Marx treated the bourgeois individual as a natural given, not a social product.
Evidence
Bourgeois individuality is the actual ‘substrate’ of Marxian thought on social phenomena. To this extent, Marx himself is a bourgeois individualist and a product of his time. The notion that the category of the individual itself is socially produced did not yet occur to him at all. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1256
Categorization
- XREF: Links to Adorno’s critique of identitarian thinking and the chapter’s thesis on individualisation as historical development — resonates with the ‘dialectic of individualisation’ theme that carries through the volume. — connects to: Marx’s concept of natural history is critical, not naturalist — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1344; Marx broke with political economy by abstracting structures apart from individuals; In Marx’s Capital, persons are personifications of social relations rather than economic agents — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1980