Capitalism doesn’t only control what we produce and who owns it. It also shapes how we understand ourselves.
Its preferred image of society is a collection of separate individuals, each pursuing their own interests and responsible for their own fate. Success is treated as a personal achievement. Poverty, unemployment and exhaustion become personal failures. Even problems created by the organisation of society are handed back to us as private burdens to solve alone.
This way of thinking protects the capitalist class. Workers who see themselves as isolated individuals are encouraged to compete, blame themselves and mistrust one another. They’re less likely to recognise their shared position as a class, and less able to act together against the people who exploit them.
Socialists reject this ideology in theory. But we’re all formed by capitalist society, so individualism follows us into our political practice. It doesn’t disappear because we’ve read Marx or adopted revolutionary opinions. It has to be consciously identified and struggled against.
This matters because individualism can hollow out socialist organising while leaving its outward appearance intact. A group may use revolutionary language, hold meetings and publish statements, yet still function as a collection of individuals pursuing separate personal projects.
One common expression is treating politics primarily as a form of self-expression.
People come to see their politics as something that displays who they are: their intelligence, moral character, radicalism or belonging to a particular scene. Political discussion becomes less about reaching a correct understanding that can guide collective action and more about demonstrating that the individual already possesses the correct position.
Under these conditions, disagreement feels like an attack on the self. A criticism of someone’s political judgement is heard as a judgement of their worth as a person. Instead of examining whether the criticism is true, they defend their identity. Every debate becomes personal because politics has been made part of a personal brand.
This encourages performative radicalism. The most uncompromising phrase, the harshest denunciation and the most obscure theoretical reference become ways to establish status. People learn to sound revolutionary without learning how to organise. They may be able to identify every imperfection in existing movements while remaining incapable of building anything themselves.
But socialism isn’t a personal identity. It isn’t a set of opinions that proves we’re better than liberals or less enlightened workers. It is a movement to organise the working class to take power. Political understanding matters because it helps us act, not because possessing it makes us special.
Individualism also appears in the refusal of collective discipline.
Many people raised under liberalism understand freedom as the right to act according to personal preference. They therefore experience any obligation to a collective as a threat to their autonomy. They’re happy to participate while the organisation is doing exactly what they would personally choose, but they withdraw, obstruct or ignore decisions when it isn’t.
This creates organisations where every member effectively has a permanent individual veto. Decisions may be discussed and formally agreed, but nobody feels bound by them. Members carry out the tasks they find interesting and neglect the work they find boring. They support discipline when it applies to others but resent it when it limits their own behaviour.
Such a group may call itself democratic, but it can’t act as a unified force. It can only move as far as its least cooperative members permit.
Collective discipline doesn’t mean blind obedience or the suppression of disagreement. Socialists need open discussion, criticism and serious political debate. But discussion has to lead somewhere. Once a decision has been reached through the organisation’s agreed process, members have to be willing to carry it out together, including those who argued for a different course.
Otherwise the organisation isn’t really an organisation. It is a discussion circle whose members occasionally happen to act in the same direction.
Another expression of individualism is treating an organisation like a service provider.
People ask what the organisation offers them: whether its meetings are enjoyable, whether it gives them a social circle, whether it makes them feel politically fulfilled, whether every decision reflects their views. When it disappoints them, they relate to it like a dissatisfied customer. They leave, publicly condemn it and search for another group that better matches their preferences.
This doesn’t mean organisations shouldn’t care for their members or create a healthy political culture. They absolutely should. But a revolutionary organisation can’t be built around providing each member with a personalised political experience. Its purpose is to serve the struggle of the working class.
Membership therefore involves responsibility. It means asking not only what the organisation gives us, but what work the struggle requires from us. Sometimes that work is exciting and politically dramatic. Much of the time it is repetitive, administrative and invisible. Meetings need to be organised. New members need to be educated. Materials need to be distributed. Records need to be kept. People need to follow through on commitments.
Individualism devalues this work because it offers little personal recognition. Everyone wants to write the statement; fewer people want to proofread it, print it, distribute it and speak patiently to workers who don’t already agree.
This is one reason small socialist groups can become crowded with would-be leaders while lacking reliable organisers.
Individualism also shapes how people respond to mistakes.
A healthy organisation needs criticism and self-criticism. Nobody enters the movement fully formed, and nobody remains free from error. We improve by having our mistakes identified, understanding their causes and changing our practice.
