Revised version of Cucked by Capitalism

I'm releasing this cleaned up version of the paper I gave at the Alt Right Media Literacy Group this past weekend.

Cucked by Capitalism

In a world where social justice and social progress have been increasingly monopolized and managed by moral panics masquerading as politics, young people, especially young men look for alternatives to the liberal nostra of the educational and culture industries outside of mainstream institutions of ideological reproduction. Hemmed in by economic constraints that accompany a transactional culture of gender relations, so many young men see everywhere the promise of sexual happiness but can only engage in the compensatory reality of masturbating to more and more outlandish pornographic scenarios and impossibly well-endowed doe eyed webcam girls. Of course, they feel that the secret of success in this world is to avoid being cucked, that is dominated and deprived of autonomy and dignity – by something they cannot name, but we can safely say is the brutalizing economic organization called capitalism. Although “cuck” is a term that really caught fire on right wing social media during Donald Trump’s successful 2016 campaign and it was used to describe weak conservatives, “cucked” is a word rich in linguistic tradition, coming from cuckold, first used in English in the 12 century and traceable to the Old French term, “cocu.” Cocu came from cucu (or cuckoo) imported into England and English when William the Conqueror in 1066 crossed the English channel with his Norman army and remade the English ruling class and the language of Angles and the Saxons.

The cuckoo lays its eggs in other birds’ nests and tricks other birds to raise their child. To be cuckolded from the French and English Middle Ages to have another man sleep with your wife. It is a gendered insult: to be tricked and unmanned at the same time is a terrible fate, one that has deeply reactionary sexual meanings. Google cuckold today though and you will get a raft of cuckold porn and cukcold erotica about wives enjoying sex with jacked men, often African Americans in front of their husbands. Cuckold kink transforms humiliation into eros, but at the direction of the humiliated husband. The problem of sexual domination and the dialectic of power and powerlessness drives this perversion and the cuckold staging his own betrayal for masochistic pleasure seems to be one of the coping mechanisms that consumers have found to derive surplus pleasure from a painful exchange. In sociality of the premodern European world, the cuckolded man was said to “wear the horns”: during carnival, the cuckold wore horns to publicly display his weakness and inability to satisfy or please his wife.

When were workers not cucked by capital? In the U.S. during an aberrational period of wealth redistribution from the top down (1945-1972). Worker unrest after World War II was pacified by a more or less stable employment environment. It was a time of growing working class power, when working class women demanded equal treatment as wage workers first. When they joined union or even union auxiliaries, they identified the cause of workers as their own. The agitations and achievements and major leaders of labor feminism are mostly forgotten because after 1968, feminist politics were taken over by Professional Managerial Class, or petit bourgeois women. Invented by idle and discontent women with wage earner husbands, these women shaped the feminism we know today, one that is committed to recognition of their distinctive identities rather than solidarity with other workers who share their material interests. PMC feminists, in the struggle in Left politics defined by Nancy Fraser as one fought between recognition or redistribution, prioritized recognition.

The social movements of the 1960s may have demanded “more” for women and minorities, but that “more” became more and more abstract and less and less material. In the first phase of the civil rights movement and the early labor feminism of the industrial era, agitation for the good life, redistributed through wages formed the heart of political demands. Working class women of all races were concerned with the family wage, childcare, health care, fewer hours at work, but black power and second wave feminism made the material demands of the older generation seem culturally backward. Material demands, according to the new radicals, could not destroy racism and misogyny.

As Dorothy Sue Cobble argued in The Other Women's Movement, working class women as well as women’s auxiliaries grew in power as unions grew in power. Working class women demanded better treatment as workers as well as attention to their concerns as wage earners and family caretakers, but they were less interested in demanding recognition as “women.” Even in female dominated unions in the telephone industry, women workers made demands that were focused on their status as workers. Cobble sees the 1940s and 50s as a period of under recognized feminization of unions. When second wave feminism swept onto the cultural scene in the 1960s and 1970s, many of the feminist leaders like Betty Friedan saw labor leaders such as Myra Wolfgang, labor leader, known in her youth as the “Battleing Belle of Detroit” as perversely attached to working class men and their causes. The petit bourgeois or PMC feminist wanted to be recognized as a woman first, worker last.  Betty Friedan’s and the authors of Our Bodies, Our Selves were strangely disconnected from wage labor.

