For Communist Struggle Against the Manosphere!

There are likely few young people today who have not encountered online content expressing unbridled hatred of women. Whether claiming that a woman’s natural place is in the home, that sexual promiscuity is destroying society, or that men must reclaim their “natural,” dominant role, the air is rife with gendered antipathy. Young men (and women) are bombarded with caustic talk of “alpha males” and masculinity in crisis. Influencers like Myron Gaines, Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes have seen their followings rapidly expand through advocating violence against women, extolling the virtue of male hierarchies and preaching the subordination of all women as a social and biological necessity. Those who adhere to this program often describe themselves as having taken the “red pill.”

The manosphere is certainly reactionary and misogynistic, but it is an ideological response to social conditions of unemployment, poverty and declining living standards facing young men today. The justified sense that one has no future is increasingly ubiquitous among young people, regardless of gender. It is not a question of if there will be radical responses to societal decline, since we see them happening already, but who will channel these sentiments, how they do this and to what ends. Socialists must be on the front lines of this battle.

To fight the manosphere requires proposing Marxist solutions to and leading struggles against capitalism, which creates the material roots of red-pill ideology. Moral platitudes that men should “be better” and “unlearn patriarchy” are hurled in abundance by liberals. These fail to address the underlying causes of misogynistic attitudes and only fuel polarization along lines of gender. This article seeks to begin developing a revolutionary answer to the manosphere by providing a counterposition to a few of its general tropes: the sense that society is rigged against men, support for “traditional” gender roles, and the “lone wolf/self-help” mindset as a means of overcoming social barriers.

“Society Is Rigged Against Men”

Central to the manosphere is the argument that men are systematically disadvantaged and despised, and that the main force responsible for this is feminism. Let’s get one thing clear: women are and remain oppressed in relation to men by any measure in every country. That said, capitalist society does structurally disadvantage the majority of men, not because of their gender but because most men are workers. The ruling class depends on the exploitation of both men’s and women’s labor power to exist. Young men are expected to be reliable slaves, while the depredations of imperialism have pushed them out of good jobs and decent education, saddled them with insurmountable debt and trapped them in their parents’ homes.

Still, this does not explain why these declining conditions have led men to blame their plight on women. This scapegoating stems from the fact that, for the tiniest layer of elite women, conditions did improve during the era of globalization. This layer was touted as a great success of neoliberalism, while conditions for the majority of men and women deteriorated. The liberal establishment eagerly utilized “girlboss” feminism as window-dressing for a rotting society, telling exploited women that the “good life” was finally accessible even while they suffered unequal wages and discrimination. This ensured that the capitalists had the perfect scapegoat as a generation of men grew angrier over their own vanishing futures.

The liberal establishment concealed its attacks and silenced dissent by labeling men who protested crumbling conditions as bigots, while placating women and minorities by claiming that such “bigots” were the source of their problems. Behind the “culture wars” thus created, the rulers greedily plundered the oppressed.

Society is not rigged against men per se but against the working class. Men and women are both systematically exploited by the capitalists, while each is told to blame the other for their misery. Manosphere influencers, distorting this reality, engage in the same tactic—inverted. Instead of pointing to the capitalists, they insist that men blame women for the future being stolen from them. Reinforcing this divide will only make things worse for the oppressed.

The starting point must be a unified struggle to wrest resources from the common enemy responsible for worsening conditions: the capitalists. It is their endless hoarding of society’s resources that leaves opportunities scarce and men and women battling over scraps. A basic measure would be to fight for jobs for everyone, not scant positions that set men and women at each other’s throats.

Gender Roles and Misogyny in an Era of Decline

Manosphere figures strongly advocate “traditional” gender roles, often justified with extreme misogyny. A case in point is the following tweet from Andrew Tate (6 October 2025):

We need to be very clear on where a line must be drawn. A man who says a woman’s role in life is to shut up and obey her husband, or that she’s too stupid to make her own decisions, is someone any decent worker should not engage with except to oppose in the strongest terms.

