The Rise and Fall of Individualism

Tony Blair’s intervention in the debate on the NATO defeatin Afghanistan and MP’s complaints to the government that the project for ‘building democracy’ there has ended, shows that the elites in the UK are still much in favour of liberal military interventions in failed states. By implication, this means they think that the neo-liberal ideal of individual, classless, consumers in a free market electing technocrats to govern them is still an idea with power in the world. This only shows their lack of connection with the population they rule: The military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq not only failed, but caused the nightmares of Syria, Libya and the Yemen. The free market economy has not worked since 2007. The very fact they seriously espouse these ideas means that our democracy is extremely malfunctional. Whether they are moderates, have common sense, are nationalists, socialists or extremists and conspiracy theorists, people want to be something more than just individual consumers – and they probably always did. The era of the free market economy and the individualist neo-liberal dream is coming to an end.

Human beings are a social animal that cannot survive without the company of other human beings. But in contradiction to this, humans have always striven for there own individual agency to express themselves and sate the demands of the ego – in fact, too many individuals want a leadership role in the collective. Individualism tries to solve this by reducing collective power. But it is not just the emphasis of an individual’s agency at the expense of the collective, for individualism always needs a collective framework to operate in – such as capitalism. Those individualists who are opposed to the framework find themselves castigated as enemies of individualism as much as collectivists are, and are often converted to collectivism in order to change the framework. This contradiction has always weakened the individualistic society. On the other hand it is easy to accuse collectivism of being the tyranny of the majority and organise an individualist revolt. Individualism has in fact risen to power and fallen several times in western history.

In early medieval times the ability to be an individualist was very rare. The majority of the population were uneducated agriculturalists who were often unaware of any potential talent they may have had apart from farming. Their horizons were very limited, they often knew little of what was beyond the next village, possibly other than their local market town. Their lives did not give them the option of being ‘special’, and they did as they were told. For the aristocratic elite it was a different matter: They could run their estates as they saw fit and although they had to swear a vague loyalty to the monarch, a form of politics was possible where they could make deals for mutual benefit or the benefit of all. To a certain extent they could have a career. As education and transport gradually improved a little, some members of the peasant majority were able to become a professional class and benefit from more wealth and power by assisting the elites who ran the country. But this professional class was not really free to make its own decisions, it was dependent on the elites for its status and had to often side with the elites against the majority to guarantee its gains and get further preferment. This has not really changed, an affluent class in society still regularly sides with the elites to keep the majority from overthrowing them.

The first political expressions of individualism in England were at the time of the Protestant Reformation and the civil war. While Catholicism demanded collective adherence by the community to a church controlled by its priests, protestants felt that individuals should be able to study the Bible and make their own decisions about what being Christian actually was. Whilst king Charles I self-identified as a protestant he was more like a catholic who wanted independence from the pope. It was his religious ideas and an argument over the rights of parliament that provoked the civil war. The height of seventeenth century individualism was when the Levellers demanded ‘one man, one vote’ at Putney in 1647. But this experiment failed – the Levellers were denied their demands, the republic that was created after the execution of the king collapsed into a dictatorship, and after the death of Oliver Cromwell there seemed to be nothing to do but restore the monarchy. Although England, and later the UK, remained a protestant country with a parliament, anybody who was not an Anglican was subjected to discrimination and legal disenfranchisement. Those rebelling in the name of ‘individualism’ are often just as guilty of ‘group think’ as collectivists, and although protestant and so ostensibly ‘free’, the English had to follow the doctrines of the Church of England if they wanted to be fully a part of society.

The second rise of individualism arrived with the American and French revolutions, and was economic in nature: The power of monarchs was not tenable in a capitalist economy that relied on the individual’s freedom to create. Liberalism advocated a ‘laissez-faire’ (or ‘do as you will’) economy where it was up to individuals to compete and look after themselves. In the UK between 1876 and 1929 there were a series of reforms that gradually electorally enfranchised all adults and much diminished the legal powers of the aristocracy and the monarch. Despite this, a draconian attempt to incarcerate all of the poor in workhouses to protect the majority from the damaging effects of capitalism was made from 1834 – it was finally brought to an end in 1930. Although many liberals were not keen on the idea of democracy their own theories tended in that direction. Once a Liberal government had made trade unions legal in 1871 – on the grounds that if the workers were to look after themselves they needed to collaborate – a future democracy was guaranteed. It was this democracy that gave birth to collective action by workers in favour of economic equality, made necessary by the Industrial Revolution. The Conservatives at first opposed Liberalism and ‘laissez-faire’ in favour of the ‘respectable classes’ being in a position to ‘look after’ the masses. But in the twentieth century they accepted liberalism as the status quo, in order to better battle the Labour movement.

