Something liberals have done in response to Gen Z’s tragedies is pathologize the reactions from the victims, especially the male victims. This is how our discourse has framed the rise of social isolation among men who are thirty-and-under: by blaming the individuals, which is what someone is doing when they say that these men simply need to go to therapy. This is the nature of “psychology” in its capitalist form: to medicalize the problems that we experience because of the conditions in which we live. It’s a tactic that’s weaponized against both working-class men and women; but the example of suffering men being told to go to therapy exemplifies the particular nature of how capital is destroying social relations in the 21st century. It illustrates what kinds of victim-blaming, atomistic gender war ideas our institutions are pushing in order to try to stop Gen Z from rising up.
To understand what’s really behind the rise of lonely men, the birthrate decline, and the other seemingly inexplicable social crises that have emerged throughout the last generation, we have to look at when this sort of thing has happened in the past. When societies have experienced upsets which catch everyone by surprise, because everyone assumed that humanity would keep operating as it already had been. This was the nature of the transition into statehood, as described by Engels in Origins of the Family. Referring to the sudden evolution that Athenian society underwent, Engels discussed what social relations turned into after money and usury entered the picture:
If the sale of the land did not cover the debt, or if the debt had been contracted without any security, the debtor, in order to meet his creditor's claims, had to sell his children into slavery abroad. Children sold by their father – such was the first fruit of father-right and monogamy! And if the blood-sucker was still not satisfied, he could sell the debtor himself as a slave. Thus the pleasant dawn of civilization began for the Athenian people.
Formerly, when the conditions of the people still corresponded to the gentile constitution, such an upheaval was impossible; now it had happened – nobody knew how. Let us go back for a moment to our Iroquois, amongst whom the situation now confronting the Athenians, without their own doing, so to speak, and certainly against their will, was inconceivable. Their mode of producing the necessities of life, unvarying from year to year, could never generate such conflicts as were apparently forced on the Athenians from without; it could never create an opposition of rich and poor, of exploiters and exploited. The Iroquois were still very far from controlling nature, but within the limits imposed on them by natural forces they did control their own production…That was the immense advantage of barbarian production, which was lost with the coming of civilization; to reconquer it, but on the basis of the gigantic control of nature now achieved by man and of the free association now made possible, will be the task of the next generations.
Solving this riddle of how to utilize production for the collective benefit has been humanity’s great task ever since the coming of civilization. And Gen Z, with its predicament of being born into the dawn of an unprecedented social upheaval, has been given the exceptionally unfair task of needing to resolve this problem in order to have a future. By “have a future,” I mean this in the sense of establishing a relationship with the world as it will exist after all of Gen Z are dead. Gen Z have overwhelmingly been blocked from starting families, and nothing short of a wartime-level mobilization can get them on the path to doing this. Everything will need to change, and in an impossibly short time.
Given these facts, what is the way forward? It isn’t to demand the impossible from Gen Z; it’s to map out where our allies are in this fight, and what the path to victory against our class enemies looks like. The unprecedented nature of the disruption that’s afflicted us is proportional to how big of a breakthrough will come when we overcome this crisis. Never before has humanity been closer to finding the answer to the dilemma Engels summarized; to figuring out how we can take advantage of modern technology’s gargantuan productive forces, while not letting these forces facilitate exploitation by a parasitic class.
The answer to this riddle, as Engels concluded, is communism. It’s the abolition of class society, a project that can only be built on the foundations of the proletariat taking the means of production. Bringing this idea to today’s “left-behind” Gen Z individuals is a major part of why I’ve come to focus on the loneliness epidemic so much. We need to reach those who capital has forced out of “normal” life, and has rendered “excess” in the view of our social system.
To effectively convey to the left-behinds why communism is the answer, we need to fully recognize the crisis they’re facing. Pseudo-Marxist formations, like the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party, have been making it part of their marketing to argue against the ideas of the “manosphere”; but due to the inherently superficial nature of the RCP’s politics, it can’t offer any alternative to the right-wing male lifestyle brands other than basic phrases about class struggle.
The Marxism that wins over the left-behinds will be one which treats this crisis as the existential battle that it is. The RCP’s approach to confronting the manosphere involves recognizing that men are alienated under capitalism, but why exactly are they alienated? What is the problem that’s driving them to take this particular path at this particular time? This problem is more than that they’re merely alienated from their labor; the problem that they’re both alienated from their labor, and have now been robbed of the opportunities to find kinship in the midst of their experience as workers. They can no longer find women who could support them through this, and therefore no longer have hope to start families. (Which is a problem that also applies to today’s working-class women, though in a different way as I’ll explore later on.) To understand the nature of the crisis that the manosphere is exploiting, we have to look at how the alienation reached this stage, and why we were all left blindsided while the collapse was taking place.