On the other hand, there are men attracted to the idea of a partner who can devote herself to household chores and raising children, just as there are women who are drawn to being homemakers. These gender roles and the oppressive relationships attached to them do not simply reflect bad ideas in people’s heads; they stem from the social role of the monogamous family under capitalism. The family is the basic economic unit through which capitalism organizes and reproduces labor power. Women are burdened with most if not all of the domestic chores, while men are pushed to act as primary breadwinners and hardened overseers in the home. It is precisely this relationship that subordinates women and gives rise to misogyny. Figures like Andrew Tate eagerly utilize and magnify misogynistic attitudes to push men to play their assigned role and strengthen the family.

In these times of economic decline, people remain drawn to the family because it is one of the few means of social protection on which they can fall back. Manosphere influencers devote significant attention to reinforcing this connection between “tradition” and security. However, in reality the family is constantly eroded by the very system that relies on it. The rising cost of living makes the ideal of the nuclear family, where one partner works and the other keeps house, virtually impossible. For most families, both partners needing to work is not a matter of choice, and the notion of the “perfect homemaker” is simply an illusion.

Women’s integration into the workforce is of course a progressive development. While the ruling class always attempts to use this to extract greater profits by depressing wages for all, wage work does provide women a vital measure of independence and pulls them out of the home to some degree. At the same time, it has an oppressive character, as it is increasingly driven by economic compulsion and occurs under exploitative conditions. Moreover, working women still carry most of the burden of household chores on top of their day job.

At the same time, fulfilling the traditional provider role is burdensome for men. On the dating scene, men without stable or lucrative jobs receive little interest, yet such jobs are scarce. This lack of interest is not because women are inherently “money motivated” but because they face the same economic pressures as men and are encouraged to seek stability in the domestic sphere.

In this decaying economy, how does shoving women back into the home address the grievances of struggling men? It is already difficult to secure and keep a job and support a family. If realized, the manosphere’s program would only further impoverish young men forced to support multiple people on wages that barely sustain one, while denying women economic independence. Thus, traditional gender roles essentially act as an anchor keeping men and women down.

There is an alternative. Instead of returning to “traditional life” or suffering alone in a decaying economy, it is necessary to fight for a different society in which workers can make a real living and social conditions are substantially improved for all. For this to happen, women must be a central part of the struggle.

In contrast to this approach, both the manosphere and liberal feminism approach the struggles of men and women as a zero-sum game, where gains for one gender must mean losses for the other. This helps only the capitalists, who benefit from a workforce competing with each other and scrambling to survive. For men and women to provide and care for themselves and each other requires fighting collectively against those who own the means of production and for affordable housing, parental leave, free childcare and decent wages. Those battles are weakened when genders are set against each other.

“Pull Yourself Up by the Bootstraps”

As a remedy for eroding family structures and declining prospects, Andrew Tate advocates subjective self-improvement:

The danger here is more subtle. No one can be blamed for seeking personal development by learning, exercising, etc. But pursuing an extreme version of self-help as the ultimate answer to the problems of inequality and oppression means substituting an individualist “lone wolf” strategy for collective action. At work, it means isolation in the face of attacks by the bosses, pushing oneself for their profits in hopes of personal escape. Even if an individual rises above the lowest rung, the general social conditions immiserating men remain intact.

This approach also undermines workers’ power to launch action against capitalists. On a picket line, “get ahead” thinking leads to scabbing and weakened cohesion. Accepting unsafe work or overworking oneself in hopes of outrunning societal decline only brings burnout.

Individualism also means standing aside when others come under attack. As bosses accelerate assaults on those most vulnerable—immigrants, minorities, youth and women workers—isolation leaves everyone weaker. If the specially oppressed can be victimized, anyone can be. We must plant the seeds of common defense, even in a difficult period.

The manosphere proceeds from real problems but pushes men toward reactionary aims. It cannot provide solutions and will only reproduce exploitation and oppression. It is not women who are the source of difficult times for men, but men and women’s common capitalist exploiters. For working-class men to survive the coming storm, they must break with the manosphere and wage a unified struggle alongside oppressed women.

This does not mean simply fighting side by side for bread-and-butter issues. To build the necessary unity, women must know that their male co-workers will champion struggles against their oppression, for example, by fighting for equal pay and taking a stand against misogyny and violence toward women. This is in men’s own direct interests: forging the strongest possible unity between men and women workers will maximize the chance of successful offensives against the common enemy. If the capitalists continue to divide and conquer, we will be crushed together.