Many years ago, I was allowed to observe a Sun Dance at the Pine Ridge reservation. One of the tasks in preparation for the ceremony was to cut a large cottonwood tree, carry it to the site, stick it firmly in the ground and tie the various cords and banners to it. This was all done by a large group of strong young men, and an elder explained to me that this was a way to channel their energy in service to the tribe rather than to disruptive activities like drinking alcohol and so forth. Then, of course, there was the dance itself, which also required men to prepare for a year in advance in various ways, and to focus their strength, energy and prayers on the tribe. This was a really positive way of harnessing male energy in service to the community. I realize that it probably only works on a small scale, but small scale is probably where we need to go and is probably what the planet is going to force on us eventually anyway.
An older gay native friend of mine also attended one and told me the same thing, and he bemoaned how there was nothing of that sort for young gay urban males and believed that was what was driving their very high rates of meth addiction and suicide.
You’re right, of course. This can only work on small scales, because the men need to have a sense of connection to a community that they can actually see, rather than just to a nebulous “community” they will never meet. When it is on a larger scale, the “community” becomes the Nation or the People, and we know how that ends for them…
This same elder spoke to the entire group before the dance actually began and the men were pierced. He admonished them that the dance was not to prove how tough they were, or to impress a girlfriend or other men, but to ensure the continuity of the tribe. He emphasized the importance of right thoughts and not just right actions. Which I guess was the whole point of the sweat lodges and prayers and purifications they had to undergo the year prior to the dance. It really gave them a purpose. And it was obviously a challenging, hard task to mortify the flesh that way in order to send those prayers up the cords as they danced. Testosterone directed in service to the community, what a concept.
I always suspected (tho fortunately not from experience) that women are underrepresented among the homeless because they "trade in kind" for a roof over their head in much the way you did.
Some feminists would suggest that such in-kind trades are sometimes also called “marriages.” I do like Federici’s analysis of this, though, because she is able to hold both this reality (that women are sometimes forced by capitalism into such arrangements) and also the reality that women and men can also choose to marry each other for other reasons at the same time.
I think it is worth asking whether the reasons for marriage matter. The idea that a family can exist outside of the politcal and economic structure surrounding it is one of the ideas Federici debunks. Marriage and the division of labor between men and women are somewhat socially determined- as many leftists have found out after trying to create more equal marriages. For example, my husband is a loving a caring man. I don't stay with him primarily for shelter. Yet I can't deny the reality that for 9 of the 12 years we have been together my access to healthcare has been through his job. For about half of our relationship we lived in a house he owned and could have kicked me out of any time. His wages were always higher than mine. Even now that he's been disabled for years he gets calls begging him to go do construction work. Yet I (also a qualified tradesworker) would have to search long before finding a company to hire a woman who has been out of the workforce raising children for the past two years. None of this is meant to say that our relationship is not a good thing- we are madly in love, we have our little spats and I guess I get my way more often than not. He always offers me more money out of the money he brings in than I want to take every month. He bought me horses and a nice car and does half the housework. All of this is only meant to show that no matter how storybook the ending- no matter if Prince Charming really is charming and sweet and kind women do not escape the real world. The material conditions of our lives dictate that I will be dependent on his wage or we will both suffer for it. We tried having me be the breadwinner. A whole slew of factors ruined that- from the isolation he faced as a stay at home dad to the open mocking and taunting he recieved from his family to the simple fact that he sucked at making meal plans and shopping for them and a bunch of other domesric tasks he was never taught and I didn't have the time to teach him. The problem I see is that feminism tends towards collective punishment of all men for these problems which rightfully bothers men who make serious efforts to be better and also that these patterns- what marriage is in late-stage capitalism- are inescapable. There are good men out there and couples can't just bootstrap into equality. But with that in mind we have to consider the ways in which natural pair-bonding is expressed as marriage and how even those whose marriage is just a form of socially-accepted pair-bonding cannot escape what marriage is in our society.
You're analysis of the "Surplus Male Problem" feels intuitive and eye-opening.
Could you expand on this paragraph a bit:
"Yeah, I’m a bitter old Marxist (well, 45 in a few days anyway), so I’m still going to point out that there was an alternative collective identity proffered, that of the worker. Sure, it didn’t work out so well for communist states, who themselves ground up their surplus males in wars and gulags, but it did offer something better to men (and to women) than tacitly-legal rape, drug-addiction, gang warfare, or a life sleeping in your own piss on the street."