The fall of this second reign of individualism was provoked by the World Wars and the Great Depression: it seemed that capitalism and democracy had collapsed and Communism and Fascism vied with each other to set up a new collective order. Instead, in the general election of 1945 a large majority of British voters opted for a radical, although not extremist, Labour government. Although it only re-distributed wealth a little, the new Keynesian order attempted to guarantee the welfare of the population with a welfare state and National Health Service. Many of the major industries were brought into government ownership and the economy was run by collective negotiations between trade unions, big business and government. The people who got into government were essentially the same kind as before – well-to-do professional men, business leaders and those with aristocratic connections – but they appear to have been sincere about making a collective system work for the masses – in a rather patronising manner, they assumed they were best qualified to do it. In the 1960s MPs were given a salary so that workers had a chance of competing as candidates. But the MPs have regularly increased their own salaries and benefits to the extent they have become a part of the professional class that is biased towards supporting the elites in order to maintain their own position.

The collective style of democracy failed in the 1970s due to the expense of the new economic rights of the people – relating to the decline of the West and the rise of the ‘rest’ – and an oil crisis brought on by support for Israel against the oil producing Arab states. This was not a failure of the system per se: Whatever economic settlement had been made after the war would have struggled and most likely fallen due to these economic conditions, induced by the fact that the world still had a capitalist system, although a reformed one.

Throughout the post war period a small group of academic individualists bemoaned the collectivist system’s restraining of individual potential and complained that not being able to spend money however you pleased was an infringement of liberty. As the system collapsed they made an unusual alliance with young people. The collectivised system had given the youth a degree of freedom and wealth that they had not seen before. In the 1960s youth movements started that opposed the stultifying conservatism of the contemporary social mores and were anti-war, they were in favour of sexual liberation and lifestyles outside of mainstream expectations. They combined with anti-racism, feminism and the emancipation of homosexuals. These movements mostly failed due to their commercialisation – it is a lot easier to buy nice stuff than it is to change the world. However, some in this ‘radical’ generation attempted to mitigate this failure by embracing mindfulness so that they could enrich and liberate their own lives individually without taking on the world. It was easy to convert them to aselfish consumerism that seemed to guarantee personal comfort and a fulfilling career.

The Thatcher-Reagan neo-liberal settlement wanted to create an economy in which the majority owned their own properties and were to some degree stake-holders in the economic system. Heavy industry had to go, not only because it was uncompetitive with the likes of China but more because it was a hot-bed of workers’ collectivism. There was ‘no such thing as Society’, and individualism was to be completely unrestrained. People had to stop relying on the state to support them and engage in entrepreneurial activity to make their own way to greatness. All economic decisions would be made by a free market without government interference or democratic restraint. Whilst being individualists like the liberals, the neo-liberals worshipped the market in a way that the liberals did not, and had no room for individuals collaborating for their own benefit unless it was through the free market.

The Thatcherite dream failed: Unfettered capitalism led to a series of worsening economic depressions, the last one being the credit crunch beginning in 2007-8. In each depression the not-so-wealthy were forced to sell their stake in the economy to the rich, leaving the whole system in the hands of less than one percent of the people. Reliance on rising property prices to see people through old age has made property unaffordable for the majority of young people. There is little individual freedom as many either have little free time or are impoverished, are told what to do at work (even when they are ostensibly independent sub-contractors) and then have to hand over their decreasing wages to the elites in order to survive. In contradiction to neo-liberal aims, far more people are forced to rely on the state than when the experiment started.

It can be seen that as soon as the people were able to act as a mass, individualism has historically risen to and fallen from power, alternating with more collectivist systems. It seems that the free market system is in the throws of being replaced by a collectivist one: But what kind will it be?

The contemporary situation is quite similar to the one the West found itself in in the 1930s: Capitalism and democracy seem to have failed. In some ways our situation is less fraught. We seem to have the choice between socialism and nationalism just as they did, but we have plenty of historical examples of why not to go too far. Modern nationalists as a whole do not aspire to military dictatorship (although Trump did). Modern socialists emphasise their democratic nature. After a series of unpopular wars with disastrous consequences it seems unlikely that western populations would support militarism. In other ways the situation is far worse than the 1930s one: The World Wars were terrible but were not an existential threat to life on Earth – the climate crisis is, and our elites are reluctant to take it seriously due to their short term self interest. On top of this a new ‘great war’ is a possibility for the future – although China cannot replace the USA as the global superpower in the foreseeable future, the power of the USA and the West is waning and is going to continue to do so. At some point the West will either have to concede that other powers can have spheres of influence or fight a world-ending war to stop them. At the moment the West is set on the course of aggression against China.

