Collectivism

Collectivism is the doctrine that the group — society, the state, the nation, the race, the class — is the unit of reality and the standard of value, and that the individual exists to serve it. Objectivism rejects it at the root, holding that only individuals perceive, think, act and can be benefited, so that a group has no mind, no interests and no rights of its own.

“A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess.”
~ Ayn Rand, "Collectivized 'Rights'", The Virtue of Selfishness

What the doctrine claims

Collectivism is usually met as a political programme, but the political conclusions rest on two prior claims, and it is those that Objectivism attacks.

The metaphysical claim is that a collective is more than the sum of its members: an entity in its own right, with a consciousness, a will and a good of its own, of which individual people are components. Its members' identity is then held to derive from membership — one is what one is because of one's nation, culture, race or class — rather than from anything one has done or chosen.

The ethical claim follows: since the group is the real entity, the individual is a means to its ends. His labour, his property and in the limiting case his life belong to it. Anyone who pursues his own purposes instead is not merely mistaken but disloyal, and the term for him varies with the regime — traitor, kulak, race enemy, class enemy, deviationist.

Rand's diagnosis was that this is altruism transposed from personal ethics into politics. Altruism says a man must justify his existence by service to others; collectivism identifies the others and hands the state the job of collecting. See Sacrifice and Statism.

Why Objectivism rejects it

The refutation is not that collectivism has bad consequences, though Objectivism holds that it does. It is that its premise is false.

There is no collective consciousness. Thinking is done by individual minds. A committee does not perceive, a nation does not reason, and a culture does not have an idea. What we call collective knowledge is knowledge held by particular people and communicated to others. See Consciousness and Individualism.
There is no collective stomach. Nothing can be consumed, enjoyed or suffered by a group as such. When a value is taken "for society", it is not shared out among an entity called society; it goes to specific individuals, at the expense of other specific individuals. "The public good" names the transfer without naming the parties.
Production is individual even when it is cooperative. A man builds on the work of predecessors and colleagues, but the step he adds is his. An invention is not the output of collective thought; it is one person's thinking, made possible by knowledge others created and passed on — which they also created individually.
Rights cannot be created by addition. If no one man may seize another's property, no assembly of men acquires that power by voting. A group's rights are the rights of its members and nothing more. This is the point of the essay "Collectivized 'Rights'".

Because reality is not settled by consensus, collectivism also carries an epistemological cost: truth becomes whatever the group affirms, and the man who disagrees is not answered but disciplined. See Objectivity and Independence.

Its forms

Socialism, communism, fascism, Nazism and theocracy differ in who is named as the collective and in how much private ownership is nominally retained, but Objectivism treats these as variants rather than as opposites. Each holds that the individual's life is at the group's disposal; they disagree about which group, and about whether the state owns property outright or merely directs its use.

Racism, on Rand's analysis in "Racism", is collectivism applied to ancestry: judging a man by the genes of his forebears rather than by his own character and actions, which she called the lowest form of it because the criterion is one he cannot have chosen and cannot change.

The political result in every case is statism — the state as the agent of the collective — and its economic result is that the well-connected are enriched at the expense of the productive, since where values are distributed by authority the competition is for authority. See Exploitation and Totalitarianism.

Common misunderstandings

That rejecting collectivism means rejecting cooperation. It does not. Division of labour, trade, firms, teams, orchestras and armies are all individuals acting together by agreement, and Objectivism regards them as enormous values. The distinction is between association a man chooses and membership he is born into and held to. See Trader Principle.
That "society made you what you are" settles the argument. That a man benefits from an inherited body of knowledge is true and is not in dispute. It does not establish that a collective did his thinking for him, and it does not create a debt payable on demand to whoever claims to speak for society.
That caring about one's country or culture is collectivist. Valuing a place, a tradition or a body of work is an individual's judgment about things he has reason to value. Collectivism enters when membership is made the source of one's identity or a claim on one's life.
That majority rule is the alternative to it. Unlimited majority rule is collectivism with a counting procedure attached. A vote determines who administers the government's powers; it cannot create a right to violate anyone's. See Democracy and Elections.
That corporations are collectives in this sense. A company is a voluntary association whose members may leave, and whose claims on them are contractual. See Corporation.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. "Collectivized 'Rights'" and "Racism", The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964.
Rand, Ayn. "The Monument Builders", The Virtue of Selfishness.
Rand, Ayn. "For the New Intellectual", For The New Intellectual. Random House, 1961.
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 10.

External links

Collectivism at the Ayn Rand Lexicon