So-called anti-individualist critics target wealth appropriation while production is already socialized

Evidence

Prejudices against individualism, taken to the point of Jeremiads, rather than criticisms of Catholic and reactionary thought; the form of “individualism” that today has become anti-historical is that manifested in the individual appropriation of wealth while the production of wealth has been progressively socialised. That the Catholics are the least qualified to moan about individualism can be deduced from the fact that, politically, they have always recognised a political personality only in property, implying in other words that man is not worthy for his own sake but insofar as he is completed by material goods. What is the meaning of the fact that people became electors though paying a census tax and that one could belong to as many politico-administrative communities as one possessed property in, if not a devaluation of the “spirit” before “matter”? If only a man with possessions is conceived of as “man”, and if it has become impossible for all to have possessions, why should it be anti-spiritual to look for a form of property in which material forces complete and contribute to the constitution of all personalities? In reality, though, it was implicitly admitted that human “nature” was not within the individual but in the unity of man and material forces. Therefore, the conquest of material forces is one way, and indeed the most important, of conquest of personality. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1287

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School’s critique of ‘possessive individualism’ and to debates about liberalism’s property-based conception of the person that later Islamophobia-adjacent critiques of liberal neutrality build on.