It prevents you from realizing that you share problems with the vast majority, preventing many people from becoming class conscious. And if they do realise these problems they’ll gravitate towards individualistic solutions to systemic problems (for example: climate change is the consumers fault, just buy your way out of it), for which capitalism swoops in to provide a product/service to give the illusion of “I’m doing my part”.

It’s also unnatural and doesn’t go well with the fact that we were never supposed to live this way.

Individualism goes against human nature, and it is probably why people are lonely and homelessness is epidemic in the US.

This goes against everything I’ve learned in the states, where we consider individualism a necessary part of being a responsible and moral person, whereas collectivism strips us of our humanity and turns us into subhuman insectoid creatures incapable of thought.

How is this working out for the US?

It’s preached as a reskinned attempt to convince the poor to just keep their heads down and let God take care of everything. Most who preach individualism are full of shit anyways, they are very quick to turn towards chauvinism and nationalism the moment the status quo becomes threatened like we see with libs cheering on Ukraine and their mass conscription.

Rejecting individualism doesn’t negate the existence of individuals, with their own needs and agency. Rejecting individualism simply rejects an incorrect worldview, one which ignores material conditions and the inherent and irreplaceable social conditions of human life and development. Individualism is just an existential philosophy made up to fit in with the socioeconomic myths of liberalism and make liberalism seem closer to human nature.

…where we consider individualism a necessary part of being a responsible and moral person, whereas collectivism strips us of our humanity and turns us into subhuman insectoid creatures incapable of thought.

I mean, you’re working with propaganda definitions for those concepts instead of … umm… correct ones. So, don’t do that.

You have to divide the ideological conflict between individualism and collectivism into 2 lines to make things clear.

First, there is the question of “in political matters, which group should I rally around to fight for my interests?”. There are many possible answers to this: Nobody, a national group, a gender or racial group, a class. Of these answers, only “nobody” qualifies as “individualist”. And yet, when one frames it with the question I have used, it becomes obvious why the “individualist” answer is frankly, idiotic. You have a better chance of winning a fight when you have numbers on your side, plain and simple.

This question is often conflated with the other line along which the conflict extends. “Should I act to prioritize my own interests or those of my preferred groups?”. These are 2 different questions, and very often, people choose to be “collectivist” for the first question, while choosing the “individualist” answer for the second. In fact, this is often the core of reactionary politics, in which selfish people rally around national, racial or gendered groups to preserve their privilege.

The answer to the second question depends entirely on who you are as a person. Everybody has differing limits on how far they are willing to go in self-sacrifice and under what conditions. This depends on you as a person, and I don’t think reason or philosophy can really change that all too much. However, being willing to undertake self-sacrifice for a group does not make you into a “subhuman insectoid creature incapable of thought”. I have a conjecture that some people mock self-sacrifice like this because of insecurities. Instead of simply accepting their own selfishness and living with it, they make excuses about why it is infact morally good to be selfish. I honestly find that amusing. Acting self-centered but still seeking validation from others.

I think this Roderic Day thread is relevant: https://x.com/RodericDay/status/1784207317187051909

The general discussion of “Individualism vs Collectivism” is expressed incoherently as just ideas apart from existing social-class relations. In essence, the debate is Idealism. What’s actually going on is that the petty bourgeoisie, a large section of society, have class-wide interests (making money off of their property/providing services/maintaining prices) that have to be expressed as an individual decisions. The price of milk goes down so each individual dairy farmer starts dumping their supply to force a scarcity, and because holding the supply would be an unacceptable individual cost. They compete with each other and anarchy of production forces them all into similar despotic behavior. That is, the petty bourgeoisie can’t seem to align their class interests, which are individualized interests as property owners/service providers, with organization (there are caveats). The proletariat, as workers forced to sell themselves to capitalists, are already put into collectivized work relations because as the means of production develop, co-dependency between workers increases. Proletarians’ labor is already collectivized, but is owned and constrained by individual bourgeois interests. The struggle for the proletariat to gain control over their individual interests is to express their collectivized behavior into the realm of property, to take off the individual who rides on their collective backs.

The petty bourgeoisie can only squabble (cartel, state intervention, Imperialism, dumping) over the contradiction between their class existence and their individual interests, while the proletariat can overcome this contradiction by collectivizing property, because their labor is already collectivized.

It’s wrong because it simply doesn’t and cannot exist in the way that bourgeois ideology expresses it. In your framing, you’re already the ‘insectoid’ so stop fighting it and accept your nature and destiny.