How do you envision identifying as a worker would improve homelessness and address surplus males? As you already point out, communist societies have attempted this and yet it didn't seem to solve the problem.
Okay, so this comes with an important caveat, which is that we don't fully know why or how this happened--whether is was because of the extreme state authoritarianism or was a feature of the communist framework itself--but rape against women, drug addiction, homelessness, and many other crimes were very low in the USSR, Soviet Bloc and in Cuba. This is even taking into account the potential of low reporting or false recordkeeping by those governments, since historians have done a pretty good job of analysing other records and reports.
Again, we don't know if it was because punishment was so severe and the police state was so omnipresent, or if it was because something about the communist framework itself (where men and women were considered equally workers, mass housing was built at really intense rates, and the illegal production of drugs meant a death sentence).
Regardless, something "worked" there. I don't think we should ever try to repeat that experiment, but what it points to is that is is possible to organize society in a way that the surplus male problem is channeled better than what liberal democracies are doing.
"I don't think we should ever try to repeat that experiment, but what it points to is that is is possible to organize society in a way that the surplus male problem is channeled better than what liberal democracies are doing."
“While woke ideology argues this is because of racism (and they are at least partially correct here), it cannot possibly address the larger issue of what those men might be able to do instead within modern societies.”
It's a point I think only a class analysis can bring up, and since the majority of anti-racist activists are all middle class and have college degrees, they cannot even begin to address it.
All the more fulfilling and well-paying jobs are already scarce and the labor pool for those jobs already glutted, and there's a limit to how much manual labor a post-industrial society can really employ. So, it's low-level service jobs (fast food, basically), extreme poverty, or criminality.
And I think that if we were to take any group of testosterone-soaked 17 year old men (of any race) and ask them which sounds more fulfilling and exciting to them--working at McDonalds or running drugs--they'd mostly choose the latter.
So true. And if you're someone who grew up poor or in the "overcome by fear of not being middle class anymore" segment of society (like me), odds are that it's occurred to you that maybe a class analysis explains "black on black crime" committed by black men. But you've brought that up in class, or on a social justice forum, etc, and... maybe you weren't dismissed as a class reductionist, which would be a more clearly stupid and off-base reaction, but you were dismissed more subtly. "Well obviously there's a class element, and the marxian materialist analysis isn't exactly wrong, but anyway, moving on from that..."
When I read the title, my first thought was "That is what wars are for." Your analysis of the win-win for the ruling class is pretty spot on. As a former, no ex-Marine, I saw the channeling of anger into unit loyalty and community. Although there was, as is, still at least as high a rate of sexual assault in the military per Capita as there is in theU.S. society, and racism was and is still pretty rampant. When I was in (1977-1991) the Marines were disproportionately white.
I agree with the discussion between you and Sylvia, and it does require smaller societies. But so many of those societies can become closed loops, especially those which form around a shared religious belief of what ever flavor.
As an even older, and dismayed, Marxist I agree with your analysis of the "better" social function of the former USSR, but I would not want to go there either.
There does need to be a purpose of value for all people, capitalism has turned most people into cogs whose sole purpose is to serve their owners through wage labor and gross needless consumption
In his debates with Enrico Malatesta. He wanted to see Germany defeated because he believed there was something inherently malevolent in their national character, and thus took the side of French anarchists who had been calling for war against the Germans even before the war started.
His arguments are more complex than my caricature, but more importantly they form the basis of much of the anarchist/antifa support for extreme violence against people they identify as fascist. This is also being extended currently into German Antifascist support for Israeli state violence against Palestinians (some recent manifestations just occurred in Leipzig with banners that read “antifascism means pro-Israel”).
Short version: “the state is bad except when it can be used to stop bad people,” which is really like the communist “the state is bad but we must first use it to nationalize production, etc”
Thanks for enlightening me. I've heard good things about Kropotkin, but am entirely ignorant about him. Being a big fan of Dostoevsky, I too am against any form of "X is bad, but WE can use safely." History proves otherwise. Thanks again!
As a homeless surplus male with a few weeks of hostel living fumes left in the tank, I'm excited about my bright future of suicide, war, drug addiction, or sleeping in my own piss. Despite this, I'm still talking to potential employers to find yet another opportunity to be exploited in order to have the privilege of handing my paycheck to a landlord, as I've been doing for 35+ years now. A couple see some potential profit in me yet, despite my advancing age and declining ability to fake much enthusiasm for chasing the electronic rabbit around the track any more.
Spoiler for bright-eyed youngsters: you never catch the rabbit. It's designed that way.
