Men must not lead the revolution
I've sat on whether to write this. Is it worth the potential flack? Is it worth chafing the sacks of men who picture themselves as potential heroes of this uncertain era? The men pulling inspiration from the giants of history – the Marxes, the Lenins and Trotskys, the Guevaras and Castros, the Mandelas and Bikos, the Kings and King Jrs, the Washingtons, Lincolns, Sitting Bulls, even the da Vincis and Marconis. There is a growing swell who believe the chaos is calling them forth as leaders. They quote from their dogmas and declare things as they ought to be, frothing in the propagandic idealism of failed histories.
(As an aside, can I ask why men love communism so much? Like the capitalism/communism binary seems so stark in relation to men's views of the world. There's a hyper-masculinity to communism, an explicit sense of male dominance within the doctrine that my whole self distrusts.)
Are feminism and communism even compatible? I'm sure many men would explain to me, at length, that they are, while conveniently glazing past the fact that every one of their heroes only achieved notoriety thanks to the unacknowledged labour of the women behind them. Intellectual labour, administrative labour, household labour, social and organizational labour. The labour of women has always been a side-thought within the paradigm of class politics, as though "labour" only counts in the world of men if it can be commodified. These frameworks forget entirely the systems that came before the markets, before labour became something to exploit; there are Indigenous systems built on reciprocity, matriarchal dignity and micro economies that existed for thousands of years before Westernized men came along and decided homogeneity was the path to utopia. Frankly I find the bent of male ego within the capitalism/communism dynamic astounding – there are way too many dicks on that dance floor.
And of course we have many historical heroes in the margins: Marie Curie, the physicist and chemist who pioneered research on radioactivity, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize; Rosa Parks, "the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement" who stood against American segregation; Maya Angelou, whose poetry and passion shaped social justice alongside Martin Luther King Jr.; Malala Yousafzai, the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate whose steady courage and compassion gave voice to education rights for women and girls around the world; Marsha P. Johnson, who founded STARs (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) in the early 1070s and whose memory remains iconic to trans rights; Greta Thunberg, who has been relentlessly targeted and harassed by the global patriarchy for daring to fight for climate justice and defend Palestinians – the list could go on, hundreds of thousands of words have and could continue to be written on such women. Women who, despite being relegated to the margins of society, and already carrying the weight of both capitalist and patriarchal structures on their backs, stepped forward anyway. Applied their brilliance anyway. Said "fuck that" anyway. Did all the labour anyway. And it's no surprise that such women have only been held in historical light thanks to those who fundamentally understand the weights they carried – other marginalized communities who fought to have their heroes recognized among the rigid, male-dominated echelons of history.
Most of us didn't notice feminism going out of fashion in the 2020s. Feminism's momentum of the 2010s died with White Feminism, which could also be framed as Neoliberal Feminism – a mainstreamed ideology that prioritized women of the status quo above all else. Privilege, aka salaries and benefits, secure partnerships, social influence and financial freedoms (vacations, savings accounts, RRSPs), general ease of conformity – white collar or white skin were the preferences of 2010s feminism. Neoliberalism thrives thanks to patriarchal white supremacy. An underclass is required by its paradigm, and neolib feminism cares vastly more about salaries than the systemic, exploitative rot of market structures. This is why "intersectionality" and trans rights were ultimately bridges too far for them, and how those feminists are now finding the rug pulled out from under them as their bodily autonomy and voting rights are being taken away by the status quo they trusted. Capitalist entropy is a sneaky thing.
We're now dominated by the "manosphere"; corrupted, flailing, lost. Religious women and the Trad Wife movement are finding their utopic visions usurped by abject patriarchal servitude. Their spawn, raised online by abstract digital subcultures, emotional needs utterly neglected, no sense of tactile community or the warmth of human connections beyond mandatory, restrictive religious participation – and let's not forget how many kids have been spawned by this movement – these kids are a tsunami of chaos about to flood whatever is left of the neoliberal paradigm. Can Marx account for that?
We have panicked governments who've formed chimeric entities with technology corporations, who view protesters as mentally ill and who can only be reached or swayed by lobbyist groups backed by millions of dollars. A ruling capitalist class backed into an existential corner of their own making, unsustainable, desperately seeking immortality, their legacies already lost by their absolutely useless offspring. I truly can't think of any humans more incapable, deskilled, and feeble in every way than the spawn of the ruling class – those who require billions simply to survive.