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Prior to the breakdown in relationships from recent decades, capitalism was able to provide a structure of kinship. The contradiction bourgeois feminism took advantage of was that this structure kept the same practices of exploitation and subjugation which had been present ever since the dawn of class society, where the creation of an underclass brought prostitution into being. It’s this historical reality about how prostitution emerged from the same processes as slavery that Marxists need to emphasize. Because this is how we can combat the liberal narrative that upholds the sex industry as something empowering for women.
Wrote Lenin about prostitution’s class character:
Present-day capitalist society conceals within itself numerous cases of poverty and oppression which do not immediately strike the eye. At the best of times, the scattered families of poor townspeople, artisans, workers, employees and petty officials live in incredible difficulties, barely managing to make both ends meet. Millions upon millions of women in such families live (or, rather, exist) as “domestic slaves”, striving to feed and clothe their family on pennies, at the cost of desperate daily effort and “saving” on everything—except their own labour.
It is these women that the capitalists most willingly employ as home-workers, who are prepared for a monstrously low wage to “earn a little extra” for themselves and their family, for the sake of a crust of bread. It is from among these women, too, that the capitalists of all countries recruit for themselves (like the ancient slave-owners and the medieval feudal lords) any number of concubines at a most “reasonable” price. And no amount of “moral indignation” (hypocritical in 99 cases out of 100) about prostitution can do anything against this trade in female flesh; so long as wage-slavery exists, inevitably prostitution too will exist. All the oppressed and exploited classes throughout the history of human societies have always been forced (and it is in this that their exploitation consists) to give up to their oppressors, first, their unpaid labour and, second, their women as concubines for the “masters”.
The smear label that radical liberals have come to use for the sex industry’s opponents is “sex worker-exclusionary radical feminists.” For somebody to use this label unironically, their ideology needs to exist within the bourgeoisiefied section of the world that liberalism has constructed, where the realities of sex trafficking look like a tangential detail. This pro-“sex work” position has become as prevalent as it is now because the American working class movement was dismantled long ago, which made the workers lack a framework for combating bourgeois ideology. And it’s this part of our history—the systematic destruction of organized labor and workers parties—that we need to understand if we want to properly reckon with today’s social crises.
Our rulers couldn’t have carried out their progressive war against the working class if they hadn’t successfully attacked the old proletarian institutions in these ways. If they hadn’t illegalized key union practices after World War II, waged an anti-communist campaign that culminated in the mass killings of the Panthers, and exploited the contradictions inside the left by cultivating a “Marxism” which isn’t really about class struggle. “Marxism” as it’s predominantly existed in America since the 70s has been just identity politics, detached from a real class analysis. (Thus the rise of the leftists or “Marxists” who call people SWERFs for taking Lenin’s position on prostitution.) And it’s because the workers have been left defenseless that the capitalists could ship out our jobs, let inflation massively outpace wages, financialize the economy, and implement the other measures that have left Gen Z in such a dire position.
The conditions for the 2008 economic collapse had been engineered prior to when our generation came into being. Therefore it makes sense why we were caught so completely off guard when we started to experience the evils that have been imposed onto us. An unemployment rate for graduates that’s at its highest since 2013, even though we’re supposed to be in a “good” economy; a Gen Z home ownership rate that’s a fraction of what the boomers had when they were our age; these are some of the factors that have pushed Gen Z to react by having children at an unprecedentedly low rate. The birthrate drop is not just about a decline in living standards, though; and this is important to note if we want to advocate for class struggle in a more substantive way than RCP does.
Another part of the explanation for the birthrate crisis is that most Gen Z men aren’t in relationships with women, which obviously is going to impact how many families are being started. The other aspect has to do with a particular psychological attack that our ruling institutions have directed towards working-class Americans in the midst of our social decline, especially since 2020. This is the tactic where people are actively encouraged to give up the working-class concepts of kinship and family, in favor of a hyper-individualist mindset that’s apathetic towards the idea of having children.
This mindset hasn’t merely come from propaganda; the propaganda has only exacerbated a preexisting aversion towards having children, which growing numbers of people around the world have been feeling in reaction to modern capitalism’s conditions. And the liberal technocrats who’ve been promoting this self-centered mindset are themselves not even necessarily anti-natalist; I truly believe that our ruling class, and their managerial lackeys, didn’t understand the nature of the social collapse that their ideas and policies would bring about. From a societal management perspective, it’s never a good idea to create a massive class of excess males; yet these technocrats so often prefer to dismiss this problem. And it’s because a lot of them believe their own propaganda about what “progress” means.
