Collectivism vs. individualism isn’t about morality — it’s about ontology.

What this means is that being in favor of individualism or collectivism isn’t really about what you value in the world, but is instead about what you think is real.

Individualism is thinking that people are more real than groups. Collectivism is thinking that groups are more real than people.

Individualists think that individuals are easily separable from their social contexts, and that groups are simply convenient ways to refer to multiple individuals.

Collectivists think that individuals are constructed by their social contexts, to the point where it isn’t meaningful to ask what an individual wants— after all, what they want is simply a manifestation of their surroundings. Further, they see groups as having their own collective wills, desires, and agencies.

These are ways of seeing the facts of the world before they are strategies, moralities, ideals, or anything else. Which of these realities you believe in will determine what your moral intuitions and political strategies can refer to. Despite this, you can reach surprisingly similar concrete plans of action from these diametrically opposing views of reality — you can be right-wing for individualist or collectivist reasons, just as you can be left-wing for individualist or collectivist reasons.

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

That being said, the collectivist-individualist friction within a mixed organization can never quite be eliminated. Coops and unions can both be justified using either individualism or collectivism, but how you think that people are morally obligated to behave within them absolutely will change depending on whether you think that they are:

social infrastructures where-by we align our incentives

or, material expressions of class solidarity

In fact, one of the ways that cooperative projects I’ve seen have failed is when people come in with very different moral expectations for what they are doing.