Ask Lemmygrad

We live in a collectivized society already, competition in capitalism already gave way to monopoly and deep interconnection. The problem is that the profits are still individualist, rather than serving the collective.

Collectivism is the bedrock of human civilization. To quote the meme: apes together strong.

This is the basic principle that took us from dwelling in caves, not knowing what fire was to exploring the cosmos themselves. Quite literally nothing your friends enjoy or rely on in modern society would've been possible without the collective pooling their labor and knowledge together to create a better future, to understand the elusive, to improve the areas where nature left us most vulnerable, etc.

The collective is the only reason our species is even still alive and why capitalism and its individualist philosophy is such an existential threat in the first place. It not only goes against our very nature as a social species but also implicitly weakens the very foundations of our societies, pushing them toward collapse.

I think I remember the HG Wells Stalin interview touched on this topic in a way that I liked.

Ultimately it's not either/or. The collective is produced by the individual, who fully actualizes through the collective. They're dialectically intertwined.

You'd be surprised what a good segue "what do you think happens after you die" is into this. Genuinely what do people think is the end goal of individualism? Living a life that makes for a good movie? Fuuuuuuuck oooooooffffffdddffffffff

Point out that most people in a liberal society do end up working in a collective. You're going to be working on a team of other people, and you're going to try to achieve tasks together as a collective. That's the nature of vast majority of jobs regardless of what type of political system you have. So, then the question becomes is it better for people doing the work to collectively decide on how they work or to be dictated to by a business owner.

You might find this article from Roderic Day interesting.

It argues that the individualism and vs collectivism contradiction is "false and misleading".

That "production is already socialized — collectivized" under capitalism.

I like using nature as the proof of dialectics. Nothing exists in isolation. You can't point to the individual anything that produced itself and isn't impacted by the environment it shapes. The world is ecosystems on top of ecosystems, all of them interconnected and interdependent. They're obviously part of the natural collective of the biosphere. If someone acts individually and pollutes a river, that has downstream consequences that degrade systems it only has a tertiary connection to. Waterways are the commons because they're a natural collective with individual responsibility for the health of the ecosystem supporting our health. If a world of individualists ignore the collective nature of the biosphere, we fill the atmosphere with more greenhouse gases than it can dissipate. Only collectivist action can address the collective problem of climate change or its consequences.

The human ecosystems built on the natural ones aren't different. You survived childhood because a community was raised by historical communities. If an individualist went against their collective responsibility and polluted your waterways, you'd die of some illness. If that common water wasn't delivered through pipes the collective produced, you'd be dead within a few days or fighting other individualists to drain the diseased wells they shit in. If the collective bodies of science and food systems didn't align, you'd starve. The dysfunctions in those systems come from individualists rebelling against the collective responsibilities to ethics and socioecological impacts. Individualists seeking profit or glory at the expense of someone else, collective progress held behind individualistic corporate patents, grocers that punish the hungry for starving and the farmers for growing food.

What they're doing is protestant work ethic shit, moral Calvinism meant to trick them into thinking they can solve climate change by recycling by the polluting industries. A boss can use that to abuse and dehumanise their workers. The wealthy can use it to explain why they shouldn't pay taxes while stealing from the socioecological systems they degrade. It's good logic if you already have power and can afford to meet all of your own needs in a bunker you built yourself, but for anyone who lives in a society it's bad logic. I don't know my neighbours' names but if their lives get worse because I enrich myself at their expense, they will steal all of my nice things and shoot me. If climate change or a tax deficit or an economic crash collapses that society and there isn't a collectivist framework to protect me, being an individualistic prepper just makes me a target for people who don't feel obligated to support their neighbours.