How does one become a “true” individual in the age of misinformation, our time, the twenty-first century? What is authentic individuality? Why does it matter?
These questions regarding the cultivation of the individual have only taken on more importance as the obfuscation of the self, in great haste, transforms, becoming an aberration of its former, and, furthermore, in total abandonment of the conventional principles of Individualism, strips away the “person” leaving a mere shell, the “consumer.” A multi-pronged assault has desecrated what it means to be an individual. We see this in the rise of algorithmically driven social media, the death of community-building third spaces, and the systemic crusade against labor organizing. We see it in the institutional consolidation of power by a conservative judiciary, the cultural promotion of hyper-competition, and the deliberate whitewashing of history. This landscape displays a profound disdain and distrust for independent thinking—which achieves its highest form through critical thought.
The result is an identity crisis plagued by a shallow, pseudo-moralistic culture. This culture promotes a safe, liberal focus on superficial self-discovery rather than a radical interrogation of systemic power, effectively blocking the paths through which true individuality flourishes. Western society, in all its neoliberal and imperialist hideousness, has reduced the common person to an amalgamation of shallow, stereotyped, consumption-driven personalities. But if we strip away this suffocation of the self through ideology, we return to the core of the human experience: What does it mean to cultivate authentic individuality, and why is it essential to our survival?
Consciousness, Cooperation, and the Individual
To answer this, we must recognize that every human on Earth is a person among others, and fundamentally, a person formed by others. We are born directly from social relationships—a complex network of mutual reliance that culminates in the very act of procreation. The individual is inherently constituted by the collective. Anthropologists show that human cognition, communication, and social life all grew from mutualistic collaboration.1 Plainly, if human beings had not learned to collaborate, we never would have survived to build societies in the first place.
Because mutual collaboration is a necessary prerequisite for all human history, consciousness itself is a cooperative development. It is a process of awareness and orientation that is forever tied to a community. To have a community, individuals must share something unalterable in common: our shared humanity as members of the same species.
Our earliest, most basic consciousness is simply an awareness of ourselves as living beings. This awareness, however, transforms through the process of cooperation. We realize that while we are distinct individuals, we cannot survive without collaborating with our species; isolation leads only to a, as Hobbes would put it, short, nasty, brutish, and solitary existence. This creates a healthy duality within human consciousness. By the time we form a self-awareness in childhood, this duality is already manifest in our deep bonds with parents, siblings, and the community that keeps us alive.
Modern Western society violently disrupts this development. From the moment we enter formal schooling, the system erodes the cooperative aspect of our consciousness. It seeks to replace solidarity with a false, damaging narrative: that we must compete and struggle against one another for our very existence. It is true that we must struggle, but our battle is not against each other. To counter the destruction of individuality imposed by capitalist society, we must wage a collective struggle against the alienation of the self—against a state-sponsored system that reduces unique human beings into mere human capital.
The Material Reality of Estrangement
To understand how contemporary capitalist society fundamentally erodes the individual, we must examine the raw relations of production and their material outcome. As Karl Marx developed his critique of political economy, he moved away from abstract philosophical concepts of the self and began focusing on a concrete reality: the forced estrangement of human beings from their own property (their products and their labor-power.)
When a worker enters the capitalist market, they do so stripped of the means of production. To survive, they have to sell the only commodity they possess—their labor-power. When an employment contract is signed, a violent material dispossession occurs, an exploitation that has become so internalized that most people don’t even recognize that it is a dispossession from above. The individual is legally and structurally estranged from their own life-activity and the fruits of their existence by the very system that promises them freedom.
Described in the section above is what Marx called Gattungswesen, the term he employs to describe the species-essence, or species-being, of humans. For Marx, Gattungswesen is not a spiritual or psychological state, but a physical, material reality. What defines human beings as a species is our capacity to consciously, freely, and cooperatively manipulate our objective reality. We are creatures who, more than any other, produce and collaborate. Under capitalism, however, this material capacity is utterly thwarted by the estrangement of labor-power into a market commodity.
