What Will We Do With The Men?

Capitalism, Immigration, and the Surplus Male

You’ve seen the videos by now, I’m sure, and have already heard so much commentary about the incident that your opinion of what happened is by now ossified. But I’m going to write about it anyway.

Last week, around 78,000 people, the overwhelming majority of whom were men, rushed into the city of Ceuta.

In that sentence I wrote, there are at least two facts that might already sit wrong for you. The initial figures reported by European and British news outlets for the sudden migration were much lower: 30,000, up to 40,000.

While it can be hard to estimate the size of a crowd with any real accuracy, watching the way news outlets here seemed to under-report the amount of people felt a bit peculiar. The Spanish government has actually reported numbers much closer to the final total quite early, but then deleted references to these figures from official websites. Many news outlets across Europe kept the figures to under 30,000 for the first few days, eventually (begrudgingly?) increasing them to the Spanish government figures. And most hilariously, The Guardian, for about half a day, had stated that there were only between 1,200 and 3,000 people who had crossed.

Watching the shifting reporting here, it was hard not to get the sense that there was a conscious effort to downplay what was happening. Contributing to that sense was how news outlets reported the sex distribution of the would-be migrants. While there have been no official demographic figures reported (and none will be forthcoming, I’m sure), in photo after photo and video after video, it was hard to find a woman in the crowds. When news outlets did report on sex differences in the crowd, it was usually some form of “men, but also many women and children,” a statement so ambiguous that it tells you nothing at all.

Both the size and the sex distribution of the crowd are relevant details. First of all, consider that Ceuta, the Spanish city into which the masses poured, has a population of around 82,000 people. Compare that number to the 78,000 people who entered, and you start to understand the true scale of the event. Add into that the fact that the arrivals were predominantly men, and you can then get a sense why it might have felt a bit worrisome for some people. Imagine 60 to 70 thousand English or Australian men, mostly in the peak of adolescent male testosterone production, all suddenly pouring into cities with similar populations (for instance, Gary, Indiana or Galway in Ireland). No matter the religion or skin color of the new arrivals, that many men all showing up at once might feel less like a migration and more an invasion.

This is the “Surplus Male” problem that I’ve written about before. Large numbers of unattached and unemployed men cause problems in societies, and it’s such a repeating problem in history that governments and kings have found all sorts of horrid and violent ways to deal with it. For instance, in many European towns during the Middle Ages, it was common for mayors or councils to suspend laws against rape and prostitution when there were too many men causing havoc, re-channeling male adventurism into abuse against women. More commonly, though, such men have been sent off to war, and war is basically just armies of surplus males ordered to fight other surplus males.

To think of some men being “surplus” sounds awful, and it is. But it’s also a material observation that helps explain quite a few problems in society that ideology, with its prepackaged answers, cannot explain. Property and violent crime go up in areas where there are a lot of single men without other means to attain resources. It’s practically inevitable once you think about it.

In fact, try to imagine it. Imagine you’re a 20-year-old with no money, no higher-level education, no local family to rely upon, and no work opportunities readily available to you. And then you see shops full of nice things you don’t have, pass people on their way to and from their jobs with good clothes and expensive phones, and see advertisements everywhere for all the things you should have but don’t.

Now, what would stop you from trying to steal from others? Maybe the police, if they’re even present. Maybe your own fear, if you’re not desperate enough to overcome it. Maybe your own deep moral structure, if for some reason you’ve already had the kinds of people in your life to teach you to develop it one at so young an age.

The more enterprising you are, the more likely you might instead get into selling drugs, or joining a gang, or getting involved in some other illicit collaboration. But if you’re not enterprising, you’ve probably just started doing drugs, or drinking, or have otherwise given up on life.

But there’s one other possibility, and it’s really your best option. It’s the same option that men throughout known history in your same situation have pursued. You could always leave, try your luck elsewhere. And it’s such a universal solution that our myths, folklore, and fairytales are replete with men doing the exact same thing, leaving home, answering a call, finding adventure and meaning in another land.

Now, think about all the men who poured into the town of Ceuta. Many of them fit exactly this situation. They’re surplus males, men unable to find work in the places they live. And so they left those places and camped out in the villages and towns bordering Spain’s African frontier, in the hopes that they might find something better in Europe.

