[WalterBright]

> If I _voluntarily_ decide to join a "collective", am I individualist or collectivist?

An individualist, if you are free to leave it at any time. There's nothing wrong with forming a collective in the US, I think like 20,000 of them have been formed over the last 240 years.

You don't hear about them much because they all failed. You're free to start a collective anytime in the US and try to make it work.

Isn't freedom great?

[fragmede]

They haven't all failed. I hear about REI quite a lot. Rainbow Grocery is quite popular in SF. I hear good things about Organic Valley. Equal Exchange is in Massachusetts. It's popular to bank at a credit union instead of a bank.

The NCBA maintains a list of several thousand collective/coop businesses.

https://ncbaclusa.coop/

[WalterBright]

I was using collective in the sense of being a commune. Sorry about not being clear.

[fragmede]

Communes haven't all failed. There are a number of them that continue to exist to this day. That the rest of us haven't been forced into living in one of them doesn't mean they don't exist. Portland has a bunch of co-living co-housing communities that are thriving.

[20after4]

https://www.eastwind.org/ is just a few miles from me. It's quite successful, they even operate a business that grosses ~$2M/year and they provide their members with health insurance. I'm not keen on giving up my possessions to join the collective but I can think of a lot of worse ways to live.

Most definitely not a failure.

[WalterBright]

East Wind has high turnover:

https://rootstalk.grinnell.edu/past-issues/volume-vii-issue-...

https://www.linkedin.com/company/east-wind-community

I couldn't find out how high that was, but I've seen another "successful" commune with an average stay of 2 years. It takes people an average of 2 years to discover they don't particularly care for communes.

[hef19898]

Two years sounds about right in 2024, doesn't it?

[color_me_not]

Sorry, that question was purely rhetorical.

That divide between individual and collective as stated above was very sketchy, and I merely wanted to indicate that.

If one take the strict definition of individualist and collective from a dictionary (well, which one, to begin with?), of course they are opposite, just looking at the idea conveyed by the word radicals (ie individualist -> individual, vs collective).

As always, we all start talking about things without first defining the terms we use to discuss those things, and of course confusion, anger and frustration ensue.

[AmericanChopper]

The whole point this thread seems to be missing is the collectivist vs individualist debate that this relates to is about how society is governed. People assembling to address their needs/wants collectively might be collectivist in the broad sense, but it requires individualist governance framework to exist, because under a collective governance framework such freedom of association would not be permitted.

Just like how a large company is essentially governed in the same way as a planned economy is, but nobody’s under the impression that JPMorgan is a socialist institution.

[WalterBright]

Collectives are when people share equally in the work and the results.

[lupire]

Has China failed?

[WalterBright]

If you count mass starvation with collective farms?

It's a good thing China switched to free markets.

[hef19898]

China has a free market? Since when?