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So I was reading Murray Rothbard's "An Austrian Perpective on The History of Economic Thought",
and I found an interesting point within his section on communism, which I will read in a second.
He basically argues that even though communists claim to support a very social collective system,
in reality their system isolates individuals from each other. And they're the ones that claim
that individualism isolates people.
Rothbard starts with the following quote from Marx:
Religion, the family, the state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular
modes of production, and fall under its general law. The positive transcendence of
private property, as the appropriation of human living, is, therefore the positive
transcendence of all alienation and thus the return of man from religion, the
family, the state, etc., to his human, i.e. social existence.
He then follows up with:
But if all these cherished institutions are to be rudely stripped from man,
what then remains to this poor, 'liberated' creature? For make no mistake,
these post-Marxian creatures would be deprived of all human interrelations
that make up a society. These 'complete' individuals would be deprived of
law, family, custom, religion, and, of course, of all exchange of goods and
services, Le. they would be complete, hermetically sealed creatures each
isolated from everyone else. Ironically, then, leftists who habitually though
falsely denounce individualist thinkers for advocating a world of isolated
'atomistic', hermetically sealed individuals, themselves worship a theorist
whose vision of the ideal future is precisely of such a monstrous world. At
the same time, of course, each will have the consolation of knowing that they
are all trivial particles in a mighty collective organism now united with
'itself' - and that any vagueness or inconsistency in this picture will be
resolved by the sorcery of the 'dialectic', in which all contradictions transcend
their negations into a higher unity.
My point of sharing this paragraph isn't really to focus on what Marx believes, but rather the reality of
Marxist societies. Individualism brings about a very social society. Each individual person is
free to associate with who they want, and will do so voluntarily. Anyone that desires to isolate
his or herself will do so, but everyone else will create collective groups of their own free will,
and this is still individualist.
Free ebook version here: https://mises.org/system/tdf/Austrian%20Perspective%20on%20the%20History%20of%20Economic%20Thought_2_Classical%20Economics.pdf?file=1&type=document