Because the worker does not own the tools, the land, or the infrastructure, their capacity to produce freely is confiscated. Their species-essence is reduced to a line item on a corporate balance sheet. The individual’s life-activity is no longer a conscious expression of their humanity; it is merely a commodity bought by the capitalist to expand capital.
Once the contract is active, the worker’s labor-power, their capability to produce, no longer belongs to them because it has been sold, meaning the physical use of their own muscles, brainpower, and time is entirely at the disposal and utility of the capitalist. Because the worker has relinquished control over their own activity, the act of production becomes entirely external to them; it is forced labor. The individual, in general, cannot use their labor-power to solve community problems or express unique talents, they must deploy it precisely how the capitalist dictates. The individual is estranged from the very motion of their own body and mind during the workday, operating strictly as a tool for someone else’s profit.
The physical manifestation of this stolen labor-power is the product itself. The worker pours their material energy into creating an object, a line of code, or a service, but they have zero legal right to it. The product is immediately alienated from its creator and claimed as the private property of the capitalist class.
In the twenty-first century, this takes an incredibly aggressive form. Amazon warehouse workers handle millions of commodities a day, yet own none of them. Digital workers train artificial intelligence models and generate massive amounts of data, yet this data is instantly locked away behind corporate paywalls. The tragedy of this material relationship is that the worker’s own past labor is crystallized into products that are then weaponized against the very people who produced them—used to enforce stricter quotas, automate their jobs away, and drive down their wages.
As capitalism relies on the buying, selling, and commodification of labor-power, so it fundamentally alters how individuals relate to one another. Once labor-power has been commodified, human beings are forced into a market where they must compete to sell themselves. We are estranged from our peers because the system legally and economically pits us against each other for survival. We do not look at those around us as potential collaborators in free production. Instead, we look at other individuals through the cold lens of competition, as a threat to our contract, our wage, and, ultimately, our existence.
Praxis and the Reinvigoration of Gattungswesen
The capitalist contract enforces a material estrangement from our property, our labor-power, and our species-essence, meaning true individualism cannot be recovered through internal, private self-discovery. Instead, it requires praxis: the manifestation of theory, the correct principles and ideas, into practical, collective action. Because Gattungswesen is our material, cooperative capacity to freely alter our world, it can only be reinvigorated when individuals unite to break the monopoly that capitalism holds over production and community survival.
The great paradox of individualism under capitalism is that the collective does not swallow the individual; rather, it is the only crucible in which a person’s distinct human agency can be rescued from the market. The Amazon Labor Union and Black Panther Party offer examples of liberatory individualism through collective action.
On the floor of an Amazon fulfillment center, the estrangement of the individual is absolute. The worker has legally signed over their labor-power, and the capitalist class uses automated algorithms, digital surveillance, and harsh quotas to micromanage every physical move. The worker is completely estranged from the act of production as their muscles and time belong entirely to the corporation. Gattungswesen is utterly suppressed as the human capacity for conscious, creative output is reduced to the repetitive, robotic sorting of boxes.
The unionization campaign upends this material relation. When workers organize militantly, they perform a radical act of collective praxis, they reclaim control over their collective labor-power. Organizing and striking break the cycle of compliance that capitalism requires. To build a union against a multi-billion-dollar empire, workers must deploy their unique, individual talents. A worker steps up to speak publicly and handle external communication, another worker uses language to translate the message across diverse communities, still another uses their understanding of organizations to help map out the workplace, discovering the pressure points and problems to focus a campaign around.
By collectively withholding and redirecting their labor-power, these workers are no longer passive tools of capital, and are instead consciously reshaping their immediate economic and material reality. Unions do not homogenize, and, therefore, strip members of their individuality. A union breaks the isolation of the employer-employee contract, allowing the worker to step out from behind the illusion of individualism that capitalism conjures. The worker, for, perhaps, the first time in their life, begins to look at their peers not as competitors, but as comrades, and in doing so, restores and revitalizes their Gattungswesen—their capacity to cooperatively dictate the terms of their own physical existence.
