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celebratedrecluse wrote

Personal choices don't make social change. Social relationships make social change.

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LostYonder wrote

Are they that distinct from one another? Aren't our personal choices connected to our social relationships and the kind of values that define our relationships with others?

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celebratedrecluse wrote (edited )

No, they are not connected, let alone indistinguishable from each other. Not if they're truly personal choices like what you decide to eat from the supermarket, and other atomized cog-in-machine interactions like that.

The ubiquity of personal choices, separate from other constituted individuals, are something particular to the consumer culture under capitalism. You can certainly meld your personal consumer choices with your social relationships, but it will only be to the detriment and shallowness of those social relationships, which will increasingly be built upon fragile and infertile grounds.

Personal choices which aren't reliant on the context of capitalism, aren't really good grounds for social connection on any scale, because to the degree they are divorced from capitalism they are divorced from socioeconomics in general. In which case, they are not relevant for social relationships that can scale enough to be relevant, in my analysis.

Collective choices, however, are an entirely different beast; unfortunately, they require a different social and economic context than many of us have, in order to be possible.

Thinking you can skip the process of making that context for collectivity to exist, is one of the key trademarks of liberalism.

If you are creating that context through your autonomous choices, it is no longer a personal choice, but rather a contribution to a collective context for the making of collective choices. These are almost always, done with other people rather than on one's complete isolated self.

By definition, personal choices are individual, and not social, so they cannot really overlap with social relationships and therefore do not really impact social change processes except insofar as these processes reduce the capacity for social relationships and social change.

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LostYonder wrote

Thanks for this argument - I fully agree. I was somehow imagining "personal choices" outside of consumeristic capitalism and that was the wrong path to go down...

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