Andrew Kimbrell

In “The Masculine Mystique”, Andrew Kimbrell discusses several important ideas.

One is the concept of enclosure. Kimbrell defines enclosure as the “...historical process by which a people are separated from their ancestral work and land...”

The process began in Europe in about 1600 a.d., he says. “The land-enclosure phenomenon is not a mere historic curiosity. It has played a key role in shaping modern life. Whether practiced in late-medieval Europe or late-twentieth-century South American, enclosure caused the most traumatic changes in the lives of working men and their families in modern history. It shattered traditional communities, created untold millions of economic refugees, and disrupted virtually every element of the lives of the people on whom it descended.”

Kimbrell goes on to describe the historical backdrop against which this drama was first played out:

For centuries during the Middle Ages the village commons were the primary social units in England. In this system the peasantry comprised a village community of shareholders who utilized the majority of land on a collective basis. The commons system varied in each particular area of England, but it generally involved peasants pooling their individual holdings into open fields that were jointly cultivated. ...cynical appropriation of village commons began... In the early decades of enclosure wealthy landowners threw up fences around the formerly commonly owned fields, permanently cutting off tens of thousands of peasants from the land their families had used for hundreds of years. ...agricultural land in the village was allowed to be bought up by the lords and large landowners, who could then claim all rights to the common meadows and pastures. The peasants and serfs were left without land or subsistence.”

When families were stripped of their auxiliary resources, men were left with no social function but to become wage earners. They lost their independence. Meanwhile, large landowners were becoming the new financial elite.

...millions of peasants dislodged from the commons were forced by circumstance to migrate to the newly industrialized cities. ...became the cheap and available labor required for the new mills and factories of the Industrial Revolution. They no longer worked in the interests of the community, or for family, or religious duty, but rather for wages that barely allowed for survival. Event parents and children were separated as each member sought some location where an employer would buy his or her labor.”

In sections titled “The Machine Man,” “The Competition Man,” “The Profit Man” and “The Power Man,” Kimbrell discusses the “isolation, hostility and suspicion” bred by such male stereotypes. In chapters about husbandry, father policy and mentoring, Kimbrell proposes alternatives to the destructive myth of machismo.

“The Masculine Mystique” even includes a nice bit of investigative reporting: Kimbrell reveals widespread abuse of Ritalin as a means of drugging boys who have no physical medical problem. He suggests that many children diagnosed with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are actually suffering from emotional problems brought on by the disintegration of the family unit.

Anyone who thinks current standards of male behavior sprang from innate male character will likely be surprised to see how Kimbrell reveals the influence of unmoderated industrialism. Much more than a book about men liberating themselves from stereotypes, “The Masculine Mystique” points to a saner lifestyle.

Opinion:  How did we get here?

The way we think about independence and privacy today has roots in history, much of it tied to wealth and control. In England during the 1700s and 1800s, the government allowed wealthy landowners to take over shared public lands through a process called “enclosure.” These lands had once been used by ordinary people to grow food, graze animals, or make a living.

With enclosure, most people lost access to this vital resource and were forced to work for low wages on someone else’s property or in dangerous factories. This sudden loss of freedom created a sense of humiliation and fear among those who were struggling to survive, and over time, those feelings of loss and powerlessness passed down through generations.

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In the United States, the story of independence has always been celebrated, but it hides a contradiction. Many Americans value freedom and personal choice but often feel powerless in the face of large systems like corporations, governments, or even economic conditions they can’t control.

This contradiction can be traced back to the generational trauma caused by extreme wealth inequality. The gap between the rich and the poor grew even wider because tools that could have helped balance the scales—like fair wages, accessible education, or strong social safety nets—were often absent. The result? A society where people learned to focus on individual survival rather than challenging the systems that created the inequality in the first place.

Today, this history shows up in surprising ways. Many people in the U.S. avoid participating in systems they see as corrupt or useless, like voting in elections. This isn’t laziness—it’s often rooted in the belief that individual actions won’t make a difference. Ironically, while Americans pride themselves on independence, this mindset has made it easier for powerful corporations to take control of people’s lives in ways the public often doesn’t notice.

For example, companies collect enormous amounts of personal data online, using it to funnel more money into already-overstuffed pockets, while most people don’t even question that. Just like the enclosure of land, this quiet takeover of our private lives leaves individuals with less autonomy.

Understanding how we got here is the first step to fighting back.

If we recognize that the same patterns of wealth and power are at play today, we can start to make better decisions about how we live. Choosing to withhold our shopping dollars, or not to hand over our personal data to online corporations, are ways to reclaim some of that lost independence.

It’s a way to say that we value our freedom enough to protect it, even in a world where it feels like the deck is stacked against us.
—K. Purtell

On labor

Karl Marx

The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former ... [T]he historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.
― Karl marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

In money-lenders’ capital the form M-C-M [Money to purchase Commodities, which are sold for more Money] is reduced to the two extremes without a mean, M-M , money exchanged for more money, a form that is incompatible with the nature of money, and therefore remains inexplicable from the standpoint of the circulation of commodities. Hence Aristotle: “since chrematistic [of, relating to, or occupied in the gaining of wealth] is a double science, one part belonging to commerce, the other to economic, the latter being necessary and praiseworthy, the former based on circulation and with justice disapproved (for it is not based on Nature, but on mutual cheating), therefore the usurer is most rightly hated, because money itself is the source of his gain, and is not used for the purposes for which it was invented.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital - Capital

The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.

The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Chapter 32)

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