The Coldness of Collectivism

Why history should give modern reformers pause

Courtesy of New York Mayor’s Office

History has been unkind to political movements that challenge liberalism. Yet in his inaugural address on January 1, 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” The 20th century offers a long and brutal warning against that aspiration. Across the globe, collectivist and authoritarian regimes arose to challenge liberal democracies and supplant them with planned social orders. Their collapse, alongside the political repression and mass starvation they produced, revealed a fatal misunderstanding of both human nature and economic reality. Given that record, Mamdani should be reluctant to romanticize collectivism. Yet the temptation persists among those who believe society can be consciously designed, who discount human incentives, and who underestimate the complexity of allocating resources without markets.

The modern collectivist project began in an agrarian autocracy, not the capitalist society Marx anticipated. In Russia, the Bolsheviks violently overthrew the Tsardom, eliminated political opposition, and set out to construct a new order. Land and industry were nationalized, the press was brought under state control, and agriculture was forcibly collectivized. Convinced that history itself justified their rule, the regime subordinated economic life and civil society alike to centralized authority. The result was mass repression and famine, including the Holodomor in Ukraine, in which millions died. Mao’s China followed this model, collectivizing agriculture during the Great Leap Forward, resulting in the Great Chinese Famine, the deadliest famine in modern recorded history, which killed an estimated 36 million people.

Collectivism was not confined to left-wing ideology. The 20th century, after all, was defined by sustained assaults on liberalism from both political extremes. In the Doctrine of Fascism, Benito Mussolini wrote, “Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual.” Like the socialists, the fascists subordinated the individual to the state, replacing class struggle with national struggle. Adolf Hitler enacted this collectivist logic in racial terms, constantly subjecting the individual to the collective interest of the Volk. Under National Socialism, the regime rebuked the free market and coordinated nominal “private” firms by dictating their prices, outputs, and wages. It demolished the private sphere by crushing independent institutions, censoring any dissent, and enforcing conformity through state-propagated organizations. In the end, this collectivism cultivated in a state-defined “racial community,” achieved through the exclusion and eventual extermination of Jews and other designated outsiders.

The 20th-century conception of collectivism was not new but a revival of utopianism. In The Republic, Plato imagines the rule of a philosopher-king that will eradicate all class conflict. Private property would be forbidden, families and all voluntary associations would be dismantled, and the education of children placed entirely under state control. All these measures to eliminate any individual identity were to ensure that the individual would be completely oriented towards the collective interest of the city.

The fundamental flaw in this vision, and any subsequent collectivist ideal, was that it ignored human nature. Individuals always have self-interest, have goals and aspirations of their own, and ultimately care more about what belongs to them than what is held in common. Aristotle made this point clear in his Politics, where he argued that what is held in common is cared for the least. When property is held in common, and it belongs to everyone, no one feels fully responsible for it. People assume that others will do the work and pay the costs to care for it. The incentive to contribute declines, and then free riding becomes a problem. Over time, this leads to shared resources being neglected and overused.

At the same time, collectivist economies face an insurmountable knowledge problem. Consider the simple example of a pencil. Producing one requires wood, graphite, rubber, paint, fuel, machinery, labor, and many other resources, all moved from across the world. No centralized committee or expert can possibly direct that process in real time. Instead, markets solve this through price mechanisms. If graphite becomes scarcer because a mine shuts down, its price rises, which signals to producers to conserve graphite, look for substitutes, or expand supply. If fuel costs rise, shipping becomes more expensive, and shipping methods might change, including finding closer suppliers or changing the production process to use less transportation. If demand for pencils rises at the start of the school year, the pencil’s price rises, telling manufacturers to produce more and telling buyers to purchase only what they truly need. The pencil appears on store shelves not because anyone designed the system, but because millions of people pursue their own self-interest, and information is coordinated through prices.

Given the historical record and economics, one wonders why Mayor Mamdani would embrace collectivism. Again and again, the conceit of central planners has produced starvation, repression, and catastrophe. Markets, by contrast, have generated unprecedented prosperity. In the early 19th century, 75% of the world lived in extreme poverty. By the end of the 20th century, that figure had fallen below 10%. The rise in living standards didn’t come from bureaucratic planning or collectivist schemes. It came from markets that emerge spontaneously from the decentralized decisions of millions of individuals using their private property to pursue their own self-interest.