The Great War Between Collectivism and Globalism

There are multiple schools of thought prevalent in modern military and academic circles, but most are based on the premise that the world is teetering on the verge of regressing back to tribalism. I argue the opposite: human loyalties aren’t splintering and there is no compelling evidence for this idea. Ideologies consolidated throughout the ages and now there are only two left: Collectivism and Globalism.

Note: this is a chapter in my ongoing series The Great War Between Collectivism and Globalism. See the other chapters listed below (updated as I post them). For additional context, read my post about the rise of fascism in the USA. Since that article, I’ve adjusted my argument, referring to the 21st Century revolution as globalist in nature, rather than traditional fascism.

Introduction and Synopsis
Our Social Roots: Conflict Between Collectivist and Solitary Predators
Gender Roles: The First Distribution of Labor, and the Most Important One
Women’s Emancipation and Feminist Counter-Revolution

Every schoolchild knows that collective farms and factories are bad. Now ask yourself this; why are they bad?

A “why” question is hard to answer, so here’s some context. Which is more efficient; a mechanic building cars one at a time, or Henry Ford’s assembly lines? Naturally, any remotely sane person would say an assembly line is more efficient. Isn’t that a collective? What about farms? “Collective farm” is almost a slur. It’s like the capitalist “N Word.” Yet the vast majority of modern farms are collective farms. Does a seasonal migrant worker picking strawberries own the farm? Of course he doesn’t. 

The idea that “collectivism bad” is strange because we all endlessly say that, but not a single person on the face of the planet believes it. We all live in collectives. Our families are collectives. Our workplaces are collectives. Our churches are collectives. Human civilization itself is a collective.

We’ve been conditioned to recoil at the idea of people working together for a mutual goal unless there’s someone at the top of the pyramid who owns everything. To make this weird religion stranger, ownership is rarely singular anymore either. Almost every corporation of any size is owned by collectives. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, and Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, don’t own their companies. Neither of them even own the majority of their companies, not by a huge margin.

The idea of collectivism is as old as humanity itself. People have worked and fought together as collectives from the very beginning. Globalism is new, and the sworn enemy of collectivism. Globalism cannot be understood without understanding capital. For most of human history, various civilizations’ currencies of gold, silver, and other finite metals were a means to an end. No civilization ever pursued hoarding wealth for its own sake.

Human greed has always been a vice, but it was used constructively. Kings and emperors wanted to create and strengthen great dynasties, build sprawling cities, establish trade routes, and construct huge fleets of merchant ships. Kings never deliberately destroyed their own civilizations to hoard more gold, and that idea wouldn’t have made sense to them. The ideals of collectivism applied to humanity’s leaders as much as anyone else. Every king wanted to build something greater than himself that would last for hundreds of years after his death. Every successful civilization of any size throughout human history abided by this guiding principle, both East and West.

In the 21st Century, there is no frontier. There is no more land to be discovered and colonized (stolen). All that’s left for the West’s ruling class is a cabal of small, soft, and feeble men, and their bizarre fetish for capital. It’s not even a goal anymore. Capital is a god.

While any metric attempting to measure the gap between a prince and a pauper is going to be somewhat arbitrary, that gap can only be so wide. The top 1% ruling the Western World have reached that hard limit. It is not possible for them to be any richer than they already are. I mentioned Mark Zuckerberg previously. What can Zuckerberg buy that he doesn’t already have? The law of diminishing returns applies to wealthy people, and maybe more to them than anyone else. If I bought a million-dollar sports car, I’m sure I would be thrilled. But if I already owned fifty sports cars, I wouldn’t enjoy that new one very much. Sometimes I wonder if Zuckerberg is even able to enjoy things at all.

Globalists eventually realized they couldn’t be any richer, they couldn’t satiate their god anymore, and they went insane. Wealthy elites suffer from shared insanity and are attempting an equally insane plan against the human race, and for entirely irrational reasons.

In tactical terms, we don’t need to work with hypothetical scenarios to figure out what globalists are trying to do. They are emulating a proven model. European colonial empires ruled most of the rest of the world with tiny armies. George Orwell reflected on his time as a junior official and the almost comical way handfuls of British bureaucrats and soldiers ruled indigenous people who could have easily overwhelmed their white masters at any moment. In the Banana Wars, small contingents of American Marines, the “soldiers of the sea,” dominated entire nations. Colonial empires were, to a large degree, paper tigers. If an enslaved people unified, the odds of quelling the revolt would have been zero. The odds of success for any attempt to re-subjugate them would have also been zero.