And we have effective accelerationism, an ideology that most resembles a cheese-rolling competition down a steep mountain heaving through climate change – whoever makes it to the bottom in one piece apparently wins all the cheese. They are razing democracy with explicit eugenicist intent. Not just the obvious fascists, the entire Western capitalist class is doing this, consuming itself in the process. The covid conspiracies of "The Great Reset", much like many of the QAnon conspiracies seeded on 4chan, 8chan, and proliferated throughout Reddit and social platforms by the Epstein ring, these concepts were also seeded with explicit eugenicist intent. The horrors planted by the Epstein ring into the vulnerable minds of panicked citizens were protective deflections based on the known realities of their abject corruption. A class that considered itself beyond morality, beyond law, beyond ethics – absolute power that had reached absolute corruption. This is whose hands our world now sits in.
And we think men can solve this?
Men, who've been granted such full reign of society for centuries that the entire planet is now victim to their collective ego. Men who've been handed the historical reigns again and again yet who blow themselves up every time (or more often, women and children). Men who so fundamentally crave power and status – over a household, a community, a congregation, a town, a city, a country, a continent, a world, a galaxy – there's no end to their fantasies of dominion. Men who literally cannot exist without entire networks of unacknowledged marginal labour.
I'm not saying every man is a lost cause, I'm simply saying they are not suited to lead. Patriarchal blindness is exactly like institutional blindness – the fundamental inability to see beyond the embedded framework they exist within. Every man alive today is a victim of that blindness.
Consider the men we see stepping forward on social media as voices of resistance: it's the very safety of their status within the patriarchy that grants them the ability to "stand out". They often share dogmatic or violent rhetoric or imagery with no great concern for risks to their social status. They make bold statements about the way things ought to be, and most of them actively defer to sycophantic followers, truly believing their positions are correct. Their security as men swept social barriers away long ago and granted unearned confidence and authority to their positions. They are granted the privilege of being loud and antagonistic because the status quo provides them the safety to exist that way. But rather than reflect on the dynamics of their positions, they simply assume their reality lacks barriers due to their inherent correctness. Thanks to tools like ChatGPT we can now see the ultimate result of concentrated sycophancy, yet patriarchy and systemic sycophancy go hand-in-hand, and the results of this dynamic at scale should be clear to everyone.
Because of this – this systemic social coddling – men cannot suffer challenges to their status. Their emotional resilience is fundamentally stunted. And the effect feeds back on itself, as they accumulate followers who agree with them, their sense of correctness is hardened and amplified into their sense of "leader". They develop an altruistic self-image, referring back to the myths of their historic male heroes as their North Stars, further enabling themselves in the belief that benevolent power and hegemony are simply the noblest paths forward. They congratulate themselves on their allyship with marginalized groups and promise themselves they'll lead "the right way" once their time comes, missing the critical yet obvious truth that their power can only exist in relation to the patriarchal teat they're actively suckling on. If they were granted the true power they crave, they wouldn't do it differently, because no man ever has.
This is why anyone participating within spheres of resistance must reject men from roles of leadership. Do not join a movement led by a man, especially a white man. They cannot see the path forward, because they are fundamentally blinded by the system they've been shaped by. They cannot grasp the full experience of humanity and therefore cannot lead the experience of humanity.
And if you're a man feeling a sense of resentment reading this, if this requirement to take a step back from the order of things fills you with a sense of existential pain, that's the patriarchy burrowing itself deeper into your soul. If you are truly our ally – if there are good men reading this thinking, "well fuck, what can I do then?", your job is to amplify, protect, and clear the paths for marginalized voices of the resistance. Just because you can't lead and wield the power you've been conditioned to crave doesn't mean you have no purpose – again, that's just the poison of the patriarchy talking.
I've chosen to live without a male partner for about six years now. I have teenage daughters who value their fundamental autonomy and understand their future is their own to build. Having established independence and explicit agency over my path, I can't imagine surrendering it to a man conditioned by this era. Relationships centred on autonomy, sure. Friendships, absolutely. But every man I've invited into my life has approached me, my house, and my assets, from a perspective of property, whether they understand it or not. Every single one has asserted, or attempted to assert, dominance over my choices, my perspectives, my beliefs, and in the more extreme cases, my relationships and daily movements. Either that, or they have a female dominance fetish I'm absolutely uninterested in. Just because I'm grounded in myself and firm in my values doesn't mean I get off on subordinating men. Grow the fuck up.
Show me a man who genuinely sees women and marginalized people as powerful contributors to this world, who lives in humility and curiosity without loudly congratulating himself for it, someone who doesn't fetishize those on the margins, who understands the strengths that emerge from equity. We exist in a resonant web of interrelations – show me a man who understands that on every scale, persistently and despite temptations offered by status and power, and I might be willing to trust him with my world.
It may take centuries of rehabilitation for such a man to exist.