I challenge you to try to survive one day without relying on thousands and thousands of other people, dead and alive.

Time to get up and get dressed. If you didn’t make your own clothes, leave them behind. If you made your own clothes but didn’t weave the fabric, leave them behind. If you made your own clothes from fabric that you wove but you didn’t spin the threads, leave them behind. If you span the threads but didn’t grow the cotton or hemp, etc, leave them behind.

You’re probably naked by now. Or maybe you had time to hide in a bush and strangle a bear, so you’re wearing a bloody pelt.

Either way, it’s time for breakfast. Toast or cereal? I think you fancy buttered toast today. Did you bake the bread, knead the dough, grind the flour, harvest the wheat, nurture, water, or plant the crop or till the field? Did you portion the butter into it’s block or churn the milk or milk the cow or feed the cow and vaccinate the cow and help it’s mother give birth – or did vets and farmers do that work?

Are you using an electric toaster or an electric or gas grill? If toast is your go-to breakfast, I reckon you’ll have an electric toaster. Did you build it? What with? Did you order the components from China? How did they arrive? Did you row or swim or did they come in a shipping container? Where did you get your schematics for the toaster design? An engineer? Or did you design them yourself? If so, who taught you or the engineer how to design and make things? Who built the buildings in which the teaching happend and who wrote and printed the textbooks? Who created the ink and turned pulp into paper and who chopped down the trees and built the chainsaw and the printer?

Maybe you didn’t simply order your components. Maybe you went to Texas or Iraq and came back with a bit of oil in your cupped hands and refined it to make your plastic casing and insulation. Maybe you went to the Congo and Bolivia to mine for your precious metals and smelted your dig for the copper wire and steel frame?

Let’s pretend you individually did all of this. Where do you get your energy supply? I doubt that you have time to run a power station, mine coal, and maintain a grid while you were busy building your toaster. You haven’t even had a wash yet or jumped in your car or on the bus or walked on a sidewalk or done any work whatsoever – what job do you even do that doesn’t rely on other people?

Bourgeois individualism is nonsense.

Individualism leads to people working against others with the same interests (crabs in a bucket). Individualism causes people to do adventurism or act like it’s them against the world rather than working with others. Individualism encourages people to be the “masters of their own time” leading them to self exploit (increase productivity) and justifying misaligned schedules that directly correlate to less happiness. Individualism flatters the ego leading people to do things for their own prestige rather than in the collective interest and self criticizing.

There is probably some good literature on this, but I have none on hand that I can recall, so I will attempt to say my rough understanding of it from memory: individualism is in bed with liberalism and idealism, and the package does this thing of effectively positioning you as a being who is supposed to overcome or transcend your “base urges”, which are in some way wicked, perverse, or broken. Not to be confused with valuing you as a human being intrinsically and thus enabling a certain degree of individual being and expression and choice, which a socialist state actually does a way better job of doing than the liberal capitalist order because, ya know, you don’t have much “freedom” if that “freedom” is dying homeless. The collectivist system does a way better job of getting your needs consistently met and so that gives you more actual freedoms. It’s one of those things that can sound contradictory because, well, it kind of is in a way; we live within contradiction all the time and navigating those contradictions is a critical part of scientific socialism.

With individualism, the focus more or less ignores the dialectical relationship between things and puts it all on you, as an individual on a journey, to overcome. It lives in some fantasy land where babies are going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, while ignoring the systemic and systematic exploitation orchestrated by the capitalists, colonizers, imperialists. It will have you viewing a billionaire as a lone rugged individualist achiever, while ignoring the systems of power and exploitation, the organization of the capitalist class, that enabled their rise. It is conveniently used to say that the exploited masses are simply individuals in isolation who have made “bad choices” and that the exploiters made “good choices”, while ignoring what goes into that power dynamic on an organizational level. It is decoupled from history, from observation, from much of anything of substance. I would characterize the individual vs. collective framing that capitalists do as similar to the one they do of democracy vs. authority. They simplify things down to a dichotomy, ignore the nature of contradictions, say they are on the good side of the dichotomy, and call it a day.

Individualism was constructed by the bourgeoisie as an ideal so that they could freely exploit wage labour. They successfully couched it up in an idea of “liberty” with the help of some really insincere philosophy and tied it to the idea of personal growth (in places, even spirituality itself).

But this was all so that they could utilise wage labour as atomic parts of their industrial mechanism whenever they chose to.