This is something I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about with respect to both the military and prisons.
Prisons in the US have long been a place to house surplus men as you point out. Conveniently, the 14th amendment left the carve out for their forced labor. So when labor is required, these (mostly) men can be rented out for rates below that of free labor and with no concern for trivial things like employee satisfaction & retention. I think I remember during the last wildfire season, Kamala Harris lamented the lower level of prisoners available for use as firefighters.
And of course, the way the United States operates prisons allows gang activity (with some now-street gangs finding their start as prison gangs), violence, and drug abuse to run rampant. Once released, the system is designed to suck most former prisoners straight back in (onerous parole terms, ongoing financial punishment, difficulty re acclimating to the outside world, and difficulty finding jobs). The people who can get out and stay out really have to claw their way to proving they aren't just unwanted surplus.
Prisons also create low skill jobs for other surplus men - prison guards, probation officers, and the like.
The military, similarly, is to a significant extent a housing project for surplus men. There's no reasonable geopolitical argument for maintaining US troop levels at their current state, which is why so much of the rhetoric around the enlisted military ends up centering around being a jobs program. And of course, you find the same features you note with unofficially sanctioned criminal behavior (assaults, DUIs, rapes, etc) being filtered through the military rather than civil legal structures. We export a lot of it (ask the populations around any of the American military bases around the world) or its constrained to the vicinity of military bases here.
There are some other obvious features, too: we teach "military combatives." Theoretically, we're training soldiers in close quarters, hand-to-hand combat. However, this does not reflect modern warfare whatsoever; with airstrikes, guns, artillery, tanks, cruise missiles, and countless other weapons, there is no reasonable expectation that anyone will ever end up wrestling an enemy soldier 1-on-1. What we are actually teaching all of those young (mostly) men to do is kick the shit out of each other in the barracks in a mostly safe, controlled manner.
I found this very eye opening too. I just didn't understand. Thank you Rhyd. I'd like to suggest a book that I read last year, if anyone is interested. "Rude Awakenings From Living Rough" by Peter C. Mitchell is a memoir. It tells how the author became homeless through some bad decisions, and how it seemed like the system in Britain wanted to keep him homeless. Horrifying to me. I'm sure this happens in many places. Really good.
It's interesting that you chose to write about this subject. I was just meditating on this the the other day, as I am pregnant with my first child, who is male, and all my close circle of friends have birthed males in the last 5 years. The implications for this on a society and these future men are both fascinating and terrifying. I often wonder if there is an evolutionary reason for it, such as less females to reproduce, if one wants to hypothesize that there is a population problem.
This is really helpful to help shape the extent of the problem— though heartbreaking. No one is disposable. I have been honeless actually, as a result of being cancelled— lived in the back of my truck in Williamsburg Brooklyn for many months and also in N. California. Along with many others in school buses and vans in both places, yes, mostly men. I was surprised how many of my guy friends had been homeless before too— they all shrugged it off as a thing they had to do to survive but why do any of us have to go through that really? It sucks!!
Seems you skirted the pagan practice of child sacrifice as one of the pre-Christian means of dealing with excess males. Personally, I am not sure whether it is more humane to let them grow up to be sacrificed to war and/or homelessness, or to cull them at birth. I am sure there are other options.....
Child sacrifice still happens—think China’s one-child policy. Which, incidentally, led to a surplus male problem because parents would abort female fetuses or kill off female infants because of a preference for male children in China.
I think that the issue before Christianization was less child sacrifice than it was infant exposure (placing infants in known areas to die from the elements). The pervasiveness of this practice can be intuited from its central role in a number of myths (from Sargon and Moses to Oedipus and Romulus and Remus). It was certainly a taboo topic, and in some ways Oedipus Rex can be read as a warning against the practice.
But it also served a number of other social functions. Not only could it act as a method of population control, but it also served as a donation market of sorts. Since the spots where people would leave infants were known, others would collect them to raise as their own or enslave and sell. People who left infants in those well known spaces may have expected them to survive, sometimes leaving a coin or other item that could later be used to connect them to their actual family. And of course, it was a way of dealing with birth defects, illegitimacy and gender selection, or just for superstitious reasons concerning ill omens from divination.
As an animist I echo the comment below but don’t see a problem with small scale. Our future is going to be pretty focused on our relationship with resources , unless we just self extinguish (climate tipping points) and small scale many times over is where this relationship happens, opening up a place for initiation, demonstrative aggression and actual resource sharing disputes, ritual law - all requiring aggressive channeling. That’s my hope anyways.
