The algorithms are pushing gender-based relationship resentment because this is how to shift the blame for the collapse our civilization is experiencing. Our rulers chose to propagate gender divisions for a very specific reason, one that’s distinct from the reasons behind when they promote racism. Gender discourses have come to be at the center of today’s culture because at this stage in capital’s crisis of overproduction, every new generation keeps having less children than the last.
There’s a reason why this is only happening in the richest countries: in a society that’s abundant with money and consumer goods, while at the same time subject to gargantuan increases in the cost of living, its people are going to view having children as something that doesn’t make rational sense.
This is part of the destruction that capital inflicts upon social structures. A destruction where as the productive forces can ever-greater ability to produce, the human labor that society has traditionally needed becomes unnecessary. Marx pointed out how “Capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces.” This is a progressive process, becoming more advanced as the technology develops and lets old parts of life become outmoded.
Referring to the labor relations that are at the heart of economics—and, regarding this analysis, at the heart of what lets families exist—Marx wrote that “A revolution in the forces of production further alters these relations, changes these relations themselves, whose foundations – from the standpoint of capital and hence also of that of realization through exchange – always remains the relation of necessary to surplus labour, or, if you like, of the different moments of objectified to living labour. It is possible, as we have already indicated earlier, that the capital as well as the living labour capacity set free owing to the increase in productive forces must both lie dormant, because they are not present in the proportions in which production must take place on the basis of the newly developed productive forces. If it proceeds regardless of that, then ultimately a minus, a negative magnitude, will come out of the exchange on one side or the other.”
He explained the effect this has on the lives of human beings, with “men” being used here to describe both sexes: “The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things.”
I have included these quotes because they’re vital to putting in perspective the economic collapse that we’re experiencing. This is a collapse where the old industrial means of subsistence have been replaced by “bullshit jobs,” which are themselves now becoming insanely scarce. How this connects to the decline in families is that the productive gains which come from having children, or the mutual economic benefits that come from getting married, are being outmoded by the substitutes which have appeared. Or at least they’re outmoded under the present system, which completely prioritizes monetary gain at the expense of humanity.
This is where we’ve gotten the phenomenon of more and more men being turned into “excess males” because women are no longer as economically dependent on men, while becoming economically successful in general has become harder and harder. These factors have created an elitist dating culture where the tiny minority of successful men have become favored in massive disproportion. This is a real problem that’s emerged. But something critical to remember is that this particular attitude towards low-income men only exists inside a certain layer of our society, this being the bourgeois layer that’s by far the most culturally visible.
The “dating market” of 2026 is a deeply bizarre world, where individuals from the owning class and the professional-managerial class define the rules of gender relations. Its guiding cultural hegemony is completely detached from the experience of the working class, who’ve been increasingly shut out of participating in it and don’t have the platform to combat the strange bourgeois ideas about what relationships mean. To defeat the gender war psyop—and in turn save the family from being destroyed by capital—we have to recognize the context in which this destructive culture exists.
The only way that this gender dynamic could come into being was through a historical process where, within the core imperialist countries, society first became "bourgeoisified" and then became de-industrialized. To be included within “normal” life, and have access to the path that lets you start a family, you had to be able to attain prosperity within the society that’s most rife with overproduction. Then this society experienced crisis after crisis after crisis, each one cutting off that access to more people.
Marx wrote of how “the destruction of value and capital which takes place in a crisis coincides with – or means the same thing as – a general growth of the productive forces, which, however, takes place not by means of a real increase of the productive force of labour (the extent to which this happens in consequence of crises is beside the point here), but by means of a decrease of the existing value of raw materials, machines, labour capacity.” It was in the wake of this destruction that the ideology behind the gender war psyop could arise.
For example: the impulse to treat most men with disgust because most of them have failed to attain a bourgeoisified lifestyle could only become widespread after an advanced stage in capitalist decline. After society within the heart of global capital had set an unparalleled living standard for its people, and then ripped away the means for living up to this standard.
This attitude that the left-behind men deserve their suffering is one version of bourgeois culture’s reaction to inequality, where poverty is seen as an individual failure. Here, this reaction has just been reframed as a way to empower women. This is the class character of the anti-male side in the gender wars.
The misogynist side is different in its grievances, but it’s also based in the bourgeois framework of discourse, and its propagators are also boosted by the algorithms. It tries to get working class men to view women as their class enemies, with this effort usually coming in the form of low-IQ social media takes that fuel a vague resentment. The common messages these statements convey is that “women are shallow,” or “women are boring.” They don’t directly address class because capitalist psyops want us to stay away from that subject, but the superficial traits they talk about are the traits of humanity’s exploiters.
Every aspect of the gender war psyop depends on the working class experience being hidden, so that only the bourgeois perspective on gender relations is visible. In the culture that our ruling class has constructed, only the minority who’ve managed to become bourgeoisified deserve respect, with everyone else being ignored or looked down upon. This mentality is absorbed by everyone who hasn’t been confronted with the experiences that make somebody become disillusioned with class society. In the last fifteen years or so, enough people have become class-conscious in this way that the right wing can no longer use its old propaganda of “if you’re struggling in life then it’s always your fault alone.” However, a place in our culture where this kind of cruelty can still be practiced is the gender wars, with the targets being the “excess males.”
The purpose of this narrative, and the other gender war narratives, is to prevent the re-emergence of working class solidarity in this country. And we can rebuild such solidarity, but only if we wage an uncompromising war against the stupidity that our rulers propagate. The communist movement needs to actually provide an answer to the conditions being faced by the post-Covid generation’s “left-behinds,” who have no reason to join a movement that’s detached from what they’re actually being subjected to. Part of this means identifying the class antagonists towards them, which the psyop has presented through a gendered lens but truly comes from a global financial structure.
This structure is what’s hollowed out America’s economy, then created an environment where Gen Z men and women mostly are not coming into contact and are rarely having children. Global banking responded to the growing contradictions in the productive forces by shipping out America’s industry, while waging war against working class men and women in different ways. Millions and millions of men have become untouchables under this system, partly because they’re now isolated from the women who are in their own class. The system has cultivated a layer of bourgeoisified women, elevated by the feminist campaign within the corporate world, who these left-behind men of course can’t even relate to. And in this last decade in particular, an additional trend has emerged, one where massive numbers of working-class women have joined the lumpenproletariat by becoming part of the sex industry. This has happened at the exact same time that a wildly unprecedented proportion of men have been rendered “excess.”
The foundations for a future like this one were laid a long time ago, and we were all blindsided when the collapse became advanced enough that it created today’s birthrate crisis. The decisive factor was when we allowed our rulers to rob us of the community spaces that used to let working-class men and women come into contact with each other, and build lives based on their shared experiences. This is the true source of the tragedy we’re experiencing, not phones and screens. The post-Covid generation only spends so much with screens because their access to healthy activities has been massively reduced.
For the victims of this tragedy, the only way to go is forward. The only thing to do is start running in the same direction, and concentrate this generation’s collective energy around overthrowing our banking dictatorship. In the absence of a “normal” life, this is the goal for the left-behinds to concentrate their time and their effort around.
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