First of all the question is a bit of a strawman because socialism and collectivism are not 1 to 1 the same thing. Some level of collectivism is necessary in a socialism system but only to a certain extent, just as a sustainable capitalist system can’t be 100% individualist either . A socialist country CAN be extremely collectivist, but that just depends on the culture of the country in question. Marxism is against systematic exploitation at the industrial scale, it doesn’t say we have to be spending all our time doing nice things for our neighbors 24/7.

Your friends might be thinking of conformism (orthodoxy in thoughts and belief, pliancy to assimilate), which is the extreme version of collectivism. As far as I know, Marx never said collectivism must completely replace individualism. They both must co-exist, because either of them alone will lead to its extreme version. Individualism alone always leads to egoism (when an individual prioritizes his own interests and desires at the expense of his social group). Marxism doesn’t impose selflessness, since individualism is in some circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals, but it demands balance. Without collectivism, the extreme form of individualism will rear its ugly head and push people to treat others as expendable and exploitable, which violates individual liberties, making it contradictory. This hyper individualism is easily illustrated by the selfish appropriation and hoarding of land and resources we see today. Everyone should be free to be independent so long as that doesn’t require taking independence from someone else in the process. The social nature of human beings is an intrinsic trait that evolved with us. Our hunter gatherer ancestors wouldn’t have survived without collectivism.

Individualism is sorta like an API in programming. You can do what you want with it! Wow. But you need a computer with which to access the API properly. And you need programming knowledge to use it. And if you want to go outside what the API makers planned for, you may just be stuck.

On top of this, the API is an abstraction. Underneath it is multiple layers of complexity: layers that required lots of organization and hierarchy and planning and meetings and capital to make them. Then more of that to maintain the systems over time. So what you see on the surface layer is the neat, flexible API, but you don’t see how much is going into making it possible in the first place.

So individualism is sort of an abstraction. It’s not the actual society as a whole. It is a field to graze in with fences around it. And the more the capitalists squeeze, the smaller the field gets, the more the soil turns ashen, and the harder it is to move and survive.

What commies want to do involves making the people more widely part of the hidden layers, empowering them in the process and better ensuring their needs are represented and get met. Their movement space becomes largely broader as a result, the soil more fertile, and the collective strength of so many knowledgeable people contributing to an ecosystem of shared benefit turns a confined and unstable field into an expansive and sustainable world.

Public roads are owned collectively. Libs can go eat shit.

Humans didnt evolve as solitary creatures. Individualism was created to erode social ties and destroy unions.

You might find this article from Roderic Day interesting.

It argues that the individualism and vs collectivism contradiction is “false and misleading”.

That “production is already socialized — collectivized” under capitalism.

I like using nature as the proof of dialectics. Nothing exists in isolation. You can’t point to the individual anything that produced itself and isn’t impacted by the environment it shapes. The world is ecosystems on top of ecosystems, all of them interconnected and interdependent. They’re obviously part of the natural collective of the biosphere. If someone acts individually and pollutes a river, that has downstream consequences that degrade systems it only has a tertiary connection to. Waterways are the commons because they’re a natural collective with individual responsibility for the health of the ecosystem supporting our health. If a world of individualists ignore the collective nature of the biosphere, we fill the atmosphere with more greenhouse gases than it can dissipate. Only collectivist action can address the collective problem of climate change or its consequences.

The human ecosystems built on the natural ones aren’t different. You survived childhood because a community was raised by historical communities. If an individualist went against their collective responsibility and polluted your waterways, you’d die of some illness. If that common water wasn’t delivered through pipes the collective produced, you’d be dead within a few days or fighting other individualists to drain the diseased wells they shit in. If the collective bodies of science and food systems didn’t align, you’d starve. The dysfunctions in those systems come from individualists rebelling against the collective responsibilities to ethics and socioecological impacts. Individualists seeking profit or glory at the expense of someone else, collective progress held behind individualistic corporate patents, grocers that punish the hungry for starving and the farmers for growing food.

What they’re doing is protestant work ethic shit, moral Calvinism meant to trick them into thinking they can solve climate change by recycling by the polluting industries. A boss can use that to abuse and dehumanise their workers. The wealthy can use it to explain why they shouldn’t pay taxes while stealing from the socioecological systems they degrade. It’s good logic if you already have power and can afford to meet all of your own needs in a bunker you built yourself, but for anyone who lives in a society it’s bad logic. I don’t know my neighbours’ names but if their lives get worse because I enrich myself at their expense, they will steal all of my nice things and shoot me. If climate change or a tax deficit or an economic crash collapses that society and there isn’t a collectivist framework to protect me, being an individualistic prepper just makes me a target for people who don’t feel obligated to support their neighbours.

i mean, individual welfare depends on collective welfare. think of covid-19 -> prioritizing collective actions/health benefits individual health. think of things like insurance/taxes -> investment into collective funds helps individuals with their bills/infrastructure access.