A parallel reclamation of species-essence occurs when the oppressed learn to organize independent survival infrastructure. In Western capitalism race is a weapon that systemically marginalizes communities by estranging them from the means of survival. Land, housing, and food are commoditized and locked behind the legal bulwark of private property. Individuals, as a result, are left to struggle against one another in a state that can only be described as manufactured scarcity, entirely dependent on a hostile market or a neglectful government.
The Black Panther Party intervened directly, disrupting this material dispossession, through the praxis of their 10-Point Program. Instead of going through the “proper channels” and petitioning the capitalist state for relief, the Panthers used collective action to build autonomous counter-institutions for the people. Through the Free Breakfast for Children Program, free medical clinics, and community clothing drives, they organized the collective power of the people to seize control over their own survival.
The Panther praxis directly reinvigorated the Gattungswesen of the individuals involved. Organizing these programs required intense conscious coordination, critical thought, collaboration, and creative problem solving. At last, a person who was once isolated and discarded by the state restored their rightful place as an active historical creator, a mover of history, cultivating food networks, managing community logistics, and educating neighbors. In taking the material conditions of their community into their own hands, the individual becomes so much more than the passive consumer. Indeed, they realized their human essence as social, creative beings who possess the collective power to construct a new world within the cracking shell of the old.
Furthermore, modern mutual aid campaigns push praxis into everyday life, directly attacking the atomization that capitalism forces upon people making them permanent competitors. Capitalism forces an impossible situation upon people wherein if an individual lacks adequate housing, food, or healthcare, it is a personal failure. To counter this, mutual aid rejects this false premise through the practice of solidarity.
By cooperating to guarantee collective survival outside the bounds of the wage contract, individuals escape the cage of market estrangement. People cease to view their peers as threats to their own economic security. Mutual aid proves that the fulfillment of the individual cannot be understood as an isolated pursuit, and, instead, must be understood as a collaborative project. Thus, we reclaim our true species-essence only when we realize that the individual “I” can only be liberated through the collective “We.”
Resolving the Paradox of the Self
And so, the twenty-first century crisis of identity cannot be solved by turning inward. As long as Western society remains bound to the dictates of neoliberal capitalism, the isolated individual will remain a, on the one hand, legal and, on the other, economic fiction; fundamentally, a piece of human capital systemically dispossessed, from above, of its own life-activity. The original promises of liberal individualism have been thoroughly hollowed out and replaced by a suffocating system where personhood is reduced to how productive one is at consuming the pseudo-individualistic mass conformities constantly shoved in our faces. Put simply, to search for an authentic, independent “self” within the boundaries of capitalism is to chase a ghost that was never actually there in the first place. True individuality is not an isolated state of mind that can be discovered. True individuality is a material capability that must be collectively reclaimed.
That this realization resolves the unique paradox at the heart of this inquiry, one can only be certain. Individualism and collective action are not oxymorons; they are dialectically inseparable. Capitalism and liberalism achieve a false individualism by violently isolating human beings, stripping them bare of control over their labor-power, and alienating them from their Gattungswesen. Conversely, radical collective praxis can only look like conformity to the ruling class, when, in reality, it is the only mechanism capable of breaking the monopoly of private property.
When workers seize control of the factory floor, when communities organize independent survival programs, and when neighbors build autonomous mutual aid networks, they are doing something far more and far greater than fighting for material resources: they are dismantling the market relations that govern society and pit us against one another. In joining the collective struggle, the individual undergoes a transformation from a passive object of history into an active, conscious creator of it. The myth that we lose ourselves in the collective is the great phantom that ensnares us in a delusionary trance. Only within the solidarity of the collective can the authentic, creative, and liberated individual finally be born.
Notes:
1. Michael Tomasello et al., “Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation,” Current Anthropology 53, no. 6 (December 2012): 673—92, https://doi.org/10.1086/668207, 673.