But Europe already has its own surplus male problem, especially since the kinds of manual work that such men can do (factory work) have been outsourced to the Asian continent for decades. The work that is most available now often requires extra university training (engineering, technological, health care) or several years of apprenticeship (skilled construction work: carpenters, bricklayers, electricians) that an immigrant is likely not to have already. So, adding surplus males from outside Europe to the surplus male population within Europe would just mean fewer opportunities for either group.

Looking at what happened in Ceuta this way cuts away all the false consolation of ideology. Ideology gives easy answers and smears a veneer of simplicity over terrifyingly brutal material realities. Ideology on the “left” gives us pat answers that feel good: the responsibility of colonialism, the obligations of “wealthy” nations to the poor, the racism of anti-immigrant critics. Ideology on the “right” gives answers just as inaccurate: the danger of Islam, the cultural and genetic proclivities towards violence in non-Europeans, global conspiracies to weaken Christianity. Neither side even tries to notice the global inevitability of migration as capitalism implodes and the Earth’s bio-systems shift, that many of their own sons and maybe they, too, might soon become surplus.

In fact, many men already are, and capitalists have come up with some rather creative ways to keep them docile enough not to wreak havoc yet. Addiction to video games, to porn, and to social media aren’t just unfortunate side-effects of technology, but rather part of their purpose. Giving young males masturbatory ways to channel innate drives that society stopped valuing keeps them from causing too much disruption to the system.

And it’s working, at least for now, but the reported “male loneliness” statistics keep increasing, while the rate of baseline male testosterone decreases. And on that second matter, it’s hard not to wonder why there’s been a 50% reduction since 1972. While no one seem to agree on the cause, “industrial pollutants” are a pretty good answer if you include technology as an industrial pollutant and obesity and diabetes as deleterious health effects of industrial food production.

It’s also hard not to wonder whether such a biological shift has been intentional, but there’s a simpler way to understand this. Surplus males in capitalism are treated the same way as surplus males in industrial agriculture. In industrial dairy production, male calves are considered surplus, slaughtered and packaged as veal or allowed another year or two of life to be eaten as beef. In industrial egg production, male chicks are “macerated” or “shredded” (dropped into grinding machines) while still alive, since it’s considered inefficient to let them live long enough to be killed for meat. The only males who get to survive are the ones kept around for breeding purposes.

Call those breeding males “elite” and you can start to see something truly horrifying about the way capitalism sorts men, too. Men selected for their usefulness get to stick around, get better feed and nicer pastures. They get land, wealth in the form of salaries, even the chance to “breed” (to have families). The more useful they are, the nicer their jobs, the higher their pay, the better conditions for living.

The ones that aren’t useful? Well, they’re surplus. Some of them leave their homes and migrate, trying to cross borders into lands where they might still get to show themselves as useful. But there are fewer and fewer places where that’s possible, fewer places where they’re welcome because those places already have their own surplus males.

None of this is to say that there aren’t female migrants, or that life is any better for them than it is for men. But the migration patterns we keep seeing are mostly men, and even the most anti-immigrant groups in Europe and the United Kingdom make allowances for humanitarian and social aid for immigrant women. But no political groups, left or right or whatever, have any idea what to do with this surplus of men.

Neither do I. However, I keep thinking about how narrowly I’ve escaped being surplus in my life. The material conditions into which I was born and in which I lived up through adolescence should have made me surplus. Only my own drive, my own will to live, my own desire for something better kept me from such a fate. And that desire to escape my fate made me a migrant, both internally within the country of my birth and eventually across an ocean into other countries.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve such sympathy for such men. What the fuck else can you really do in such circumstances? Stay and be poor and miserable, or cross a threshold into the unknown? Try to eke out subsistence in a land that doesn’t have room for you, or try out your luck in a land that doesn’t know you and maybe doesn’t even want you?

