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A far wiser man than either of us once noted that the principled application of left-wing equality and classism rhetoric results in sexual justice for incels.
A not insubstantial reason for the rightward shift of young men is that they notice that the left applies Marxist logic to every problem except the one problem that they are bothered by most of all.
"A far wiser man than either of us once noted that the principled application of left-wing equality and classism rhetoric results in sexual justice for incels."
Well, left winger would answer that sex is not necessity like food and shelter, and historically aware person would answer that lack of sex is not revolutionary force, that all historically documented revolts and revolutions were triggered by shortage of food, not sex.
Ahem:
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And they'd be so wrong it's actually kind of embarassing.
Unmarried men surplus is probably one of the most well established predictors of political instability, it's just not as strong as famine, and it tends to coincide through banditry.
"Partheniae"
Mostly mythical event "at least three distinct traditions", and not rebellion - sending excess populaiton overseas to found new city was SOP at the time. None of the traditions say that Partheniae wanted to get laid, but to get land of their own.
"Sabine women"
Pure mythical event.
"Nian Rebellion"
From your own source:
"Their slogan was "'kill the rich and aid the poor.". Not: "Let's get laid!"
"Crusades"
Economic motive for crusades is completely discredited by modern scholarship - crusading was never profitable, emarking on crusade ruined both ordinary nobles and great kings, but they persevered for centuries, as if they really believed in Holy Land. And sex motive was never ever proposed by anyone.
If lack of sex is common motive for revolutions and urprisings, you would be able to cite numerous examples from well documented history, where well fed and comfortable people go set the world aflame just because they can't get laid.
I did not bring up the crusades and as you point out they are not relevant, so I don't see why you have to reflexively bring up Riley-Smith. The existence of the juvenis as a class generated by primogeniture, which is Duby's central relevant claim here is far less controversial.
And if that is criticized it's under the auspices of primogeniture not being as universal as he assumed, not because it can't mechanically generate the social class he names and its set of incentives.
As to the Nian Rebellion, I'm just going to straight up link the article that makes the relevant claim https://kar.kent.ac.uk/11430/1/surplus_men_IS_article.pdf I think it's a bit silly to deny that the Guang gun existed as a class because you want to believe bandit slogans literally.
Moreover, these are but the most famous examples, you can draw from an almost endless well here, James Barrett or Ben Raffield have made this same argument for the Viking invasions among others: https://profmarkcollard.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Raffield-et-al-2017-EHB.pdf
The claim that a surplus of unmarried men generates social instability because it creates incentives for defection and banditry is supported by a lot of cross discipline scholarship. I could also have mentionned the work of Laura Betzig which goes over a similar argument on 104 societies, surely that's numerous examples enough: https://www.academia.edu/48337408/Despotism_and_Differential_Reproduction_A_Darwinian_View_of_History
Now it's not airtight and beyond question, what is in social sciences, but the idea that this widely shared and not fringe at all thesis is something that an "historically aware" person could dismiss it out of hand is ridiculous.
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Indeed thé crusaders bragged about being unusually non-rapey by the (low)standards of armies at the time. We can probably take this with a grain of salt, but it does indicate sex wasn’t the motive(armies which are motivated by sex slaves tend to brag about how many and how beautiful their captured women are).
Just because you don’t believe in medieval Catholicism doesn’t mean they didn’t.
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No joke, this is one core reason Marxist movements will always fail, since sexual reproduction is a massive bottleneck, and yet by all lefty logic every person should be 'entitled' to reproduce, yet women are biologically wired to jealously guard their own reproduction, so 'distribution' of sexual contact, let alone actual reproduction, will ALWAYS turn hierarchical, unequal, and skewed towards the 'attractive' males, whilst attractiveness itself is never equally distributed.
Capitalism is unique in that it solves this in a way that enables a man not endowed with reproductive value at birth to channel his energies away from zero-sum conflict toward things (productive economic value) that benefit both himself and society.
I wouldn't say that's unique to capitalism, you are describing most functional social orders throughout history, hell probably the very concept of civilization as a whole.
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"one core reason Marxist movements will always fail"
Strange that failure of IRL Marxism (after brilliant success after success that culminated in Marxist governments controlling one third of human race) had nothing to do with this "core reason".
No one opponent of Marxism, whether outside or inside Marxist states, ever cited lack of sex as reason why Marxism is wrong.
Yes, Marxism has multiple "core" reasons for failure; it's probably reasonable at a certain point to just call them reasons.
Still: can you imagine any factors that muddy the link between "X is a reason that Marxism fails" and "X is reported as a reason that Marxism fails"?
For example: can you imagine a social incentive against saying "I oppose X because it leads to me having less sex?"
I don't think the lack of explicitly reporting a particular reason is good evidence the the reason wasn't important.
But people being "entitled to reproduce" was never an actual issue in Marxist societies?
It's not clear to me how that connects to my comment.
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Its not lack of sex, its the basic impossibility of economic calculation when society reaches a certain level of complexity.
The problem is, the distribution of sex is intractable at EVERY level above, maybe, the village, without some distributed coordination method.
Go look at various attempts at forming small scale communes and see how many of those failed because one guy started hogging all the women despite the representation that it was all about free love and equality. Okay, its also because all the labor ultimately fell on the men, or a small subset of them, they can't even get the distribution of LABOR right in these cases.
Ironically, you're thinking too big. Not every "Marxist movement" is the Soviet Union.
Oh, and just a note guess what China has to start cracking down on in the name of Marxism.
Because even under Marxism with Chinese characteristics, you can't make women WANT to settle for just any dude.
This issue is even more present in hyper-capitalist Korea and Japan it doesn't have anything to do with Marxism. It has to do with Asian family social structures being traditional while the economic structure has become more egalitarian along with small family size. Women don't want to get married because they are expected to work, take care of the house hold, take care of the children, take care of her husbands parents and take care of her parents. It's gotten to where Asian families are attempting to unload the entire social burden of an extended family onto one 28 year old woman it's not sustainable and is a big part of the collapse of birthrates and marriage in these societies.
China under Mao didn't have these problems. Many other more horrific ones but not these ones.
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