Debating Internet Collectivism (2): Jeremy Gilbert on going beyond fundamentalist individualism and collectivism

This text is a little more philosophically grounded and more difficult to read than yesterday’s contribution on the topic by Cathy Fitzpatrick, but well worth the effort.

Unlike Cathy’s contribution, it does not deal directly with internet collectivism, but provides a broader context to it, by reviewing and critiquing concepts of individualism and community, positing that the latter is not inherently totalitarian (a subtext which may well explain’s Cathy Fitzpatrick’s approach).

We are publishing it in two parts.

Jeremy Gilbert teaches Cultural Studies at the University of East London. His books Anti-Capitalism and Culture (Berg) and Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (Pluto)

The original essay appeared in Soundings, Issue 35 Spring 2007, dedicated to “Left Futures”

Part One, the critique: Liberalism, collectivism and democracy

Jeremy Gilbert:

The defining conflict of our times appears to some to be that between ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’. It hardly needs spelling out just what a misleading formulation this is: both crudely simplifying and mischievously divisive. Neither ‘the West’ nor ‘Islam’ are coherent entities, and the flashpoints between them are as much the symptoms of their respective internal conflicts as anything else. Bush’s aim, on one level, was always to beat the Democrats before anything else, just as Hamas’s struggle is often against Fatah as much as it is against Israel. But the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ (the title of a notorious essay by neocon ideologist Samuel Huntington) is a problematic myth not only for these reasons, but also because it obscures a more fundamental conflict for which it is at times a metonym and at other times just a mask. A more fruitful way of understanding most of the antagonisms of contemporary global politics is to see them as manifestations of the conflict between two opposing principles – liberal individualism and authoritarian collectivism – each of them manifest in various but increasingly extreme ways, and each of them, carried to its logical conclusion, inimical to the culture of democracy. In this article I look at some contemporary theoretical debates that are helpful in getting to grips with issues of politics and inter-connectedness, in order to try think towards alternatives beyond these two paradigms

Liberal individualism is, broadly, the most influential and widespread way of thinking about and relating to the world in western economies. It is easy to overlook this because it is opposition to it which is often most noisy. For example, the conservative opposition to gay marriage and adoption, in Europe and the US, claims many headlines, but it is, by definition, the reaction of a losing side: where once no gay people could marry or adopt, today it is increasingly only in conservative enclaves that they cannot. This is a phenomenon partly made possible by the popularisation and radicalisation of the assumptions of old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon liberalism, the most basic such assumption being that the claims of any group on any individual – including the right of that group to tell that individual who they can marry – are minimal, and should be kept so. The idea that we are all, fundamentally, individuals, with only contingent and relatively superficial ties to any other individuals, or to groups, traditions or institutions of any kind, is a very powerful one’ – and one which is liberating and coruscating in equal measure, depending who you are and exactly what you want to do. If you want to marry your same-sex partner, or choose your child’s school, or take cheap flights to exotic locations, or travel from job to job throughout the EU, and you have the material resources or the skills to enable you to do those things, then liberal individualism is wonderfully empowering. If you want to protect a way of life which depends upon the observance of ancient customs (repressive or otherwise), or to ensure that your local comprehensive contains a social mix rather than becoming either a ‘sink’ school or a bastion of privilege, or if you want to protect the environmental resources that we depend on collectively but consume privately, then liberal individualism is a rather more problematic paradigm.

Since denunciations of ‘bourgeois individualism’ have a long and honourable history on the left, it is worth bearing in mind just how much has been gained by the hegemony of this set of ideas. The extraordinary social gains made in much of the world by women and by sexual and ethnic minorities have largely been effected through the implementation of liberal ideals and assumptions. But, by the same token, those gains which such groups have not made despite decades of campaigning have been exactly those which demand a collective assumption of responsibility (decent publicly-funded childcare in the UK, for example). At the same time, we should remember that liberal individualism has not been spread throughout the world simply by dint of its inherent reasonableness. A long history of scholarship has demonstrated the intimate connection between this ideology and the social logic of capitalism, with its emphasis on the sanctity of property and freedom from social restrictions for capital and commerce. Wherever the IMF or WTO have demanded the privatisation of public services and the lowering of taxes (which is pretty much everywhere in the world), they have in effect enforced the implementation of liberal individualist values in at least some crucial areas of social life. Marketisation and privatisation have been imposed on more than one region by means of military force. As such, it’s not surprising that the reaction against these impositions should be frequently violent and extreme.

