Originally Posted by elphenor

btw I hear this individualism thing a lot and it's actually an interesting question does the whole benefit the individual or the individual benefit the whole

but one of the major criticisms of Capitalism from my perspective is that in practice it is a "cog in a machine" type system in entirely comparable ways to what we can call "authoritarian communism" (e.g. Soviet Russia)

at least for the proletariat I see very little evidence that Capitalism fosters individualism it seems to iron people into particular molds on both the supply end as workers with one specific mundane skill that they will not perform under their own control

and on the demand end where billions are spent on generating uninformed consumers that champion the right corporate brands