This essay feels like a beginning, it seems very simplified, ie prostitution = violence.
I don’t feel there are problems to be solved, I don’t care if it’s pretty or not, this lens has an “othering” about it that goes along with the premise that being domesticated humans is desired, ie farming being how we get food ( it’s one way and great for domestication) but not very effective if your an animist.
Surly this is a civilization issue rather than industrialization? I’m looking forward to your thoughts in more depth as I also feel that how we hold anger, violence and rage in culture and community is a really interesting practice as well as how we integrate into community, rather than how we become civilized, with surplus anything
I live part time in Seattle and the way this city treats the homelessness here, especially during lockdowns etc was mind blowing.
Hmm... I think this is really important but also misses some points. I don't want to saying that this isn't an important topic, but I do feel that it gets turned into men vs women. I think we have more of a surplus people problem than a surplus male problem but that female problem is less visible. I've had this conversation with several men I know who have been homeless, and I find they misunderstand the situation of women. It is common for homeless (or formerly homeless) men to be jealous of women because of the greater ease of a woman finding a sex partner to get a warm bed. This ignores a few pertinent points:
1) A female has less ability to choose not to accept this arrangement. While homeless men are at risk of sexual assault it is basically a guarantee for homeless women. Women must accept a transactional sex arrangement as an alternative to gang rape on the streets. Thus sex for shelter is not just a situation that is more available to women but a situation which is more necessary for women as well. There is also a tacit assumption I have seen that being a straight woman trading heterosexual sex for shelter is less emotional damaging and humiliating than a straight man performing homosexual sex for shelter. Which is not necessarily true. Most women I know would rather trade sex for shelter with a lesbian than a man due to the risks of pregnancy, violence, etc from men.
2) The risks of a sex for shelter arrangment are higher for women. On average, women are smaller and weaker than men and thus more vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse. Many women are also vulnerable to pregnancy and being entrapped in abusive relationships in a way men are not. I also think women are more vulnerable to the emotional consequences of sexual exploitation due to both biological and social factors, but that is a subject I won't pursue here.
3) Men overall are less vulnerable to these situations in the first place. Men have jobs available to them as laborers, as soldiers, etc. Men are also simply more likely to be hired for any job. It's easy to say that men die at higher rates in physical jobs than women do in any job. It also obscures the reality that women are denied these jobs, which often pay far more than a woman can make even with a degree. I have worked in construction and I know what I'm talking about to say that women being denied those positions is not a case of women being valued more than men but a case of women being denied high paying jobs for being female. Construction has been the only job I've ever had where I could afford to support myself without having to rely on a man.
I know a lot of men and a lot of women who have had no place to go at some point in their lives. Most women I know have had to trade sex for shelter at some point in our lives. The risks of such an arrangement are very high but for women the only other choice is literally gang rape on the streets. The choice between one abuser and many is easy to make, but it does no make homelessness a male problem- at least without an acknowledgement that women's strategies to avoid homelessness can be worse than homelessness. A homeless man can seek a shelter, retraining, a job. A woman in a sex for shelter arrangment may not be allowed her own money, may have children who are hostages to the situation, and may be beaten for trying to find a job.
I really don't mean to gloss over the way in which surplus men are considered expendable to society. It is an important topic. I just also want to provide some balance that I find lacking in this piece. I think it hard for men to really get that no matter how vulnerable they are, no matter how far down society stomps them, they don't have to fear that they will be there pregnant. Men get sympathy when they have to trade sex for the necessities of life. For women, most of the the time it's normal and expected. Men envy us being forced by finances to tolerate rape and abuse with the threat of general rape and abuse by more than one man as the alternative. It dehumanizes women and trivializes our exploitation to assume that these arrangements are voluntary, normal, or enviable. There are times when women accept such arrangements voluntarily but more often we are forced into them by a society that makes such sexual exploitation of women the norm .
I probably am way too sharp. I'm usually more patient. I just don't have it in me right now. The fact that we can be having a discussion about whether it's worse to be a man who froze to death sleeping under a bridge or to be a woman who gets killed by her domestic partner is enfuriating. Just what the fuck is this world that this is a topic of discussion? Not that I'm saying we shouldn't have the dicussion- I'm just in pure rage mode that all of the above situations are real and real people are trapped in them.