Broadly speaking, we can understand the rise of various kinds of ‘fundamentalism’ around the world – evangelical Christianity, Zionism, Hindutva, Islamism, Serbian and comparable nationalisms – as responses to the disaggregating and disconcerting consequences of liberal individualism. It’s no accident that sexual conservatism is such a central and ubiquitous feature of these otherwise quite disparate tendencies, and no wonder that they so often manifest themselves in attempts by men to control women’s bodies, from their veiled faces to their sanctified, abortion-proof wombs: men’s control over women – and everything that that necessitates or makes possible – has been eroded by the rise of individualism like nothing else. In all of these cases, social conservatism is combined with a powerful collectivism which insists, implicitly or explicitly, on the homogeneity and purity of the community. The simplest way to oppose individualism and its consequences is to insist on the value of the collective and to diminish the value of individuality; and the simplest way to do that is by insisting on the homogeneity of a community which is assumed to determine the identities of all who are part of it, and to exclude from belonging all who cannot share a very specific and circumscribed identity.

The great dream of much of the left – its utopian hope – has always been to find another way, to oppose individualism without crushing individuality and to imagine a community which could be inclusive and tolerant of diversity. This has not, however, been a consistent guiding vision for its most powerful elements. Soviet totalitarianism was only one symptom of socialism’s historic inability to accommodate a diversity of desires and identities. Another was the inability of the British labour movement to mobilise a wide social coalition against Thatcherism. In today’s era of proliferating possibilities, when advanced capitalism makes a vast array of life choices available to the consumer-citizens of the western world, any political project which threatens to curtail these choices without offering, as fundamentalisms do, the comforts of absolute certainty, is pretty much impossible to sell to anyone. Secular collectivism seems to belong now to the era of welfare Keynesianism, Soviet Communism and the comprehensive school.

But there are perhaps reasons to believe that this is not the end of the story. For one thing, in South America, exactly that part of the world where neoliberalism was implemented first and has bitten deepest, we are currently witnessing a remarkable resurgence of socialist utopianism – democratic, egalitarian and pluralistic – manifest in both the militancy of Chavez and Morales in Venezuela and Bolivia, and the more cautious reformism of Lula and Kirchner in Brazil and Argentina. The social forum movement – a disappointment only to those naive enough to have expected world revolution to be sparked off by a conference of NGOs organised by a French monthly journal – is explicitly committed to this same combination of egalitarianism and libertarianism, like no global movement has ever been before. At the same time, at the purely conceptual level, the past thirty years of philosophical and theoretical innovation have produced a wealth of ideas with which to challenge the one key assumption on which both neoliberal individualism and postmodern fundamentalisms agree: that collectivity is inherently totalitarian in nature.

The rest of this essay focuses on contemporary theoretical debates and the light they can cast on thinking through these issues. Of course they are in themselves nothing new. The assertion that human capacities can only be fully exercised in collaboration with others, and that collectivity should thus be considered not the limit but the precondition of true liberty, stretches back to Marx’s earliest work and well beyond, into pre-modern notions of commonwealth and community. But if the history of the past century teaches us anything, it is just how difficult it is to reconcile a respect for the collective with the freedom of the individual and the minority.

The genius, and paradox, of liberal democracy has always been its ambition to reconcile its two eponymous principles, or at least to enable them to limit each other in a workable fashion. By guaranteeing certain basic rights to the individual, it empowers the demos to authorise most important decisions while protecting individuals and minorities from ‘the tyranny of the majority’. (It’s worth noting that in these terms the UK is not a liberal democracy at all, because there is no right or privilege accorded to any British citizen which a parliamentary majority cannot rescind.).

But it is a myth of liberal democracy that its two principles co-exist naturally: that liberalism and democracy somehow imply each other. It is a view reinforced by the common emphasis that both democratic and liberal theory tend to place on the importance of free speech, but it is important to understand that the liberal and democratic arguments for free speech are quite different. The liberal argument emphasises the importance of protecting the private right of the individual to express their opinions, while the democratic argument emphasises the value to the general polity of an open contest between different views and perspectives. Beyond this issue, history makes quite clear that democracy need not imply liberalism: Hitler, after all, was a democratically elected politician. And the current condition of ‘post-democracy’ in western capitalist economies could be characterised as one in which increasingly liberal societies are governed by an increasingly unaccountable technocracy. Contrast this with Iran’s Islamic republic, in which a largely illiberal political culture is upheld by the democratic consent of the majority, or indeed with the efforts of the evangelical Right in the US to impose its morality on the entire population. Contrary to Fukuyama’s notorious thesis (in The End of History and the Last Man, 1993) liberal democracy has not resolved itself as the solution to the riddle of history: the problem of how to reconcile aspirations towards pluralism, liberalism, collectivism and democracy remains as acute as ever. It may be an old aspiration, and an old problem, but there should never be any complacency in the search for new solutions to it, both practical and conceptual.”

1 Comment Debating Internet Collectivism (2): Jeremy Gilbert on going beyond fundamentalist individualism and collectivism

  1. AvatarChriswaterguy

    Interesting ideas. I’ll have to come back and finish reading though.

    A minor point: Iran’s Islamic republic is not a democracy in any meaningful sense, as only approved candidates can contest elections, and this is used to exclude anyone that the theocratic regime does not approve of.

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