> we simply disagree.
> I like strong individualism, and consider it a big historical
> breakthrough.
> I consider it to be a necessary step toward maximum humanity and
> freedom
There's more than one kind of "individualism."
There's the ontological individualism I think can reasonably be attributed to Marx. This accepts that the only locus of agency and the realization of value is the "individual" so that it makes no ontological sense to speak of a group of individuals, such as those composing a state or a class, as if agency and the realization of value could reasonably be attributed to the "group" treated as something independent of and apart from the individuals composing it.
Keynes adopts individualism in this form in the following:
"Though one must ever remember Paley's dictum that 'although we speak of communities as of sentient beings and ascribe to them happiness and misery, desires, interests and passions, nothing really exists or feels but individuals', yet we [early Bloomsbury] carried the individualism of our individuals too far." (Collected Writings, vol. X, p. 449)
However, Keynes (as the last part of this suggests), Marx and other adherents of an ontology of internal relations (such as Whitehead) elaborate individualism in terms of this ontology i.e. the essence of the individual is elaborated as a relational essence, as in, for instance, in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach. This contrasts with "atomic" individualism, i.e. the individualism associated with external rather than internal relations that defines so-called "methodological individualism" and that is implicit in e.g. social theories that assume that "rational self-interest" characterizes all individual behaviour in all times and places.
This conception of the individual as internally related to the social is not, however, a form of "social constructionism" in so far as we mean by the latter the idea of the individual as "determined" by the social in a way that leaves no logical space for self-determination and final causation. This means, among other things, that Marx's conception is incompatible with the ontology underpinning Darwinian biology. This ontology - scientific materialism - explicitly excludes such ideas (Whitehead criticizes it on just this basis - see, for instance, The Function of Reason).
The textual evidence for this interpretive claim is found in the many passages (early and late - e.g. the "rich individuality" text from the Grundrisse quoted by Mandel in the passage Doug recently posted) in which Marx elaborates the idea of the "universally developed individual." This is Hegel's idea of an "educated person" characterized by "universal self-consciousness," a "universal will" and a "will proper."
This kind of individual can only be fully actualized within a particular kind of social relations. The way such relations work to enable such development can't, however, be coherently conceived in terms of the "materialist doctrine" which many Marxists attribute to Marx. "Education" conceived in accordance with this doctrine is inconsistent with the end it's supposed to achieve. One reason for this is spelled out in the third thesis on Feuerbach.
Other relations produce a less than fully rational self-consciousness. For instance, they may produce a "fragmented" consciousness lacking in consciousness of itself as a self, in any consciousness of the fragmented object of consciousness as consciousness of anything real and in any consciousness of the content of its willing as self-determined let alone as self-determined in accordance with Reason (the latter constituting the Hegel/Marx idea of the unity of freedom and necessity i.e. the idea of the "universal will").
Ted