinate to the needs & authority of the collective. Take a football team where the coach yells to his players “sacrifice your body.” What is more collectivist than this? The military is the ultimate collectivist organization, teaching its recruits to literally die for the greater good. Besides taking the good of the whole as being more valuable than the good of the individual, the collectivist sees the world as an either-or dilemma: as George W. Bush’s famous quote after September 11th, “You’re either with us or against us”. This is collectivism at its core. Everyone must be coerced into the collective, or they become the enemy (those who refuse or resist the coercion). War is collectivism in action.

Propaganda is necessary to keep collectivism going. The corporate collective spends a great deal of time proving how the corporation is providing “value” to its shareholders, workers, & the public at large. If the workers don't continue to be more productive, then the company cannot continue to provide them with jobs: economic coercion. The state, the highest form of collectivism, always requires propaganda to support its abuses in the name of collectivism. The benefits of collectivism are coerced & unnaturally delivered. Let’s just take the fact that social security payments are taxed as income. The wealthiest individuals in this country will receive social security benefits that they don’t need, that wouldn’t sustain their ‘lifestyle’ for a day. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just let individuals keep their money & provide for their own social security? Not according to a collectivist. We are told by propaganda that social security protects the elderly from poverty & tragedy. Naturally poverty is real. Poverty should be eliminated, if such a thing is possible. However, after 80 years of social security, poverty has not been eliminated or even lessened. The only difference between then & now is that our poor can actually afford goods that don’t support them (TVs, cellphones, etc.). They still struggle to pay their rent, feed their family & themselves, and struggle to survive, even when holding more than one job with a collectivist corporation. Categorically the efforts of a state to maintain their collectivist paradigm means suffering for those coerced into the collective.

It is coercion even for those who think they support it. They have swallowed the propaganda of the collectivist that they are better off if the state is better off. The collectivist applauds the coercion of the police to enforce taxation & adherence to laws based on the superiority of the good of the collective over the individual. The collectivist mentality that is created by propaganda creates such lovely slogans as: “America, Love it or Leave it” or “If you don’t like America why don’t you leave?” or "If you don't want to be killed by the police, then submit to their demands." Now granted the individual can leave if they so choose, but the collectivist cannot accept much criticism of the state. Those who criticize eventually must be coerced into submission or relegated to the enemy status. Individuals can complain about the individual holding the authority at the time, if it isn’t a totalitarian state. That level of criticism boosts the argument of the collectivist that there is a democratic process & freedom of criticism. Still being able to complain because you don’t like George W. Bush or Barack Obama doesn’t exactly compare with critiquing the entire process. People become so caught up in the collectivist mentality that even elections become simply which collectivist to put in control. When I’ve admitted to voting for a third party candidate or a write in candidate (I used to vote for Bill the Cat every four years), I’ve been met with such expressions as “you’re just throwing your vote away” or “why even vote?”. This demonstrates the powerful ideology of collectivism at its worst: the winner-take-all mentality & the fallacy that one vote (yours) really matters. Elections in this country have a decidedly horse race mentality or for most Americans, a Superbowl mentality with playoffs (primaries) leading to the ultimate showdown between two collectivists who won’t significantly change the core system, just continue to infringe upon the individual rights of the people. 

Who is the worst president ever? The next one.

This is another layer of propaganda in collectivism, the cult of personality or the savior complex. Elections come down to one or two word slogans like: hope, change, dignity, progress. This is blather. This contradicts the idea of temporary authority in the cooperative process. Namely that any position of authority should not only be held temporarily, but that the whole position should be temporary to fit the current need. The cooperative mentality means that any authority position should eventually self-eliminate. A collectivist doesn't want the problem eliminated because that eliminates the need for the authority. The one thing that the collectivist needs to continue the collectivist project is a perpetuation of the problem. If the problem is solved, the need for the collective authority disappears. Take the case of what’s happened after September 11th, 2001. Americans had reached a disdain for the collectivist propaganda of intervention in the affairs of the rest of the world. Remember that George W. Bush claimed he wasn't interested in "nation-building" during his campaign. The old enemy of the Soviet Union & communist spread no longer frightened the masses. The collectivist needed a new justification for the continued intervention in the world to support the Military Industrial Collective. What a bonus that 19 hijackers flew planes into buildings & shifted Americans back to the interventionist mentality from their isolationist leanings. Since that horrific day, the collectivists have managed to pump people across the world full of fear. However the average individual is more likely to die from a car accident or disease than from a terrorist attack. The propaganda effort not only builds fear in the coerced membership of the various collectives, but it creates its own antithesis in a collective of those who have been labeled & declaimed as terrorists. I’m not making conspiracy theories here. I’m not claiming that the government or the state intentionally or deliberately created the ‘terrorists’. I’m saying that identifying an enemy, an antithesis to the collective will, is innate in collectivist thinking. It isn’t deliberate: its the ideology. The collectivist 'creates' the enemy by coercion to ideology. Those who reject or renounce the ideology become the 'facts on the ground' enemy. The collectivist goal is always to confront a physical or an ideological enemy. Note how our country is now inflamed in the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the War on Crime, & we even spent a decade on the War on Poverty, which some collectivists want to re-escalate. So a collectivist mentality, by those who adhere to the ideology of collectivism, finds justification for any and all collectivism.