That’s exactly what started to happen in the early 20th Century. Even failed uprisings like the Boxer Rebellion demonstrated the precarious nature of European overseas regimes. By the close of World War II, there was no longer any plausible justification to continue imperial domination. European elites were still getting as fantastically wealthy as ever from worldwide exploitation, but European voters caught on to the reality that enslaving an Indian man did not benefit the Englishman in any way. Especially since the Englishman was the soldier who had to fight and die to keep the Indian man in slavery.

It should be obvious to the attentive observer that the colonial model of slavery is the inspiration for 21st Century globalism. Theories of Fourth Generation Warfare and COIN relied on the assumption that empires need huge armies of hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy just one small country like Iraq. In hindsight, that’s not true. The current status quo in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and the other developing regions of the world suffering under the yoke of NATO imperialism are all proof that small cadres of special forces, airpower (manned and unmanned), and local militias are more than capable of carrying out globalist policy.

But what is the globalists’ plan? To put it bluntly, their plan is chaos.

Globalists can’t widen their distance away from the rest of society by moving up. That’s no longer possible. All globalists can do now is push everyone else down, and that’s exactly what they’re doing. Collectivization, to use Reaganite terms, is like a rising tide that lifts all boats. Globalists are fighting that tide as hard as they can. They’re making a deliberate and calculated effort to destroy civilization, to so thoroughly eradicate human collectives, there’s nothing left but isolated individuals, cattle to be enslaved. They’re attacking humanity on all fronts, destroying national identities, turning races against one another, and even turning men and women against each other.

Our ruling elites have become a death cult. They loot and cannibalize their own companies and industries. They deliberately destabilize and destroy developing nations. They deliberately cause chaos and death everywhere they can.

This is the greatest war in all of human history, and the most important one. If the globalists succeed, civilization will be so utterly destroyed, it might take centuries or longer for the human race to recover. It might not recover at all. Presumably, globalists have some plan to live through their planned apocalypse, but they’ve gone so hopelessly insane, I can’t know that for sure.

Moving forward, I’ll define the basic social principles that human civilizations live by, starting with their roots in nature all the way up to the colonial period and industrial revolution. From there, I will explain where the ideas of collectivism and globalism stand on the modern stage. There have been countless volumes of work analyzing collectivism and globalism, but I’m using them as broad concepts. No homework is necessary.

A Synopsis of Social Evolution and Conflict in the Modern Western World

For an excellent book describing the social construct of European feudalism, I recommend Carl Stephenson’s Medieval Feudalism. See my review of this book here.

Starting in the European colonial era, feudalism and Christian morals gave way to capitalism. Whatever one’s opinion on religion might be, it should go without saying that there must be some logical framework for human rights, whether it’s God, humanism, or some other concept. Morality aside, it was time to transition away from the backwards and stratified ideals of feudalism. But instead of being good, this transition was terrible because humanity’s leaders began to behave irrationally. For the first time, people worshipped money, which is irrational so of course those people acted irrationally. In the Gilded Age, there emerged an entire class of robber barons who committed acts of extreme cruelty for no particular reason except that they could.

Colonialism and industrialization aren’t mutually exclusive, they’re almost unrelated ideas and any civilization can engage in one or both simultaneously. Western Europe saw the rise of both ideas and colonialism bled over into industrialization. People benefit from industrialization, but European industrialization was poisoned by elites’ growing obsession with capital.

Obviously, colonialism changed the subjugated civilizations negatively, but European civilizations also changed, and in an equally negative way. For the first time in history, human social hierarchies fragmented to an extreme that’s usually only seen in nature between rival species. Or more precisely, conflicts between predator and prey.

Peasant revolts of the past were exceedingly rare and usually burned out fast. The narrative usually taught in modern popular culture is that peasant and working-class people were too stupid to lead themselves. That’s a false explanation based on prejudice rather than facts. The real reason is that there was almost never a compelling motivation for those people to revolt. Their rulers weren’t the enemy.

Most civil wars like the Barons’ Wars and War of the Roses in England were feuds between noblemen and their tiny private armies. There are exceptions, like the War of the Orders between Roman patricians and plebians, but even this was a series of complex political schemes and violent brawls spanning centuries. It ended with political reforms and improvements in egalitarianism. This civil war wasn’t so different after all. As important as various issues were to people of that time and place, in the end, this was just another feud between various political factions, and definitely not a great class struggle.

Colonialism sparked the early beginnings of capitalism, and something unprecedented happened. The gradual deification of money brought human ruling elites into direct conflict with their governed people, which was an astonishing and horrifying precedent.

