queeranarchism:

“The personal is political” was originally intended to mean that the oppression you experience as an individual is patterned – that there are structural patterns underlying your experience. It encouraged individuals who were experiencing oppressive situations – a woman abused by her husband or a worker exploited by her employer – to view these situations not as personal problems but as political problems that require coming to getting with others to address the issue in the public sphere.

It is no small irony that the phrase “the personal is political” is now often used to mean something opposite of the original meaning. While it once meant that personal problems are not really personal, but are structural problems that require collective action, now people use the phrase to advocate uncoordinated individual action (buying organic shampoo) as somehow constitution a political intervention.

Jonathan Matthew Smucker – Hegemony How-To. A roadmap for radicals.