Why socialism, not capitalism, cultivates the highest form of individualism

While the debate between socialism and capitalism is not only finally happening in the United States but actually starting seriously to heat up, I find people have at best a confused grasp of these terms.

I find this confusion especially true when people talk about socialism as somehow antagonistic to the individual and to individuality.

When I have occasion to talk to students about Marxist thought and what a socialist society developed according to Marxist principles might look like, they typically express worry about, even hostility to, what they believe such a society would mean for the individual.

Like a tightening stranglehold on our social imaginations, the myth abides that a socialist society founded on egalitarianism somehow produces a drab and moribund world characterized by homogeneity and repressive conformity.

The drab myths of socialism

Their minds conjure a dim world devoid of fashion and creativity where citizens wear the same gray clothes, eat the same bland food rations, and are encouraged (if not ordered) to think the same thoughts and pledge allegiance to rigid belief systems that outlaw disagreement or divergence.

In short, the myth perpetrated against socialism, largely a product of the deeply-rooted anti-communism in American culture, is that it is hostile to and repressive of the individual in every possible way — to individual…