Now cooperation can be seen as a collective action. Any time individuals get together & work for a common goal, it can be called a collective action. However cooperative process is not based on a collectivist mentality. Individuals can come together voluntarily to solve a particular dilemma without having to create a collectivist organization. Individuals who act cooperatively will not form a collectivist mentality that the good of the whole is more important than the good of the individual. The first difference between the two organizations is the voluntary vs. coercive nature of these organizations. A collectivist mentality requires membership of all. No one is exempted. While some collectivists will volunteer, the majority will be coerced. In a cooperative process, volunteers are free to join or leave at their volition. The cooperative process works through consensus to benefit the individuals in the cooperative. If an individual doesn’t see the benefit, that individual doesn’t have to participate.

Whether it is a myth or a reality, the shared cooperative activity of barn building on the prairie is an example of cooperative action. Each family recognized the difficulty of building a barn alone, & so the families voluntarily came together to build each others barns. Once the barns were build the cooperative organization disappeared. Families could choose not to participate, but they didn’t benefit from the cooperative effort. The cooperative organization didn’t force the membership to build barns for people who didn’t want one or didn’t participate in the cooperative. For that matter, the individual family probably might have left the cooperative effort after their barn was built & not helped with other barns without being coerced to participate. They would have been denounced & probably wouldn’t have been popular. I don’t think this happened often because most people recognize innately the benefit of cooperation & choose to participate rather than take advantage. There will always be some individuals who seek advantage without toil, but they will be ostracized by self-reliant individuals & will probably not be asked to participate in future cooperative efforts. According to the mythology of the pioneering era, the barn raising was a social event with celebration & camaraderie, yet another motivation for individuals to participate. While the men built the barn, the women prepared a huge meal (I acknowledge the patriarchal hierarchy & don’t wish to perpetuate it, just describing the mythology’s plot). Why do I continue to describe this as a mythology? For the most part, I get this imagery from various movies, TV series & literature where these activities are portrayed. I don’t have primary documentation that they ever occurred, but whether they did or didn’t, the behavior is consistent with what I’m describing as cooperative action rather than collectivism. Self-reliant individuals cooperating to achieve what is difficult to achieve as individuals alone isn’t the same as an authority deciding that everyone must come together & build barns for the ‘good of all’.

If I think back to my experience with PAUSE (Palestine Action, Union Square East), I can see the cooperative model working consistently. A completely anarchistic operation from the beginning, the group never had leadership, never coerced people to belong or leave, never established any hierarchy. The only guidelines that received consensus were the times we agreed to meet on Saturdays. No one held any positions of authority, & no one was coerced into participating in a certain way. When there were disagreements about the materials or the speech that some individuals used, the group as a whole got together & developed a consensus that all agreed to follow. Violations were met by other members speaking to the infractions. We decided what was acceptable to discuss & what wasn’t pertinent to the cause. Once we had agreed that the cause was informing the public on the Israeli occupation & American financial, military & diplomatic support for that occupation, the determination of what language or presentation was acceptable was always based on these goals. If the particular language or presentation didn’t promote the goal, then the language wasn’t used at least at that setting by consensus. For years, we were held together by the violent, hateful responses to our weekly protests by Zionists, Israeli apologists, uninformed Americans who believed otherwise, & religious zealots who couldn’t see beyond their religion. It often drove them nuts when they asked to speak with the leadership that didn't exist. We had to provide security for each other, but the main way this was flexed was by massing around the individual being aggressive & not allowing them to continue. Rarely did we have to use defensive force, but on those occasions, we stood together. Individuals who didn’t take action were shunned & shamed by the rest of the members. They weren’t coerced into leaving, but they weren’t made to feel as welcome (ignoring them was the common demonstration of disapproval). As we gained a stronger foothold & a better presentation, the strength of the protest began to make the opposition from the aforementioned groups less prevalent & less distracting. Slowly we overcame any opposition except for what we began to refer to as ‘drive-bys’, a snarky comment shouted as they walked by. Fewer and fewer antagonists stopped to argue or agress. We reached a point where the protest became what Saul Alinsky calls a “drag”. It became a ritual & not a productive use of our time. On top of that, bigoted individuals within the cooperative began to spew ridiculous statements & refused to agree that these statements were not in service to the goal, bringing an end to the cooperative consensus. Their continued obstinacy in the face of objection from the rest of the group led most people to stop participating, demonstrating again the voluntary quality of the cooperative organization. When it no longer matched individual goals & values, individuals voluntarily left rather than participate or be attached to the changes in the group. It came apart just as organically as it formed. Many of the individuals have stayed in contact but no longer attempt to protest for a Free Palestine together at Union Square. The best part of being involved in this action was learning about anarchic methods & process, meeting some of the most amazing individuals I’ve ever met, & interesting me in more cooperative, anarchic organization & process.

In summary, the collectivist adheres to an ideology, the ideology that the good of the whole supersedes the good of the individual. Coercion & brute force demand the acceptance & participation of the collectivist community. A process of cooperation is not an ideology & doesn't use coercion. Rather cooperation is a process, a process that has few defining elements other than individual volition & consensus. When these two elements work together, a cooperative process starts. Where it leads is up to the volition & consensus of the self-reliant individuals who work together. I'm not claiming that cooperative process will replace the state with a new form of governance. Rather, cooperation is process that works at local levels. Cooperation is grassroots action that doesn't get usurped by collectivist leadership who only want to establish a new hierarchy under their 'leadership'.