Further notes on Western Individualism and Asian Collectivism

 

Continuing from post below,  I was thinking that there is nothing that makes it necessarily true that kpatalism is individualistic - in reality the individual is constantly giving things up for the collective. Just because your relationship to others is mediated through the money relation doesn't mean that you are less connected to others.

The dogma is that it is socialism and collectivist systems deny rights to individuals for the advantage of the collective. However isn't this just as much true within market relations? This is where the 80s neo-liberal dogma that "greed is good" comes from; that is, that in being greedier you are actually being more productive and creating more value and therefore actually giving more to society as a collective whole. In this sense the person who is motivated by money and does whatever is highly paying is actually, according to this view, most influenced by the collective (aggregated) will of others, and less motivated by their own immediate desires.

Also one is always effected by the collective in so many infinite ways that the idea of the individual is a huge abstraction; so the American individualism doesn't reduce their inter-reliance on each other at all, it just means that one has less empathy etc when one passes a homeless person because they are constructed as completely in control of their own respective destiny.

In this context liberalism's stress on the individual is an ideological one, it is one that emphasises individual choices at the micro level, but in fact you have less and less choice to act in ways that are "inefficient", and you have less option to disengage from the logic of market exchange relations. The individualism you are actually provided with is just the cultural allowance to ignore the plight of others in proximity to you, so it is just a shorthand that conditions everyday cultural practices.

So firstly, could one say that Western individualism might be taken to mean a cultural preference for acting through market relations as opposed to directly, informally or through the state (so a disentangling of individualism as a concept from market liberalism). For example, Asian collective values means that people preference looking after their elderly relatives directly as opposed to the West that would either do this through the welfare state or through private healthcare or paying for nursing homes etc.

Secondly, could we then say that the individualism against the state is the individualism against the market, not the individualism in favour of the market?  Thus the individual vs collective (state, market, family) dynamic exists prior to the system of mediation between the two terms. Further, that individualism against the market actually requires more than one individual to operate (eg informal economy) so the collectivism of relational projects is actually a type of expanding of individual liberties? (Freedom through others vs freedom from others).

Thirdly, in constructing this as a cultural question, it is I guess about how a society represents its   mediations between individual and collective to itself. So if in fact American individualism represents a preference for market relations, and Asian collectivism a preference for state driven mediations, on what basis do we ethically say that individualism (of Ai Wei Wei or relational practice) is more emancipatory than collectivism? Or does the emancipatory potential lie in just running counter to power, its concentration, and all the problems that creates?