I wanted to provide a little background to PMC feminism’s meltdown about the manosphere and its horrific misogyny. The manosphere sees women as objects to be manipulated, feared and exploited, but it first and foremost wants to promote men as a victimized identity category. To be red pilled is to see through the conspiracy leading to one’s victimization. The manosphere presents itself as the perfect dialectical partner to today’s elite feminists who see patriarchy and misogyny as the highest and most powerful of all evils. Tate is serving himself up as a villain cooked up in Hillary Clinton’s brain.

During the 2016, HRC rallied her supporters with a refutation of Bernie Sanders’ economism, his stupid class reductionism, “If we broke up the big banks would that end racism? Would that end sexism?” No!!!! her besotted followers yelled in response. Major media outlets greeted this line as a fatal blow to the Bernie Sanders campaign, when liberal journalists cuffed Sanders on the head for not foregrounding the “racism” and “sexism” in his own campaign as he tried to secure the Democratic Party nomination. Ryan Grim’s AOC and the Rise of the Squad covers much of the history of the Bernie phenomenon and the progressive politicians it inspired. Grim goes over the critical 2016 Nevada primaries that secured Clinton’s victory over her democratic socialist opponent. 2020 was a different story as the Nevada unions lined up for Bernie, but the Sanders campaign failed to carry his victory in Nevada into South Carolina, where he was soundly defeated by Joe Biden.

            Feminism, specifically PMC feminism was weaponized to smear Sanders and his followers. Banks were not broken up, but sexism became much more awful as Donald Trump’s Groper in Chief Presidency inspired the Democratic Party elite with even more serious fodder for their demonization of “toxic masculinity.” Trump himself remained impervious to their critiques: his followers were not Nelson Rockefeller Republicans, genteel country club folk with stiff upper lips and trust funds. They were and are a group of angry people who are driven by a series of resentments and suspicions of government, and even darker powers that they can’t quite name because capitalism is off limits to their analysis. The biggest donors behind the movement are capitalists often in the extractive industries and they pay their own well financed intelligentsia to keep capitalism off the table and out of the discourse. The hypocrisy of Democrats is an evil to them as noxious as the sexism of their mascot and Alpha male leader, the Donald.

            In the logic of the manosphere, influencers talk to young men who cannot hope for double Harvard degrees, finance jobs all lubricated by out of reach credentials. Manosphere influencers affirm that the system is rigged, and they sell to their followers the secret of success under capitalism, all for a modest price of a subscription to their own educational content. Sexism is a mode of power over women who men like Andrew Tate assert can and should be treated like objects. Men cannot feel anything for women, because women are either rivals or victims and they should be manipulated to depend on a man to such an extreme degree that they are willing to perform sex work for the profit of their male handlers. Sexism and patriarchy identified by liberal elites as the ultimate evil appear extraordinarily powerful as a means to outwit an entire system built to keep men down.

Andrew Tate and company argue that they have the secret to becoming the Alpha in a system designed to ‘enslave’ young men, but they are merely repeating Benjamin Franklinesque grindset mindsets. Work, work for me, work for free is Tate’s message emanating from his various accounts and followers. Work, for young men and young women around the world is ill paid and degrading: work insults our intelligence and our bodies.  After enumerating the many reasons why domination is the only way to becoming a master of oneself, women and the world, Tate asks followers to send him $50.00 a month. There seem to have been enough desperate lost young men with enough disposable income and Internet connections to enroll in his “university.”

Liberals and conservatives have been asking recently, as in this article on the Substack  “Persuasion” authored by FIRE, and Freedom of Speech, Why Are Young Men Drifting to the Right? The Financial Times identified a widening Ideology Gap between the genders, with young men and women diverging as much 30 percentage points between conservative and liberal ideologies. One important aspect of the gender gap in ideological leanings, at least in the United States, the education gap. Women in the U.S. have seen a dramatic increase in college attainment, having surpassed men in rates of completion of a four year degree as shown in these datasets. This divergence in political orientation and college attainment would see to confirm conservative ideas that colleges are liberal training grounds. On the other hand, from the liberal perspective, it would confirm that higher education leads to more open mindedness and anti-authoritarianism from which the uneducated are excluded.

