Bakunin noted, for example (and I can provide quotes later), how the "bourgeois" individual was a character archetype or stereotype upheld in the literature of his day (pre-cinema, though cinema has taken these bourgeois individualistic motifs and run wild with them -- i.e. Air Force One and Independence Day and other movies where, ridiculously, the President of the US is the main action hero, and other examples not so outlandish). The Russian exile made quite a remarkable point about how individualism under capitalism is not the same as individuality, and further, how capitalism "individualism" was and is a sham. They were and are good points no matter what else thinks of Bakunin o his other thoughts.
Of course, others have made similar points, including even Daniel Bell in his _Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism_, who notes corporate advertisers' promotion of bucking the herd and doing your own thing in their ads (as covered by Thomas Frank and The Baffler) while in the workplace enforcing strict regimes of dress codes and hierarchies, etc. But this capitalism-is-the-best-system-for-individualism issue recurs with such frequency among those with whom I chance a discussion about a post-capitalist society: "Won't we all be worker ants in gray-colored uniforms in the socialist utopia?" An interesting sentiment given that libertarian socialism as I understand it seeks to unshackle, Prometheus-like, humans from the conformity and the "cogs-in-a-machine"/human-labor-as-disposable-commodity weltanschauung upon which capitalism is predicated.
This ties back into one of my favorite topics, Nietzsche, who similarly embraced the idea of a "New Man," as did Marx and the anarchists, as well, even if there are disagreements in the details. (And let's not underestimate *those* differences, at all.) But we still have a long way to go to convince US folks that capitalism is not the best system for expression of individuality, something that is distinct from "bourgeois individualism" -- which is in fact sham individualism.
This rich and fascinating topic and is supremely important ideologically in the USA, which does not have a culture of solidarity as strong as that of other countries. I feel like US leftists, humanists, etc., need to tackle this issue more aggressively. Individuality and individualism, and the conflation between different types of this, are of huge importance to most Americans, especially younger folks. The socialism of gray-suited worker ants is still a popular cultural image, even if plenty of anarchists and socialists have insisted that that is, in fact, what corporations turn human beings into -- not economically just societies.
-B.
Carrol Cox wrote:
"What Marx called the "abstract -- isolated -- human individual exists in capitalism, and most if not all capitalist ideology stems from the premise that that individual is The Human Individual."