One of the wonderful things about capitalism that hardly anyone every speaks of is how it brings people together in a peaceful cooperation. It emphasizes that peace is more profitable than war, cultural division is dangerous, and violence makes all a victim. In free trade we have a mechanism that automatically works to allocate resources and labor to the products and services that society desires, an immensely powerful tool that brings prosperity to everyone in society and lifts more out of poverty than any other cultural norm. It persuades us to cooperation, because that is what is rewarded in a capitalistic society. Were there no trade between individuals at every level possible, there could be no division of labor that brings with it the increase of living standards. In capitalism, we don’t even need to understand or care about the intent of the other; we only need to know what is being traded.
We are engendered to cooperation even though we might disagree with the religious and philosophical beliefs of another. Capitalism subsists in free cooperation, and though it secures no things like “right to health care,” this is only because those who do not cooperate with society cannot stand to profit from society. In capitalism, you are free to not join in; but it doesn’t follow that you are free to benefit from the work of others. Collectivism is altogether too worried with the beliefs and intents of one, forcing other to conform to certain kinds of behavior that the elites prefer. You are not free to not join, yet one is free to the work of another (“From each according to ability, to each according to need,” as Marx declares). The individual is burdened by society, employed to serve the needs of all others but themselves.
Collectivization is to enforce cooperation, but then that is really to diminish the co-operation that an individual offers to the whole, reducing the individual to a mechanical operator who can be picked and placed in the machine like any other cog; even the social whole is deflated into a mere picture of the whole, since all the individuals who serve as cooperative parts are now meaningless operative parts who are considered not in themselves as individuals who bring their labor forth to trade, but only in terms of their labor. The laborer is just, for all the hemming and hawing of those socialists and Marxists who might seem otherwise interested in their plight, is considered only as labor in their new construction of “society.”
There is no longer the one who labors, just the labor. Where did the one go? He went nowhere, for he is no more, what are you talking about? The end of collectivism is the reduction of the doer to its deed, so that the doer is no more and only the deed remains (to riff on Nietzsche). One who is not free to cooperate of their own accord, to trade of themselves with others who do so of themselves, of their wills, is not one for whom any themself is left to be given or taken from.
What do we have in collectivism? Command and obey.
What do we have in capitalism? Be, do, and have as you will.
