REPOST
As a reply to another lj comment, I felt the need to repost this in my own journal. I've been thinking about individualism a lot, and how bourgeois youth tend to fetishize it in order to deal with their non-role in class struggle. In response to comments about indie rock kids in Milwaukee defending Nazis's right to express their opinion, and their free speech. I finally gave some time to respond ......
**************************************************************************

One of the problems with Post-modern american white bourgeois youth is an obsession with their extreme appropriation of individuality which inevitably conflicts with the reality of collectivity. People who can't accept their place in collective life, mask their fears behind facades of individuality. It's a social disease that affects the collective mind. Folks build up a massive collective self-denial about their own collectivity, therefore making their defense of individuality and atomized society comical at best, and completely dangerous at worst. In this case, defending fascists, nazi ideas, etc. are easy to comprehend, it's a natural extension of this delusion of indivuality. In order for people to express their own personal niche within the collective society (which is only about aestheitc and illusion), they are forced to defend everyone's right to do so as well, even if the right to do so means the mass genocide of others. Including themselves. That's what happens when you have bored white middle class boys sitting around coming up with a zillion tendencies of social/anti-social ideas jsut to create their own cool and artistic space in a world of homogeny. THe problem with criticizing capitalism and totalitarian society by viewing its central ills as boredom, consumerist, and homogenous, is that the solution formulates into anti-boredom, anti-comsumerism (or alternacomsumerism), and crass spontaneity, none of which offers paths to heal social wounds, they're only cough suppressants to make us imagine that we're not sick just long enough to continue getting through the mess of life. It's creted such a problem that people actually see action against fascism as being fascistic. Liberalism has won over potential revolutionaries.