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According to the main trend within bourgeois feminism—the one that’s come into conflict with the radical feminists who oppose prostitution—the highest form of female empowerment is to give women opportunities for monetary gain. And in a society where young people from working-class backgrounds have now been almost completely cut off from the opportunities of past generations, the bourgeois feminist solution is to promote the sex industry as the new great source of upward mobility for women. This is what we’ve seen with the rise of OnlyFans since 2020, when the mismanagement of the pandemic accelerated all parts of our societal decline.
At the same time that 2020 and its aftermath have created an unprecedented number of “excess men,” a massive number of women have become part of the lumpenproletariat. The tactic of the gender war psyop is to make these abandoned men into objects of obsessive cultural hatred, and paint them as having chosen their bleak circumstances; then use the manosphere to have these men give that hate back. The connection this has to OnlyFans is that in order for OnlyFans to become culturally accepted, our ruling class had to normalize a view of female “empowerment” which is utterly detached from the working-class experience, and in fact hostile towards workers. Which is where this vitriol against today’s struggling men comes from.
The manosphere is filling the absence of a working-class familial role that men are increasingly being shut out of, in part because capital has been pushing ever-more working class men and women out of their roles as workers. The outcome is that growing numbers of working-class men are underemployed or unemployed, without any viable opportunities to find women; while the system is offering these men’s female counterparts a “way out” in the form of sex work.
In the old time, the bulk of working-class men and women were enabled to struggle through their exploited conditions together. For Gen Z, this has been made into a rare thing. For the bulk of Gen Z working-class men, the default state is to be celibate and without companionship. This is also true for many working-class women in Gen Z; but without a massive effort to reconstruct our old spaces for community, these two types of workers will remain separated from each other. Our ruling class views these excess men as purely disposable resources, to be exploited through ever-lengthening work hours or discarded entirely. With the women from working-class backgrounds, though, we’ve seen capital take a different approach. We’ve seen the capitalists try to draw as many of these women as possible into the sex industry, and do so through a psyop about how this represents the height of liberation from patriarchy.
OnlyFans, this regulated and open part of the sex industry, serves to whitewash the horrific experience of the bulk of the globe’s “sex workers” while letting working-class women gain a type of bourgeoisified social status. It’s an addition to the corporate feminist push from this last half-century, where companies have sought to recruit more women and incentivize more women to get college degrees; except this campaign is about cultivating a larger lumpenproletariat. The members of the labor aristocracy and the professional-managerial class, both male and female, cannot see their social class grow; the existence of their lucrative careers depends on skimming off of imperial super-profits. So capital has instead grown the number of bourgeoisified women by offering them a lumpenized path, one that’s elevated within “progressive” culture and thereby offers an upward escape from the despised working class.
Why has social engineering gone in this direction? Why this effort to elevate a layer of women at the expense of working-class men? From the perspective of the class war, this lets capital hide the shared struggle of working class men and women. It lets the discourse frame gender relations through an insane kaleidoscope, where it looks like most men are failures for not matching the incomes of the bourgeoisiefied women (who of course make up a small minority of their gender). There is another aspect to it, though, that we can actually take advantage of as we fight our own side in this war: the managerial technocrats truly believe that creating a gigantic legion of angry men with nothing to lose would be a good thing for the stability of their empire.
Their confidence that this won’t pose any sort of problem comes from the expectation that these alienated men, and the others with a stake in overthrowing our economic order, won’t come together. The PMC liberal mindset can’t fathom the concept of collective working-class organization, because the rootless cosmopolitan role of this class makes its ranks detached from the realities of the class war. PMC liberals very often adopt the “socialist” label for themselves, because they see socialism as synonymous with their bourgeois “progressivism”; therefore, they’re blinded to what the true interests of the workers are, and where a real proletarian movement gets its appeal.
The PMC and their lumpen allies believe they can stop such a movement by attacking it with epithets; for example, these pseudo-Marxists try to smear actual working-class organizers by calling them “SWERFs” or “misogynists.” Such nonsense cannot halt a serious effort to organize working men and women, which is why the PMC and the lumpen left are not our biggest enemies in this fight. A larger obstacle will be the individuals who our ruling class is recruiting in preparation for an unprecedented terror campaign against the working class, with many of these mercenaries themselves being excess males; this is the demographic that many of the men who are joining ICE come from. Making alienated men into armed killers for the Zionist right is the end goal of the manosphere psyop; if the banking regime can’t make enough of us submissive, it will activate the layer of left-behinds who’ve joined death squads. Defeating this Satanic alliance is our only path to salvation.
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