But individualism turns criticism into humiliation. Because the individual sees their political judgement as a possession and their reputation as something to defend, admitting error feels like losing status. They make excuses, minimise what happened or redirect attention towards somebody else’s failures.
The opposite problem also occurs. Criticism can be used as a weapon for asserting personal superiority. Instead of helping a comrade correct an error, a person tries to expose, embarrass or defeat them. The goal isn’t political development but victory over a rival.
This is especially destructive online, where denunciation attracts more attention than patient correction. Socialists can begin treating one another as content: screenshots to share, arguments to win and examples through which to advertise their own correctness.
Revolutionary criticism should be firm, but its purpose is to strengthen the struggle. We criticise comrades because their development matters and because the organisation’s work matters. Criticism that only leaves the critic feeling superior has achieved very little.
Individualism further encourages the personalisation of political conflict.
Every organisation contains disagreements, uneven development and clashes of temperament. Individualist thinking interprets these problems through personal loyalties and antipathies. Political questions are reduced to which person someone trusts, likes or identifies with. Cliques form. Gossip replaces principled discussion. Members defend their friends regardless of the political issue and assume bad motives in those they dislike.
Soon, every organisational problem becomes a story about personalities. One person is arrogant. Another is difficult. Someone else is controlling. These descriptions may contain truth, but they can also conceal political and structural questions. Are responsibilities clearly defined? Are decisions accountable? Are members receiving political education? Are disagreements being handled through proper collective processes?
A revolutionary organisation cannot be governed by friendship groups, personal feuds or informal popularity. Comradeship is deeper than friendship. It means a shared commitment to the struggle, including the ability to work constructively with people we wouldn’t necessarily choose as personal companions.
Individualism can also take the form of refusing responsibility altogether.
Some people avoid tasks because they’re afraid of making mistakes or being criticised. They remain on the edges of the organisation, commenting on what others do but rarely becoming accountable for outcomes themselves. Because they never take responsibility, they preserve the comforting belief that they would have done everything better.
This position can appear very radical. The person always has a criticism and never has to confront the compromises, limits and difficulties involved in real work.
But spectators don’t make revolutions. Political maturity develops through practice: accepting responsibility, making decisions, sometimes getting things wrong and learning collectively from the result.
There is also an individualist approach to burnout and sacrifice. It appears when political work depends on a few people privately exhausting themselves while everyone else treats their labour as an unlimited resource. The heroic individual becomes a substitute for collective organisation.
This isn’t collectivism. It is another form of individualism, because the work still rests on isolated personal effort rather than a sustainable division of labour. A strong organisation doesn’t glorify burnout. It distributes tasks, develops new organisers and creates structures that don’t collapse when one person becomes unavailable.
Overcoming individualism therefore doesn’t mean demanding that every individual erase themselves for the organisation. Socialism isn’t opposed to individuality. The development of human personality, creativity and freedom is one of its aims.
Individuality refers to the particular qualities and capacities of a person. Individualism treats that person as separate from society and places personal preference above collective obligation. The two aren’t the same.
We don’t lose our individuality by acting collectively. We gain capacities that none of us possesses alone. A worker by themselves has little power against an employer. Workers acting together can stop production. An isolated tenant can be evicted. Organised tenants can resist. A socialist with correct ideas can write posts. An organised working class can seize power and transform society.
The capitalist class understands collective action perfectly well. Capitalists organise through corporations, parties, states, military alliances, banks, media institutions and international bodies. They promote individualism for workers while coordinating relentlessly in defence of their own class interests.
We cannot defeat organised capital with scattered individuals who participate only when it suits them.
Socialists have to cultivate different habits: reliability instead of personal convenience, comradeship instead of competition, criticism instead of humiliation, discipline instead of individual vetoes, and responsibility instead of spectatorship.
None of this happens automatically. We carry capitalist habits into the movement because capitalist society produces them in us every day. Struggling against individualism is therefore not a demand for personal purity. It is part of our political development as revolutionaries.
We learn to subordinate ego to purpose. We learn that being correct individually is less important than helping the collective reach a correct line. We learn that freedom isn’t the absence of obligations to others, but the collective power to consciously shape our lives together.
Socialism cannot be built by people treating politics as a collection of private journeys.
The working class becomes a force capable of changing history only when it becomes conscious of itself as a class, organises itself and learns to act collectively. Our practice must prepare us for that task.
We have to stop approaching the movement as isolated individuals looking for a place that reflects us, and start building organisations capable of uniting, educating and disciplining us into a force that can win.
