Forum Post: The myth of "the Individual" under global capital

As the normative view would have it, "the Individual" is king under global capital. This is a delusion. From the perspective of the marketplace itself, the individual is not understood as an irreducibly unique personality with its own set of desires, goals, and aspirations but an abstract numerical unit that possesses only an instrumental value: to work, to consume, to produce, and to reproduce its own identity as a consumer. Global capital is not an "individualistic" system. Rather, it is profoundly collectivist in the most Borg-like sense possible: individual identities are subsumed within a quantitative logic that is concerned only with its own internal functioning. This is something that neither the so-called "left-wing" nor the so-called "right-wing" have been able to come to terms with. Why? Because both presume a linear "political" spectrum that is indebted on both sides to the same understanding of the role of the individual within society -- an understanding that is derived in equal parts from capitalist economic theory and the liberal-democratic "Enlightenment" tradition.

"All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher." -Ambrose Bierce