Many years ago, I was allowed to observe a Sun Dance at the Pine Ridge reservation. One of the tasks in preparation for the ceremony was to cut a large cottonwood tree, carry it to the site, stick it firmly in the ground and tie the various cords and banners to it. This was all done by a large group of strong young men, and an elder explained to me that this was a way to channel their energy in service to the tribe rather than to disruptive activities like drinking alcohol and so forth. Then, of course, there was the dance itself, which also required men to prepare for a year in advance in various ways, and to focus their strength, energy and prayers on the tribe. This was a really positive way of harnessing male energy in service to the community. I realize that it probably only works on a small scale, but small scale is probably where we need to go and is probably what the planet is going to force on us eventually anyway.
An older gay native friend of mine also attended one and told me the same thing, and he bemoaned how there was nothing of that sort for young gay urban males and believed that was what was driving their very high rates of meth addiction and suicide.
You’re right, of course. This can only work on small scales, because the men need to have a sense of connection to a community that they can actually see, rather than just to a nebulous “community” they will never meet. When it is on a larger scale, the “community” becomes the Nation or the People, and we know how that ends for them…
This same elder spoke to the entire group before the dance actually began and the men were pierced. He admonished them that the dance was not to prove how tough they were, or to impress a girlfriend or other men, but to ensure the continuity of the tribe. He emphasized the importance of right thoughts and not just right actions. Which I guess was the whole point of the sweat lodges and prayers and purifications they had to undergo the year prior to the dance. It really gave them a purpose. And it was obviously a challenging, hard task to mortify the flesh that way in order to send those prayers up the cords as they danced. Testosterone directed in service to the community, what a concept.
I always suspected (tho fortunately not from experience) that women are underrepresented among the homeless because they "trade in kind" for a roof over their head in much the way you did.
Some feminists would suggest that such in-kind trades are sometimes also called “marriages.” I do like Federici’s analysis of this, though, because she is able to hold both this reality (that women are sometimes forced by capitalism into such arrangements) and also the reality that women and men can also choose to marry each other for other reasons at the same time.
I think it is worth asking whether the reasons for marriage matter. The idea that a family can exist outside of the politcal and economic structure surrounding it is one of the ideas Federici debunks. Marriage and the division of labor between men and women are somewhat socially determined- as many leftists have found out after trying to create more equal marriages. For example, my husband is a loving a caring man. I don't stay with him primarily for shelter. Yet I can't deny the reality that for 9 of the 12 years we have been together my access to healthcare has been through his job. For about half of our relationship we lived in a house he owned and could have kicked me out of any time. His wages were always higher than mine. Even now that he's been disabled for years he gets calls begging him to go do construction work. Yet I (also a qualified tradesworker) would have to search long before finding a company to hire a woman who has been out of the workforce raising children for the past two years. None of this is meant to say that our relationship is not a good thing- we are madly in love, we have our little spats and I guess I get my way more often than not. He always offers me more money out of the money he brings in than I want to take every month. He bought me horses and a nice car and does half the housework. All of this is only meant to show that no matter how storybook the ending- no matter if Prince Charming really is charming and sweet and kind women do not escape the real world. The material conditions of our lives dictate that I will be dependent on his wage or we will both suffer for it. We tried having me be the breadwinner. A whole slew of factors ruined that- from the isolation he faced as a stay at home dad to the open mocking and taunting he recieved from his family to the simple fact that he sucked at making meal plans and shopping for them and a bunch of other domesric tasks he was never taught and I didn't have the time to teach him. The problem I see is that feminism tends towards collective punishment of all men for these problems which rightfully bothers men who make serious efforts to be better and also that these patterns- what marriage is in late-stage capitalism- are inescapable. There are good men out there and couples can't just bootstrap into equality. But with that in mind we have to consider the ways in which natural pair-bonding is expressed as marriage and how even those whose marriage is just a form of socially-accepted pair-bonding cannot escape what marriage is in our society.
You're analysis of the "Surplus Male Problem" feels intuitive and eye-opening.
Could you expand on this paragraph a bit:
"Yeah, I’m a bitter old Marxist (well, 45 in a few days anyway), so I’m still going to point out that there was an alternative collective identity proffered, that of the worker. Sure, it didn’t work out so well for communist states, who themselves ground up their surplus males in wars and gulags, but it did offer something better to men (and to women) than tacitly-legal rape, drug-addiction, gang warfare, or a life sleeping in your own piss on the street."
How do you envision identifying as a worker would improve homelessness and address surplus males? As you already point out, communist societies have attempted this and yet it didn't seem to solve the problem.