From this point onward, collectivization would have to grow despite the upper classes of society. The various echelons of human society became enemies, and this hostility has escalated up to the present day. 

As horrible as the robber barons were, they did build great factories and railroads. There was an undeniable net benefit from industrialization, but it was viciously antagonistic toward the rest of human society, and for no rational reason. Robber barons were too greedy and crossed a line. There would be consequences for this.

Before capitalism, human collectivization was a blur with few clear stages. Even huge events like the fall of Rome were classified as distinct “eras” retroactively, and many centuries later. If a modern historian went back to the 5th Century and informed a peasant in Gaul that, as of yesterday, he was now in the Dark Ages, that farmer would have been very surprised. New “eras” are usually sparked by the rise of a new ideology. Jesus Christ founded Christianity, Mohammed founded Islam, and so on. In modern history there is at least one particular social and political movement that stands out from all the others: Communism.

This is no accident. Wealthy landowners and industrialists now saw people and animals as one and the same thing; livestock to be exploited. It should come as no surprise that humanity’s collectivist instinct would react, and in much the same way white blood cells detect an invasive threat and try to destroy it.

Capitalism gave way to fascism. Like communism was a reaction to capitalism, fascism was a reaction to communism. European elites were no longer leaders in the normal sense, any more than a man is the leader of the cattle is milking and butchering. So European populations started to organize amongst themselves. For obvious reasons, this terrified capitalists. They needed a new ideology to keep people docile. Fascism was their first attempt at this goal.

Fascist economies revolve around privatization, an idea pioneered by Hitler himself, and is an effective strategy. Hitler redistributed infrastructure and wealth straight into the pockets of his corporate sponsors and he placated the German public with jobs and higher income produced by aggressive war mobilization.

Conflict in the 20th Century boiled down to a war between Communism and Fascism. Communism won a decisive victory against fascism with the fall of Berlin in 1945 but didn’t survive the aftermath. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a massive blow to the progress of human collectivization. Almost every communist movement in the world was directly influenced by the Kremlin. Without the Kremlin, communism was no longer a coherent worldwide movement to be feared.

Evolving media formats change the way people process information. A peasant on the shores of Normandy didn’t care about the collapse of Roman Empire, and certainly not the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire. He probably didn’t even know either of these events happened.

For a 17th Century peasant, the ideologies giving him a narrative to live by were Christianity and feudalism. Even feudalism wasn’t a proper ideology on its own. Rather it was a set of social conventions allegedly ordained by God and ruled by leaders also ordained by God. Neither of those ideologies changed with the signing of a faraway treaty so there was no reason for him to care.

Now, thanks to the 24/7 news cycles and people’s need for a narrative larger than themselves, the Cold War’s conclusion left a glaring ideological vacuum. Two opposing ideologies falling in close succession left people in a lurch. As their government was collapsing in real time, people across the Soviet Union rushed to their TV sets for answers, and there were none to be had. Every station was playing Swan Lake in a continuous loop for hours on end. This might be an accurate analogy for what everyone in the developed western world felt for the rest of the decade.

The end of the Cold War was different than the fall of any other civilization. Our world didn’t end, but from a story-telling perspective, maybe it should have. Imagine reading a book, watching a television show, or playing a video game and reaching its conclusion, but the story doesn’t end, it just lurches along. I wasn’t old enough to remember the immediate post-Cold War period, but it must have been surreal. The real world was like a convoluted soap opera that should have wrapped up nine seasons ago.

Internationally famous poet Yulia Drunina was most well-known for her recollections of serving as a 17-year-old combat medic in World War II. On Nov. 21, 1991, Drunina wrote her last poem.

I am leaving, there is no strength. Only from afar
All baptized I pray
For such as you, for the elect
Hold over the cliff Rus.
But I fear that you are powerless.
Therefore I choose death.
As Russia flies,
I can’t, I don’t want to watch!

In the mostly aimless aftermath of the Cold War, there were attempts to draw a new narrative. A 1989 article in the Marine Corps Gazette spawned the theory of Fourth Generation Warfare. Much like Marxism was an analytical breakdown of human history and a critique of capitalism, 4GW divided modern Western military history into “generations” and proposed a way forward. Also like Marxism, 4GW saw fairly radical changes as the world stage developed and new writers joined the intellectual bandwagon.

The 21st Century arrived, and with it, another story started. On Sept. 11, 2001, world changed. Rulers and the ruled alike needed a new ideology, and we got one.

Ian Kummer

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