The Patriot Post® · Collectivization

Government power derives from collectivization of the people’s property. When government – a small group of other people after all – owns or controls vast amounts of the people’s property it is thereby empowered to employ people to carry out its self-serving desires. Flush with the people’s property, and thereby their power, collectivist government can also redistribute property to a government-dependent so-called proletariat class – while at the same time taking away property from the laboring middle class – the social engineering of economic class struggle. Total collectivization of property into the hands of a few, i.e.: into the hands of Marxist-type government, leads to total government power; thus Karl Marx advocated the abolition of private property as a means to concentrate property, and thereby power, into the hands of a few.

“It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called ‘abolition of private property’ [Communist Manifesto] meant in effect the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before… In the years following the Revolution it [The Socialist Party of Oceania] was able to step into this commanding position almost un-opposed because the whole process was represented as an act of collectivization… It had always been assumed that if the Capitalist Class were expropriated Socialism must follow; and unquestionably the Capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport, everything had been taken away from them; and since these things were no longer private property it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc [Socialist Principles of Oceania], which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist program with the result; foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.” George Orwell – 1984

The various forms of Socialism represent somewhat lesser forms of property collectivization in comparison to Communism. There is a sliding scale of property collectivization, and thereby a sliding scale of government power over the individual. Marxist Communism is at the extreme left with Fascism (related to Crony Capitalism) just a bit to its right, both inhabiting the far left on the spectrum of government power over the individual. We should therefore refer to Marxism as the Marxist Left and Fascism as the Fascist Left.

“Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation’s economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property – so long as the state reserves to its self the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property. If ‘ownership’ means the right to determine the use and disposal of material goods, then Nazism endowed the state with every real prerogative of ownership. What the individual retained was merely a formal deed… which conferred no rights on its holder. Under Communism, there is collective ownership of property de jure. Under Nazism, there is the same collective ownership de facto.” Leonard Peikoff

Anarchy is at the far right on this scale – where there is no government. The American Revolution is center-right – where government is limited by the un-amendable natural law of our Declaration of Independence and the amendable secular law of our Constitution.

Collectivist government dates back to ancient times, but Plato was the first philosopher to lay out social and property collectivization in detail. Plato carefully worked out the system of collectivization where the ordinary individual possessed little value, but where the leaders of the collective – the Philosopher Kings – possessed great value.

“Plato’s metaphysics holds that the universe consists of two opposed dimensions: true reality – a perfect, immutable, supernatural realm, nonmaterial… non-perceivable – and the material world in which we live. The material world, Plato holds, is only an imperfect appearance of true reality… Momentous conclusions about man are implicit in this metaphysics: since individual men are merely particular instances of the universal ‘man,’ they are not ultimately real. What is real about men is only the Form which they share in common… Each man therefore must strive, as far as he can, to wipe out his individuality (his personal desires, ambitions, etc.) and merge himself into the community, becoming one with it and living only to serve its welfare. On this view, the collective is not an aggregate, but an entity. Society (the state) is regarded as a living organism (this the so-called ‘organic theory of the state’), and the individual becomes merely a cell of this organism’s body… The advocacy of the omnipotent state follows from the above as a matter of course. The function and authority of the state, according to Plato, should be unlimited… The program of government domination of the individual is thoroughly worked out. In Plato’s ‘Republic and Laws’ one can read the details, which are the first blueprint of the totalitarian ideal… The blueprint includes the view that the state should be ruled by a special elite: the philosophers. Their title to absolute power, Plato explains, is their special wisdom, a wisdom which derives from their insight into true reality… the so-called ‘Form of the Good’… The Form of the Good cannot be known by the use of reason… It can only be grasped, after years of ascetic preparation, only by an ineffable mystic experience… which is reserved to the philosophical elite… The mass of men, by contrast, are entangled in the personal concerns of this life. They are enslaved to the lower world revealed to them by their senses… They are fit only to obey orders… Collectivism is the theory that the group (the collective) has primacy over the individual. Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective – society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc. – is the unit of reality and the standard of value. On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it; on his own he has no political rights; he is to be sacrificed for the group whenever it – or its representative, the State – deems it desirable.” Leonard Peikoff

Collectivism can be reduced to the assertion that a special elite group of people – analogous to Plato’s Philosopher Kings or the Pigs of George Orwell’s Animal Farm – are “more equal than others.” Collectivism occurs when the State – a small group of other people after all – takes possession of the individual’s right to the fruit of their labor – a State which is in pursuit of its own happiness – where ordinary individuals, lacking those rights, become enslaved to that small group of other people. Collectivism is a society where a special elite has in effect been made in the image of God, and where ordinary individuals in effect are not. Seen from atop their collectivist tower of government power, the “little people” appear to be identical molecules of gas in Brownian motion, or merely cogs in the mechanism of government.

