Socialism and the Individual

One of the most omnipresent issues of the international communist movement is the relation between the individual and the collective in society. It is so prominent because the bourgeoisie preaches individualism, claiming that communism negates individual expression. No, this is not true and everyone who has read the Communist Manifesto knows this. This pamphlet gives an excellent description of the harmonization of the individual and collective as it was in socialist society, in the Lenin-Stalin Soviet Union. It proves that not only do the communists not negate individuality, but only under communism can the individual aspire to great feats not for the sake of some abstract money sum, but as a true expression of human creativity and ingenuity. In capitalism, the individual is reduced to a cog in the machine; in communism, the individual interests are no longer in contradiction with the collective but are harmonized. In capitalism, relations among individuals are reduced to money; in communism, social relations are humanized and there are no antagonisms. This was the society that existed, with Comrade Stalin and the glorious Bolshevik Party at the head, an example that never ceased to smash the bourgeois prejudices and phoney claims about communism.