In our current setup folks have to constantly defer or quash their potentialities in order to make ends meet. Self-realization of one's individuality is deferred to some vague future date, when, the reigning ideology tells us, one has garnered enough money to purchase it.
My point in distinguishing what I'm calling 'socialist individualism" (a term I use synonymously with "emancipatory individualism," which I think is a desirable thing) from "bourgeois individualism" is just to stress that "individualism," per se, is not bad -- the way some stodgy Marxists insist. That is, many Marxists condemn "individualism" wholesale, when in fact I think they really mean sham, bourgeois individualism and are hesistant to deviate from orthodoxy by asserting that that's just one (horribly cynical) take on what individualism means.
The point of economic justice as I understand it is to liberate workers and others so that they can be free to explore their true individuality, something that is mercilessly crushed under the yokes of wage slavery, bourgeois cultural conformity, and that sort of thing. These forces channel expressions of individuality into forms amenable to capitalism and which in fact further buttress capital's hegemony over culture.
In my opinion, really meaningful individualism -- the freedom to explore one's latent potentialities -- could only exist against a social backdrop where there are minimal economic guarantees and where people are not coerced, directly or indirectly, to defer the development of their greatest talents and inclinations in order to slave away for landlords and bosses and debt collectors. It goes back to a wonderful quote from the late Stephen Jay Gould: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." Some individualism this is!
A system where the above happens (folks deferring natural genius because of the immediate needs of crushing penury) -- as it does every day -- is not a society amenable to any sort of individualism worthy of the name. Individualism is punished in really-existing capitalism; it isn't encouraged or rewarded. "Individualism" isn't a term or concept that should be conceded to pro-capitalist ideologists. They support a really shallow and pathetic type of individualism that is a mockery of the real concept of fully self-realized economic emancipation.
-B.
B. wrote:
"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."
Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:
"Then what is the best system that promotes diversity?"