“As for Marxism, one thinks of an analogy with another physical theory. This is the kinetic theory of gases, according to which a gas is the aggregate of molecules that come into collision, with the result of each collision determined by the laws of mechanics. A very great number of molecules transform the statistical laws of their collision into the general laws of the physics of gases. ‘The only form of social contact of the producers of goods in capitalist society is exchange’ (just as for gas molecules the only form of interaction is collision)… It is evident that such a conception makes sense only on the assumption that separate ‘molecules’ (producers) are identical… It is consistent with the tendency to reduce man to the level of a cog in the state mechanism, as well as with the attempt to prove that man exists only as a manifestation of non-individual features, such as production or class interest.” Igor Shafarevich

Plato, Karl Marx and other utopian philosophers agitated for totalitarian government power over the individual where government possesses a collectivist “right” to the fruit of the individual’s labor in violation of the Natural Law embedded in our Declaration of Independence. Modern Marxist and Socialist governments empowered with this so-called collectivist right to individual property are reminiscent of Medieval Monarchies empowered by the so-called divine right of Kings. Marxism and Socialism are simply modern forms of Medieval Feudalism where Marxist or Socialist collectivization of property (and thereby power) replaces the same collectivization by Medieval Kings, Princes, Bishops and Priests.

Ultimately collectivization is a manifestation of the mastermind’s desire to not only self-servingly abolish the individual’s private property, but to abolish the private individual. Collectivization of individuals leaves a lifeless skeletal social framework in their place – a beehive where the honeycomb is believed to be of great value – leaving the bees expendable.

“Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.” Karl Marx

“The individual is only a cell… power is collective. The individual only has power in so far that he ceases to be an individual… If he can make complete utter submission; if he can escape from his identity; if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all powerful… Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death; the Party is immortal… You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do, and will turn against us; but we create human nature.” George Orwell – 1984

Once the Borg takes possession or control of the people’s property they possess the power and the wherewithal to collectivize guns – collectivize information – and above all – collectivize minds.

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake… Power is not a means, it is an end… The object of power is power… Always there will be the intoxication of power… We are the Priests of Power… The real power; the power we have to fight for night and day is not power over things but over men… Power is power over human beings, over the body; but above all over the mind.” George Orwell – 1984

Collect enough of the people’s property and violent tyranny follows as a matter of course, because, as Lord Acton observed, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” As the history of the 20th Century tells us; collectivist government, flush with the people’s property, and thereby flush with power, will eventually wage war against its own people.

“He who attempts to get another man into his absolute power does thereby put himself into a state of war with him; it being to be understood as a declaration of a design upon his life. For I have reason to conclude that he who would get me into his power without my consent would use me as he pleased when he had got me there, and destroy me too when he had a fancy to it; for nobody can desire to have me in his absolute power unless it be to compel me by force to that which is against the right of my freedom – i.e. make me a slave. To be free from such force is the only security of my preservation, and reason bids me look on him as an enemy to my preservation who would take away that freedom which is the fence to it; so that he who makes an attempt to enslave me thereby puts himself into a state of war with me… he that in the state of society would take away the freedom belonging to those of that society or commonwealth must be supposed to design to take away from them everything else, and so be looked on as in a state of war.” John Locke

Under our Declaration of Independence all individuals – because they are made in the image of God – naturally possess equal rights to life, liberty and fruit of labor in pursuit of happiness. The American Declaration of Independence remains the single greatest threat to all forms of collectivist tyranny – because it is pro-individual – because it is anti-collective – because it is a Borg-Killer. The American Declaration of Independence is an eternal declaration of war “against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”