Leftists and left-liberals are wrong to diagnose individualism as a core driving mechanism of capitalism and to sweepingly ascribe a negative value to individualism. Capitalism is not, in any meaningful sense, an individualist ideology. It is a form of collectivism that relies on mass subordination and conformity to state and corporate structures. Since nascent mercantile capitalism to the present day, this has always been the case. The so-called “individualism” it promotes is shallow and emaciated, consisting of mere consumer choices, and a formulaically prescribed and hyper-regulated competitive self-interest, which degradingly subjects one’s will, needs, and indeed even subjectivity to the collective entities of state and capital.

On the other hand, a positive, rounded, liberatory understanding of individualism would involve striving toward relationships based on empathy and solidarity, wherein every person’s individuality is valued and we are equipped through the elimination of rampant material need to pursue ethical and intellectual development. It would entail valuing the freedom and dignity of individuals and thus steadily work toward the eradication of interpersonal domination, social hierarchies, and institutional coercion, to provide every living person with – at the individual level – the capacity to associate and disassociate freely.

While critiquing the vicious self-interest instilled by colonial-capitalist-consumerism – the vulgar “individualism” of statism – is without any doubt valid, replacing it with a fetishized, half-thought-out conception of collectivism is not without consequence. We mustn’t forget that the most atrocious crimes against humanity in recent centuries have been committed under the aegis of various forms of collectivism, which systematically subordinated and devalued individuals as means for brutal and unrelenting nationalist, colonialist, religious, supremacist, etc., ends.

Prizing individuality is fundamental to our humanity, and thus individualism (freedom of action for individuals over collective or state control) is not an idea to be recklessly demonized.