The realism in which the Left has been immersed in the neoliberal decades has meant that even when we are fully conscious of the deep inequity of the system in which we find ourselves, we confirm and conform to the dominant ideology: turn inward, enclave, emphasize the singular and momentary. Sometimes we don’t feel like we can do anything about it (maybe we have too much work to do already). Or we find ourselves participating in individuated, localized, or communicatively mediated activities without momentum, duration, or a capacity for political memory. Or we presume that we have to focus on ourselves, start with ourselves and thereby redirect political struggle back into ourselves. In a brutal, competitive, and atomized society, psychic well-being is so difficult that success on this front can feel like a significant accomplishment. Trying to do it themselves, people are immiserated and proletarianized and confront this immiseration and proletarianization alone.
This chapter has sought to dismantle the assumption of the political primacy of the individual that binds left politics to the dominant capitalist imaginary and that prevents us from seeing the concentration of politics onto the individual as symptomatic of left defeat. Rather than a locus for creativity, difference, agency, and responsibility, the individual is the overburdened remainder of dismantled institutions and solidarities. Commanded individuality obscures individual incapacity even as it amplifies the contradictions barely congealed in the individual form. At the same time, these commands and incapacities attest to another force, the power of collectivity that manifests in crowds.
1 Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, New York: The New Press, 2010, 72. Throughout this chapter, I blur together individualism, individuality, and individuation, treating them as component aspects of capitalist society’s requirement for and production of individuals.
2 Product release: “Dr Pepper Celebrates Its Legacy Of Originality With The Launch Of The New ‘Always One Of A Kind’ Advertising Campaign,” news.drpeppersnapplegroup.com, January 9, 2012.
3 Jay Moye, “Summer of Sharing: ‘Share a Coke’ Campaign Rolls Out in the U.S.,” coca-colacompany.com, June 10, 2014.
4 Jerrold Seigel provides a comprehensive history of the individual in his The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. See also Jeremy Gilbert’s critical overview of competitive individualism, Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism, London: Pluto Press, 2014, esp. 30–42. Although the individualism of the US American present tends to be projected into the past as if it had always accompanied US capitalism, in the decades following the Civil War, US industrialists pushed for monopoly capitalism. In the words of John D. Rockefeller, “The day of combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return,” in Rob Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., New York: Vintage, 2007, 148. Thanks to Corey Robin for drawing this to my attention.
5 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, New York: Norton, 1979, xvi.
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