I was responding to Mike and it got too long so I probably won't bother but, in a nut shell, I hit upon something that irritates me about a lot of this.
Natasha is saying: We are seeking to overthrow big macro-level structures but while we are doing it, we are going to ALSO try to change the way we live. And the sociologists are saying that this collective agency prepares people to actually grasp the problems with the big, macro-level of ideologies - what Mike calls discourses. You can sit in a room and read about them and study them and understand why these discourses have a grip on you. But every damn day, in small micropolitical ways, the habits, norms, practices, social interactions of capitalist society militate against ever really getting it. But what actually works to 'get it' is that you can truly understand the criticisms of bourgeois individualism in your gut, in life experience, when you actually see how it impedes your ability to get something done in a collective group: it's how they learn, for themselves, exactly what the problems are (and benefits) with saying, "We all have a right to our opinion. Don't touch my opinion." or with saying "I can't speak for the entire group, but I can speak for myself." (malcolm = i think that's his name - was trying to tell people this but people kept talking over him)
Contra Doug and others, that isn't bourgeois individualism to take that position. It isn't merely tactics. If you want to be in a big diverse group and work together, when you all have learned that people disagree with one another, that there are serious divisions even as you are, as they said in SNCC, "falling in love with one another," you have to establish trust. If you aren't trustworthy, if people with whom you disagree and have arguments with in a working group turn around and violate an argreement by speaking for the movement, then you find out right quick who is about the survival of the collective and who isn't. No one on the skeptical side can see that because they don't get involved enough to see it and they won't sit down and listen to the people who have, but don't have pithy ways of explaining it all in the middle of some heated panel discussion.
But when you take this position, it's a normative practice that teaches you that you can check yourself for the greater good, and you start to learn, for fucking real, how absolutely important it is not to engage in some false piety of self-abnegation, but to commit yourself to something larger than yourself and its survival. When you get that, then you understand what it really takes to build a world that Jodi Dean talks about when she says health is a public good, food is a common good, education, blah blah etc.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)