            I would not want to decide which description of university education is most accurate. It is more important in my mind to look at what the corporatization of higher education as a limited liability institution really means and in this context to consider the expansion of its administrative functions and funding structures. Progressive managerialism is still managerialism made to create efficiencies for capital, not for workers or students. Progress in such a world is all based on what Adolph Reed Jr has identified as the ideology of proportional representation. In order to achieve this narrowly construed idea of institutional justice and progress, new forms of worker/employee training have been implemented since the 1970s to diminish bias in the corporate and higher education workplace are provided by companies funded by private equity and venture capital. Anti-bias training is profitable for these VC funded companies while having been proven to be ineffective at actually reducing levels of bias in workers. New forms of worker/employee training to diminish bias in the corporate and higher education workplace are provided by companies funded by private equity and venture capital. 

Golden Gate Capital was one of the angel investors in Vector Solutions the provider of the anti-discrimination, anti-sexual harassment training program that I had to take recently. Golden Gate Capital recently sold Vector Solutions to two other private equity companies, Insight  and Genstar Capital. VC hustle is the most outstanding and profitable form of hustle around these days. So out of reach of the average worker, Tate and company emerge on line to give advice about how not to be cucked by finance capital’s operations. It is also not surprising that manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate have emerged to tell young, angry, lonely men how to be men because contemporary moral panics have made being or becoming a man highly “problematic.” An on line industry of body building tips leading straight to conspiracy theory thinking, give young men a voice and an image of tumescent bodies and defiant affects. But more than anything, Tate and the other on line “motivators” that boys and young men find so compelling do offer a twisted insight into the relationship between rate of profit from speculation and rate of growth of wages. Thomas Piketty has shown through careful analysis that wages lag far behind the growth of interest and profit on accumulated capital. Every man, according to Tate, should be aspiring to be a capitalist, not a wage earner. Every man should want to be a “G” an Alpha, an entrepreneur and a social media hustler.

The 7.5 billion dollar anti-bias, DEI training industry, predicted to double in size in the next few years is a ripe area for maximizing return on investment. It is a growth area for speculation, but a spectacular failure in terms of actually producing the results it guarantees. It is an Andrew Tatesque hustle on a scale that make Tate look distinctively and pathetically small time. In Anthropology Now, Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev published, Why Doesn't Diversity Training Work exploring the history and the measurable effects of corporate and higher education anti-bias training. When faced with “public relations crises, campus intolerance” or too slow diversification of the workforce, management resorts to “training.” Workers predictably resist attempts at employer control, even though or especially when the boss may present herself progressive. Jennifer Pan is writing a much anticipated book on this topic and I look forward to the empirical studies that she cites along with Dobbin and Kalev about diversity training.

Leftist organizations like DSA have not found a better way of resolving conflicts within its membership. It is has had to hire of to outside consultant, PB Solutions to deal with complaints about harassment and bullying. Facing membership attrition and huge budget deficits, DSA has shown how difficult it is for contemporary organizations, not focused on worker priorities to articulate or implement an anti-corporate vision of organizational discipline and progress. Caucuses within DSA that prioritize class analysis have been forced out: Class Unity in Chicago is one example. People within DSA who invited Adolph Reed, Jr. to speak to NY DSA were tarred and feathered racists, with the The New York Times covering the cancellation of Reed’s Zoom talk in 2020. Liberals and some Leftists have internalized Human Resources, Democratic Party friendly approaches to identity management and every left organization after the Sanders campaign struggles with an atmosphere of distrust and mutual censorship. What the consultants produce for corporations and universities – manufactured trust of technical protocols is one of the ways that the division of labor in postindustrial capitalism pacifies dissent and destroys the very possibility of confrontation, contradiction and cooperation.

