There is probably some good literature on this, but I have none on hand that I can recall, so I will attempt to say my rough understanding of it from memory: individualism is in bed with liberalism and idealism, and the package does this thing of effectively positioning you as a being who is supposed to overcome or transcend your “base urges”, which are in some way wicked, perverse, or broken. Not to be confused with valuing you as a human being intrinsically and thus enabling a certain degree of individual being and expression and choice, which a socialist state actually does a way better job of doing than the liberal capitalist order because, ya know, you don’t have much “freedom” if that “freedom” is dying homeless. The collectivist system does a way better job of getting your needs consistently met and so that gives you more actual freedoms. It’s one of those things that can sound contradictory because, well, it kind of is in a way; we live within contradiction all the time and navigating those contradictions is a critical part of scientific socialism.

With individualism, the focus more or less ignores the dialectical relationship between things and puts it all on you, as an individual on a journey, to overcome. It lives in some fantasy land where babies are going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, while ignoring the systemic and systematic exploitation orchestrated by the capitalists, colonizers, imperialists. It will have you viewing a billionaire as a lone rugged individualist achiever, while ignoring the systems of power and exploitation, the organization of the capitalist class, that enabled their rise. It is conveniently used to say that the exploited masses are simply individuals in isolation who have made “bad choices” and that the exploiters made “good choices”, while ignoring what goes into that power dynamic on an organizational level. It is decoupled from history, from observation, from much of anything of substance. I would characterize the individual vs. collective framing that capitalists do as similar to the one they do of democracy vs. authority. They simplify things down to a dichotomy, ignore the nature of contradictions, say they are on the good side of the dichotomy, and call it a day.