Okay, so this comes with an important caveat, which is that we don't fully know why or how this happened--whether is was because of the extreme state authoritarianism or was a feature of the communist framework itself--but rape against women, drug addiction, homelessness, and many other crimes were very low in the USSR, Soviet Bloc and in Cuba. This is even taking into account the potential of low reporting or false recordkeeping by those governments, since historians have done a pretty good job of analysing other records and reports.
Again, we don't know if it was because punishment was so severe and the police state was so omnipresent, or if it was because something about the communist framework itself (where men and women were considered equally workers, mass housing was built at really intense rates, and the illegal production of drugs meant a death sentence).
Regardless, something "worked" there. I don't think we should ever try to repeat that experiment, but what it points to is that is is possible to organize society in a way that the surplus male problem is channeled better than what liberal democracies are doing.
"I don't think we should ever try to repeat that experiment, but what it points to is that is is possible to organize society in a way that the surplus male problem is channeled better than what liberal democracies are doing."
I definitely agree with that conclusion!
“While woke ideology argues this is because of racism (and they are at least partially correct here), it cannot possibly address the larger issue of what those men might be able to do instead within modern societies.”
This is huge. Really clarifying sentence.
It's a point I think only a class analysis can bring up, and since the majority of anti-racist activists are all middle class and have college degrees, they cannot even begin to address it.
All the more fulfilling and well-paying jobs are already scarce and the labor pool for those jobs already glutted, and there's a limit to how much manual labor a post-industrial society can really employ. So, it's low-level service jobs (fast food, basically), extreme poverty, or criminality.
And I think that if we were to take any group of testosterone-soaked 17 year old men (of any race) and ask them which sounds more fulfilling and exciting to them--working at McDonalds or running drugs--they'd mostly choose the latter.
So true. And if you're someone who grew up poor or in the "overcome by fear of not being middle class anymore" segment of society (like me), odds are that it's occurred to you that maybe a class analysis explains "black on black crime" committed by black men. But you've brought that up in class, or on a social justice forum, etc, and... maybe you weren't dismissed as a class reductionist, which would be a more clearly stupid and off-base reaction, but you were dismissed more subtly. "Well obviously there's a class element, and the marxian materialist analysis isn't exactly wrong, but anyway, moving on from that..."
When I read the title, my first thought was "That is what wars are for." Your analysis of the win-win for the ruling class is pretty spot on. As a former, no ex-Marine, I saw the channeling of anger into unit loyalty and community. Although there was, as is, still at least as high a rate of sexual assault in the military per Capita as there is in theU.S. society, and racism was and is still pretty rampant. When I was in (1977-1991) the Marines were disproportionately white.
I agree with the discussion between you and Sylvia, and it does require smaller societies. But so many of those societies can become closed loops, especially those which form around a shared religious belief of what ever flavor.
As an even older, and dismayed, Marxist I agree with your analysis of the "better" social function of the former USSR, but I would not want to go there either.
There does need to be a purpose of value for all people, capitalism has turned most people into cogs whose sole purpose is to serve their owners through wage labor and gross needless consumption
Where did Kropotkin write that he wanted to see people slaughtered in war?
In his debates with Enrico Malatesta. He wanted to see Germany defeated because he believed there was something inherently malevolent in their national character, and thus took the side of French anarchists who had been calling for war against the Germans even before the war started.
His arguments are more complex than my caricature, but more importantly they form the basis of much of the anarchist/antifa support for extreme violence against people they identify as fascist. This is also being extended currently into German Antifascist support for Israeli state violence against Palestinians (some recent manifestations just occurred in Leipzig with banners that read “antifascism means pro-Israel”).
Short version: “the state is bad except when it can be used to stop bad people,” which is really like the communist “the state is bad but we must first use it to nationalize production, etc”
Thanks for enlightening me. I've heard good things about Kropotkin, but am entirely ignorant about him. Being a big fan of Dostoevsky, I too am against any form of "X is bad, but WE can use safely." History proves otherwise. Thanks again!
As a homeless surplus male with a few weeks of hostel living fumes left in the tank, I'm excited about my bright future of suicide, war, drug addiction, or sleeping in my own piss. Despite this, I'm still talking to potential employers to find yet another opportunity to be exploited in order to have the privilege of handing my paycheck to a landlord, as I've been doing for 35+ years now. A couple see some potential profit in me yet, despite my advancing age and declining ability to fake much enthusiasm for chasing the electronic rabbit around the track any more.
Spoiler for bright-eyed youngsters: you never catch the rabbit. It's designed that way.