And this isn’t to ignore or even downplay the inevitable problems that migration causes. That’s where the “left” is at its most dishonest, refusing to even acknowledge that immigration gets weaponized. Morocco actually appears to have encouraged the flood into Ceuta, while two of its allies (Israel and the United States) cheered on a chance to make their strongest critic in Europe look weak. Benjamin Netanyahu’s son even once publicly encouraged Arabs to invade Spanish towns in Morocco so they’d stop trying to “decolonize” Palestine, and multiple journals have concluded this was a “hybrid attack” likely influenced by the United States. For instance, here’s what The New Statesman had to say:

That the mass incursion at Ceuta was an organised hybrid attack is not a matter on which reasonable people can differ. Spanish security cameras caught officers of Moroccan intelligence salted in among the supposed migrants. There is verified footage of trucks ferrying the crowds to the frontier, and of uniformed agents shepherding them along like so many reluctant tour groups. But the evidence, though welcome, is almost a redundancy. Crowds of 60,000 do not assemble spontaneously anywhere on Earth, and least of all in Morocco, where the state security services take a proprietary interest in gatherings of around five.

And as Unherd stated:

Some analysts suspect that Morocco’s sudden lapse in enforcement may be in response to deepening ties between Spain and Algeria — the latter alleged to have sponsored Sahrawi separatists in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara. In 2021, Morocco similarly waved through some 8,000 migrants to punish Madrid for hosting a Sahrawi leader. But a related — more insidious — reason for the latest breach is that Rabat is leveraging an increasingly close relationship with the Trump administration and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel.

MAGA has branded Spain Public Enemy No. 1 over its government’s strident posture towards the US and Israel during the Iran war. The socialist government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has refused to allow Washington access to its Rota and Morón military bases, its consistent failure to meet Nato defence-spending targets also fuelling MAGA ire. In March, the centre-right American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin wrote a policy brief calling on the White House to formally recognise Ceuta and Melilla as occupied Moroccan territory. True to the spirit of Third-World decolonialism, Rubin wrote that Spain was “a colonial power running colonies across the Strait of Gibraltar”.

It’s especially the American and Israeli far-right use of “decolonialism” as a weapon that should give anyone who still considers themselves a leftist pause. Yes, part of Spain is on the African peninsula, and this is a legacy of Spain’s colonial past. But go farther back and you’ll notice that most of Spain was once occupied by an empire whose vestiges are now Morocco and Algeria. And anyway, no one should think for a second that Israel or the United States care about decolonizing anything.

And immigrants are weaponized in other ways. Capitalists love mass immigration because it deflates wages, so they’ve more than enough reason to force acceptance of immigrants upon communities that cannot accommodate more people. And years of diminishing social service reserves (especially retirement funds) have created situations where nations are desperate to have more people to prop up collapsing benefit systems.

All this is true. So, too, is the fear and frustration of those watching their own communities disintegrate. So, too, is the desperation of migrants who want to escape their fates. There’s no one way of looking at this, no singular answer to the crisis.

And yet, again, when I look within to try to understand what’s without, I’m rooting for those surplus males, and also for the rest of us.

Right now, there’s an immigrant helping my husband and I maintain our out-of-control garden. He’s 18, he just moved here with his mother, and he doesn’t speak any of the three official languages of Luxembourg. He had to quit school, just arrived last month when his mother married a nationalized immigrant. He has no useful education, has no trade skills, barely even speaks English, and thus has all the conditions of fate that would make him a surplus male.

But fate isn’t the only thing that determines our life. Sometimes, something or someone intervenes, gives us a chance, offers a different map. The guy can garden, it turns out, and he’s good at it and loves it. We’re hoping to get his skills up enough to encourage a friend to take him on as an apprentice for his landscaping business. I don’t want to see him ground up like a male chick in an industrial egg factory, and so I’m doing something about it.

Besides writing about it, that’s all I can really do. But writing about it is also something to do, because I’m hoping you, my dear readers, understand what more can be done. We can accept our own fate and the fates of others, we can rail and rant about the decisions of the powerful and the crises they cause, or we can try to intervene a little, to short-circuit fate with the ineluctable pull of destiny.

There’s probably some male in your life fated to be surplus, to get ground up by this stupid system, and you might be able to change that. Because really, what else can we do?

---

Want to understand more about your own destiny and how to get there? That’s what my coaching is for.

You can find out more here, or book your first appointment here.