Identity and individuation

Abstract

A humanity that is articulated in a historic process that encompasses the life of all humans, resulted not in rich and multifaceted generic existences, but in solitary and fearful individualities. The basis for this paradox is in fully explicit commodities: fetichism and reification cause people to fail to encounter in other people the authentically human substance that they need. They thus loose their generic roots and are left to constitute their identities based on only themselves. The poverty of this level of individuation is an important contribution to the fact that the class struggle has manifest its most barbaric form: the armed “de-politicized” struggle of the private property of those on the margin against the private property of the status quo. Urban centers, creations of a bourgeois world, have dissolved into a sea of lonely, scared and violent individuals: the superior phase of bourgeois individualism corresponds to the structural crises of capital.