This is something I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about with respect to both the military and prisons.
Prisons in the US have long been a place to house surplus men as you point out. Conveniently, the 14th amendment left the carve out for their forced labor. So when labor is required, these (mostly) men can be rented out for rates below that of free labor and with no concern for trivial things like employee satisfaction & retention. I think I remember during the last wildfire season, Kamala Harris lamented the lower level of prisoners available for use as firefighters.
And of course, the way the United States operates prisons allows gang activity (with some now-street gangs finding their start as prison gangs), violence, and drug abuse to run rampant. Once released, the system is designed to suck most former prisoners straight back in (onerous parole terms, ongoing financial punishment, difficulty re acclimating to the outside world, and difficulty finding jobs). The people who can get out and stay out really have to claw their way to proving they aren't just unwanted surplus.
Prisons also create low skill jobs for other surplus men - prison guards, probation officers, and the like.
The military, similarly, is to a significant extent a housing project for surplus men. There's no reasonable geopolitical argument for maintaining US troop levels at their current state, which is why so much of the rhetoric around the enlisted military ends up centering around being a jobs program. And of course, you find the same features you note with unofficially sanctioned criminal behavior (assaults, DUIs, rapes, etc) being filtered through the military rather than civil legal structures. We export a lot of it (ask the populations around any of the American military bases around the world) or its constrained to the vicinity of military bases here.
There are some other obvious features, too: we teach "military combatives." Theoretically, we're training soldiers in close quarters, hand-to-hand combat. However, this does not reflect modern warfare whatsoever; with airstrikes, guns, artillery, tanks, cruise missiles, and countless other weapons, there is no reasonable expectation that anyone will ever end up wrestling an enemy soldier 1-on-1. What we are actually teaching all of those young (mostly) men to do is kick the shit out of each other in the barracks in a mostly safe, controlled manner.
I found this very eye opening too. I just didn't understand. Thank you Rhyd. I'd like to suggest a book that I read last year, if anyone is interested. "Rude Awakenings From Living Rough" by Peter C. Mitchell is a memoir. It tells how the author became homeless through some bad decisions, and how it seemed like the system in Britain wanted to keep him homeless. Horrifying to me. I'm sure this happens in many places. Really good.
It's interesting that you chose to write about this subject. I was just meditating on this the the other day, as I am pregnant with my first child, who is male, and all my close circle of friends have birthed males in the last 5 years. The implications for this on a society and these future men are both fascinating and terrifying. I often wonder if there is an evolutionary reason for it, such as less females to reproduce, if one wants to hypothesize that there is a population problem.
This is really helpful to help shape the extent of the problem— though heartbreaking. No one is disposable. I have been honeless actually, as a result of being cancelled— lived in the back of my truck in Williamsburg Brooklyn for many months and also in N. California. Along with many others in school buses and vans in both places, yes, mostly men. I was surprised how many of my guy friends had been homeless before too— they all shrugged it off as a thing they had to do to survive but why do any of us have to go through that really? It sucks!!
Seems you skirted the pagan practice of child sacrifice as one of the pre-Christian means of dealing with excess males. Personally, I am not sure whether it is more humane to let them grow up to be sacrificed to war and/or homelessness, or to cull them at birth. I am sure there are other options.....
Child sacrifice still happens—think China’s one-child policy. Which, incidentally, led to a surplus male problem because parents would abort female fetuses or kill off female infants because of a preference for male children in China.
And that indeed led to crime spikes and other societal problems: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57154574
I think that the issue before Christianization was less child sacrifice than it was infant exposure (placing infants in known areas to die from the elements). The pervasiveness of this practice can be intuited from its central role in a number of myths (from Sargon and Moses to Oedipus and Romulus and Remus). It was certainly a taboo topic, and in some ways Oedipus Rex can be read as a warning against the practice.
But it also served a number of other social functions. Not only could it act as a method of population control, but it also served as a donation market of sorts. Since the spots where people would leave infants were known, others would collect them to raise as their own or enslave and sell. People who left infants in those well known spaces may have expected them to survive, sometimes leaving a coin or other item that could later be used to connect them to their actual family. And of course, it was a way of dealing with birth defects, illegitimacy and gender selection, or just for superstitious reasons concerning ill omens from divination.
As an animist I echo the comment below but don’t see a problem with small scale. Our future is going to be pretty focused on our relationship with resources , unless we just self extinguish (climate tipping points) and small scale many times over is where this relationship happens, opening up a place for initiation, demonstrative aggression and actual resource sharing disputes, ritual law - all requiring aggressive channeling. That’s my hope anyways.