Capitalism strips away the dignity of workers, but especially of young people seeking to enter the work force, which for the majority of people in the world is low wage and exploitative. The division of labor under capitalism has created a feminized white collar managerial stratum that oversees the reproduction of class relations that justifies the destruction of worker intellect and skill bases. Stripping away your dignity is a euphemism for castration for men – taking away your autonomy and ability to decide how to use your energy and your libido. For women, in psychoanalytic terms, castration and its threat also apply, as the absolute loss of bodily autonomy is also a form of castration. Although feminine powerlessness has been framed today by second wave feminism as defined by sexual violence and victimization, psychological and physical vulnerability to domination is conditioned by economic deprivation and dependency.

            I have been thinking about how 50 cent’s P.I.M.P. is Andrew Tate and the manosphere’s anthem. It describes unvarnished a kind of gangster masculinity, displaying wealth and power over women as signs of pure success and domination. The pimp is the boss: he wields power over women who are besotted by his display of riches. But the pimp is not going to give his women a dollar. The pimp is invulnerable to emotionality or poverty: he is the opposite of the simp, the gullible young man or simpleton who in front of his computer is catfished by the pretty girl with the web camera or the hot MILF conservative firebrand or the sexy socialist showing a little too much cleavage, or in the end other men like Andrew Tate who seduce and exploit them. Tate offers his followers shortcuts to physical power, wealth and sexual happiness. His grift is made possible in part by the psychological and economic vulnerability of boys and young men. There are three aspects of the drift to the alt right facilitated by the manosphere that I want to emphasize.  All three forces are amplified by the forces of liberalism, finance capital and its need to reproduce class relations. All three factors have important effects on the questions of labor, libidinal life and social struggle.

1.     Depoliticization of public sphere in the democratic world through a series of moral panics and culture wars that frame liberalism as the “civilizing process” of the PMC or new petit bourgeoisie. (sex panics, neoliberal authoritarianism)

2.     Suppression of worker power through active deskilling of human beings – basically the division of labor under de-industrializing white collar based “meritocracies” while instituting the farming out of intersubjectivity to consultants and organizational theorists.

3.     Primitive accumulation of capital creates new needs and new complaints meant to destroy class consciousness or the ability to resist ideological capture. New managerial protocols move in and exploit previously autonomous areas of human life outside of work in the form of novel identity protocols and linguistic innovation.

I have a larger critique of second wave feminism and its focus on sexual violence and reproductive rights as class capture of a social movement, but I will simply cite Dorothy Sue Cobble’s history of women in the American labor movement in the twentieth century: in the 1940s, millions of American women joined union auxiliaries as workers and union members. In 1944, at the annual convention of the CIO Congress of Women’s Auxiliaries, the congress announced its support for “’free nurseries’ for working mothers, ‘maternity leaves with re-employment guarantees,’ equal pay, ‘and end to job discrimination’ against Negroes [sic], a permanent fair employment practices law, and abolition of the poll tax. Similar goals had been put forward by CIO auxiliar and union women at the local level some two years earlier.” (Dorothy Sue Cobble, p. 25)

             Contrast these politics with the inchoate sense of feminine discontent documented by Betty Friedan as a form of politics and finally, contrast these concrete demands with the vague indictment of all bias against women harbored by all men articulated by Judith Herman in her work on sexual victimization and the unrecognized trauma of women. The unspoken fact about her work on trauma and recovery is that Herman worked in primarily Irish working class communities outside of Boston and as a professional and a feminist, entirely neglects to discuss the social and cultural and milieu of the women whose suffering she highlighted in her best selling book, Trauma and Recovery. PMC second wave feminism prepared the world for anti-bias training as an anti-worker managerial intiative and in doing so, it does the ideological work of suppressing the history of labor feminism and its material demands on capital. In so doing, it paved the way for demands for identity recognition in a pluralist, neoliberal allegedly classless society: the manosphere turns identitarianism on its head, asserting its own sovereignty and asking for recognition as a “G” – the one who win the war of the sexes. Tate’s sexual crimes are nothing compared with the predatory actions of Blackstone and other private equity firms that are acting to increase the rate of profit by moving massive amounts of capital around to speculate on the ruins of our public institutions and our private lives.