Nationalism has caught hold in many places as a reaction against globalisation. Cheaper labour on the other side of the world diminishes your chance of getting a good job. We have to compete with migrants in the labour market who cannot survive at home, and seem to have the advantage when it comes to unskilled employment here. It is not surprising that the situation has encouraged xenophobia. The nationalist solution is a kind of collective isolationism, of which Brexit and Trump’s ‘America First’ campaign are the prime examples. Arguing that the ‘natives’ are ‘all important’ implicitly and then explicitly undermines democracy and equality – for members of ‘the nation’ have to have collective beliefs for it to be real, and differences cannot be tolerated. With its weak and divided opposition the UK at the moment seems to be heading in a similar direction to countries like Russia, Hungary and Turkey – all ostensibly parliamentary regimes but completely managed by authority figures and utterly corrupt. They are figures who are likely to be swayed by climate deniers, tempted by the ‘glories’ of war and they are completely venal in their outlook.

Social Media has also de-stabilised the situation. People will say things on the internet that they are too restrained to say in public. The internet can reinforce extreme ideas where as before they would have probably been forgotten about, or at least not become so emotionally charged. The ever growing digital society has weakened the idea of class struggle and replaced it with many subcultures angry with other subcultures or groups and often disconnected from national politics. This and the government’s close relations with the mainstream media, and the media’s lack of trustworthiness, has fractured our society like never before. The left relies on solidarity for success, so the right has run rough-shod over them.

The alternative to nationalism – a system of co-operation and an assertion of equality – is obviously far more peaceful and just than a dog-eat-dog system of grabbing what you can. But socialism has always suffered from allegations of incompetence in the system. While you can rely on people to work for their own benefit you can’t rely on them to give generously to those in need. The needy are accused of being not needy but scroungers, those asked to pay complain that they don’t have enough themselves. Whilst some accuse socialists of having a utopian pipe-dream, others would say that the moderate version has worked before, and could work even better with the technology we now have at our disposal. The climate crisis makes socialism the logical choice, and so does the fact that technology is making more and more workers unnecessary. But it has the power of money against it, and solidarity is hard to come by in a broken up and manipulated society.

A glimmer of hope lies President Biden’s electoral victory in America. If an American president can get a second term his politics are usually copied throughout the western world, as they are deemed successful. If Biden can keep his alliance going with the left and win in 2023 there is hope for leftist-neo-liberal combinations elsewhere. Although his attitude to China is very unhelpful, and his ‘Green New Deal’ is somewhat like window dressing, his other policies are common-sensical and moderate, and may steer the world away from some rash decisions.

In the 1930s it seemed that the western world had the choice between Communism and Fascism. It should be remembered that after the war it actually chose neither, and instead opted for a less extreme collectivism. We cannot know whether leftism or nationalism or something else will win out in our situation. But the new order will be collectivist in some way: It is unlikely that those who pretend the free market works can carry on in this belief for very long. In the late twenty-first century there will most likely be an individualist rebellion against the collective system that is just coming.

The UK has a more precarious future than most countries. Political culture does not really change its basics unless the state is faced with the humiliation of invasion or revolution. This has not happened in Britain since the civil war, and our political culture is an evolved version of the 1640s one: Although anti-despotic, it puts the elites in control – even under democracy – and is imperialistic – even when it has very little power in the world. The whole system is biased towards the right. The Labour left and the Labour right have almost nothing in common and do not belong in the same party. Their seemingly never ending squabble makes the Labour Party usually unelectable and the ascent of a nationalistic oligarchy to permanent power the most likely thing to happen. The extreme right is so prevalent that even now the mainstream media presents anti-racism as being ‘extreme’, and the Labour right seems unsure whether to oppose this. There would be nothing to stop these two blocks forming a coalition government if they were separate parties – it would merely give both the ability to form an agenda at the same time, and compete without a pathological need to annihilate the enemy. Corbyn proved that socialism can be popular even under terrible conditions – socialists should not be so unconfident about survival by themselves. Please support a separate and viable socialist party by signing the petition below.

Martin Gooding

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