This essay feels like a beginning, it seems very simplified, ie prostitution = violence.
I don’t feel there are problems to be solved, I don’t care if it’s pretty or not, this lens has an “othering” about it that goes along with the premise that being domesticated humans is desired, ie farming being how we get food ( it’s one way and great for domestication) but not very effective if your an animist.
Surly this is a civilization issue rather than industrialization? I’m looking forward to your thoughts in more depth as I also feel that how we hold anger, violence and rage in culture and community is a really interesting practice as well as how we integrate into community, rather than how we become civilized, with surplus anything
I live part time in Seattle and the way this city treats the homelessness here, especially during lockdowns etc was mind blowing.
Hmm... I think this is really important but also misses some points. I don't want to saying that this isn't an important topic, but I do feel that it gets turned into men vs women. I think we have more of a surplus people problem than a surplus male problem but that female problem is less visible. I've had this conversation with several men I know who have been homeless, and I find they misunderstand the situation of women. It is common for homeless (or formerly homeless) men to be jealous of women because of the greater ease of a woman finding a sex partner to get a warm bed. This ignores a few pertinent points:
1) A female has less ability to choose not to accept this arrangement. While homeless men are at risk of sexual assault it is basically a guarantee for homeless women. Women must accept a transactional sex arrangement as an alternative to gang rape on the streets. Thus sex for shelter is not just a situation that is more available to women but a situation which is more necessary for women as well. There is also a tacit assumption I have seen that being a straight woman trading heterosexual sex for shelter is less emotional damaging and humiliating than a straight man performing homosexual sex for shelter. Which is not necessarily true. Most women I know would rather trade sex for shelter with a lesbian than a man due to the risks of pregnancy, violence, etc from men.
2) The risks of a sex for shelter arrangment are higher for women. On average, women are smaller and weaker than men and thus more vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse. Many women are also vulnerable to pregnancy and being entrapped in abusive relationships in a way men are not. I also think women are more vulnerable to the emotional consequences of sexual exploitation due to both biological and social factors, but that is a subject I won't pursue here.
3) Men overall are less vulnerable to these situations in the first place. Men have jobs available to them as laborers, as soldiers, etc. Men are also simply more likely to be hired for any job. It's easy to say that men die at higher rates in physical jobs than women do in any job. It also obscures the reality that women are denied these jobs, which often pay far more than a woman can make even with a degree. I have worked in construction and I know what I'm talking about to say that women being denied those positions is not a case of women being valued more than men but a case of women being denied high paying jobs for being female. Construction has been the only job I've ever had where I could afford to support myself without having to rely on a man.
I know a lot of men and a lot of women who have had no place to go at some point in their lives. Most women I know have had to trade sex for shelter at some point in our lives. The risks of such an arrangement are very high but for women the only other choice is literally gang rape on the streets. The choice between one abuser and many is easy to make, but it does no make homelessness a male problem- at least without an acknowledgement that women's strategies to avoid homelessness can be worse than homelessness. A homeless man can seek a shelter, retraining, a job. A woman in a sex for shelter arrangment may not be allowed her own money, may have children who are hostages to the situation, and may be beaten for trying to find a job.
I really don't mean to gloss over the way in which surplus men are considered expendable to society. It is an important topic. I just also want to provide some balance that I find lacking in this piece. I think it hard for men to really get that no matter how vulnerable they are, no matter how far down society stomps them, they don't have to fear that they will be there pregnant. Men get sympathy when they have to trade sex for the necessities of life. For women, most of the the time it's normal and expected. Men envy us being forced by finances to tolerate rape and abuse with the threat of general rape and abuse by more than one man as the alternative. It dehumanizes women and trivializes our exploitation to assume that these arrangements are voluntary, normal, or enviable. There are times when women accept such arrangements voluntarily but more often we are forced into them by a society that makes such sexual exploitation of women the norm .
You put it more sharply and in more details than I, but this was what I was getting at, thanks for writing it down!
I probably am way too sharp. I'm usually more patient. I just don't have it in me right now. The fact that we can be having a discussion about whether it's worse to be a man who froze to death sleeping under a bridge or to be a woman who gets killed by her domestic partner is enfuriating. Just what the fuck is this world that this is a topic of discussion? Not that I'm saying we shouldn't have the dicussion- I'm just in pure rage mode that all of the above situations are real and real people are trapped in them.