Individual Action Matters — But It Will Never Change the System

Which Brings Me to Why I’m a Marxist

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

Often it feels easier for people to act within their immediate, everyday surroundings. And that work is absolutely essential — both for building people’s sense of agency and for protecting each other in an ever-increasing violent and resource scarce society. Every bit of local, interpersonal work I’ve ever done — from tenant organising to community-level lobbying — has been invaluable precisely because it improves real lives here and now.

But that doesn’t change the simple fact that system change can never come from individuals acting as isolated individuals.

This is exactly why I’m a Marxist. Marxism isn’t really an identity or a belief system — it’s an analysis of how power actually functions in a capitalist society. It explains why individual action is, by definition, limited: you cannot negotiate with structures that are designed to reproduce inequality and exploitation.

Some might raise the question/concern — how do we (the working class) do things that aren’t only available to the ruling class?

The Marxist answer is clear: by organising collectively as a class, not as individuals with different degrees of freedom. That’s where real strength lies. When we organize as workers — as the 90% who make the entire economic system run — the limits of individual action fall away.

This is also why researchers like Jason Hickel, even when he’s speaking in the language of climate and resource limits, ultimately build on a Marxist understanding of capital’s logic.

To people feeling powerless on changing this massive system that is capitalism and its institutions and only have energy for local engagement. What I say to this: Excellent! Because local improvements matter and building a local society of trust and care is essential for the struggle, because without collective support we can’t resist. Your local society builds trust, shift values, and give people a sense that change is possible. But for that very reason, they must be part of something larger — not a substitute for systemic organising, but a bridge into it.

Individual action improves lives.
Collective action transforms systems.
And without the latter, the former will always be confined by the boundaries that capital sets.

Why Focusing on Individual Consumption Is a Dead End

I also want to say a thing or two about individuality as it is a major obstacle to liberate us all. This may sound blunt, but I think it’s an enormous waste of energy to obsess over individual consumption or personal investment choices. When I’m asked about climate-friendly lifestyles: the impact is so tiny it’s essentially meaningless. And only a privileged minority can even make these so-called “sustainable” choices.

Feeling guilty for investing in the “wrong” thing, or for not living a perfectly sustainable lifestyle, only drains energy away from what actually matters: organising for system change — organising to dismantle capitalism.

I’ve entirely stopped playing the moral-police role, I know it is hard, because that is what each and every Liberal, Social Democrat or Green voter out there is telling you to do. I genuinely tell people close to me to knock it off when they start shaming others for flying or not being vegan. The issue is not individual consumption. The issue is breaking capitalism and building a new system.

No individual consumption choice will make a meaningful difference in the struggle. Only collective organising and systemic transformation can.

Believing that individual consumption choices matter is exactly what the capitalist system wants you to believe — because it keeps you paralyzed. It shifts responsibility away from capital and onto you. Suddenly “sustainable consumption” becomes a way to make capitalism seem redeemable — and that illusion traps people. Capitalism Cannot Be Humanized.

I’ve had far more impact on people once I threw out the idea of individual purity and the myth of the “good consumer.” Suddenly, all kinds of people opened up to me — because I told them plainly: I don’t care if you invest in weapons or fly across the world. No investment is morally pure under capitalism, and I have no interest in moral policing. I am interested in bringing the 90% together so we can overthrow the capitalist, the bankers, the exploiters, the ruling class and bring the means of production under workers control so we can have actual democracy over how the modes of production are run. Until then we are not invited to shape our collective future with everyone on this planet.

And that honesty opened the door to something more important: the real conversation about the system itself. Not about personal guilt. Not about lifestyle branding. About capitalism — and how to replace it.

That’s where transformation begins.

Our shared struggle.
In solidarity,
Adam

*Originally this is published through Adam’s life which is my personal Medium publication where I publish a collection of my personal stories that gives hope in our shared struggle, remember hope is a discipline.