Guest essay: Simon Pearson - You Cannot Therapy Your Way Out of a Housing Crisis
Simon Pearson of Anti-Capitalist Musings on the right wing's monetisation of masculine despair, and the deliberate destruction of the secure future.
The third guest post in the Crisis Masculinity series is by Simon Pearson, a Midlands-based political activist and a member of Anti-Capitalist Resistance, a revolutionary Marxist organisation in England and Wales focused on internationalism, eco-socialism, anti racism and anti fascism. He is the author of the Anti-Capitalist Musings blog.
James is thirty-two. He drives for Deliveroo, picks packages for Amazon Flex, and takes warehouse shifts when they come up. Seventy hours most weeks. He rents a room in Wolverhampton for six hundred and fifty pounds a month. The window won’t close properly. Black mould grows behind the wardrobe. The landlord ignores repair requests and hides behind a letting agent. James has a degree and the debt to prove it. He cannot save. He cannot plan. He cannot imagine starting a family.
His grandfather left school at fifteen in 1960, walked into an apprenticeship, joined the union, bought a terraced house on a single wage at twenty-five, raised two children, and retired with a final salary pension.
This is not a story about individual failure.
The contemporary crisis of masculinity has little to do with bruised pride or status anxiety. It is not a failure to adjust to women’s liberation. It begins from the material impossibility of social reproduction. Men cannot form stable relationships when stable relationships depend on secure income, affordable housing, and time not swallowed by work. Futures once taken for granted have been stripped away. Capital destroyed these conditions. What appears to be a crisis of manhood is the crisis of a system unable to reproduce itself, showing itself most clearly in masculine identity because men inherited roles that no longer exist in material form.
A man in his thirties now faces conditions his father would not recognise. Home ownership requires parental wealth. Secure employment has been replaced by gig platforms, fixed-term contracts, and permanent availability. Real wages fell twenty per cent between 1979 and 2024, while house prices climbed from three times median income to nine. Final Salary pensions disappeared. The system that once made adult life possible was dismantled.
Men cannot meet the expectations they inherited: forming a household, supporting dependents, owning property, planning a future, exercising competence in stable environments. The failure is structural.
Ideology insists the world still operates on effort, discipline, and personal responsibility. Material conditions prove otherwise. When expectation collides with impossibility, people internalise the crash. Economic defeat gets experienced as masculine inadequacy. Reactionary politics waits for the moment of impact. It offers scapegoats, not analysis. It offers nostalgia, not solutions. It transforms frustration into grievance and grievance into political identity.
This crisis did not begin with the financial crash or the rise of the gig economy. It is the culmination of a process that began with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and has continued, uninterrupted, through successive governments. What I call the Long 1980s — the period of institutional destruction that Thatcher initiated and that continues today — never ended. It hardened into the economic and social landscape that now defines the early twenty-first century. To understand masculine despair, you must understand the destruction of social reproduction itself.
Thatcher’s War on the Future
From 1945 to the late 1970s, the British economy rested on a settlement now remembered with undue nostalgia. It offered stable employment for many men through full employment policies, strong unions, council housing, public services, and welfare support. It rested on the male family wage, which positioned men as providers and women as dependents. Its boundaries were clear. Women undertook unwaged labour within the home. Black and Asian workers were pushed into the lowest paid jobs, shut out of skilled work, barred from union membership, and subjected to racist immigration controls. Disabled people and those who did not fit the ideal of respectability had little access to its benefits. The white male breadwinner model sat at the centre of this world, and the state defended it through law, housing allocation, and the distribution of opportunity.
The settlement should not be romanticised. But its material supports mattered. A working-class man could leave school at sixteen, enter a trade, join a union, rent or buy a home at a reasonable cost, support a family on one income, and retire with security. The system was stratified and unjust, yet it provided a legible path into adulthood for those positioned to access it.
These institutions were not natural. They were the outcome of decades of working-class struggle, concessions forced from capital, and a global environment where the existence of the Soviet Union pushed Western states to offer material security to stabilise their own working classes.
Thatcher set out to destroy this settlement. Not to reform it. To end it.
The assault on trade unions removed the organised capacity of workers to defend wages and conditions. Privatisation transferred public assets into private hands and eliminated stable employment. Right to Buy drained council housing, converting a public good into private leverage while ensuring future generations faced unaffordable rents and mortgages. Finance deregulation flooded households with credit, hiding wage stagnation behind consumer debt.
Every policy pressed in the same direction: individualise risk, destroy collective power, commodify what had been social, and impose market logic across every aspect of life.
The generation that entered adulthood in the 1980s could still access remnants of the old system while benefiting from asset inflation and cheap credit. Their children confronted a different reality: depleted housing stock, stagnant wages, insecure work, punishing rents, and higher education that required heavy debt. By the 2000s, the settlement that had once underpinned adult life no longer existed. The crash of 2008 accelerated a decline already well under way.
New Labour did not reverse any of this. It deepened it. Blair and Brown financialised what Thatcher had privatised. Private Finance Initiatives shifted public services into the hands of contractors and locked them into decades of debt servicing. Housing was treated not as shelter but as an asset whose rising value stood in for wage growth. Brown’s regulatory regime encouraged the reckless lending that fuelled the crash. The third way offered a gentler tone and the same economic programme.
The numbers show the scale of transformation. In 1979, house prices averaged three and a half times median earnings. By 2024, the ratio stood at eight and a half nationally and thirteen in parts of London. Union density fell from over half the workforce to just above one fifth. Manufacturing collapsed from a quarter of the economy to under ten per cent. Home ownership among young adults halved.
These figures mark the destruction of the foundations that made stable life possible.
Thatcherism tore apart the conditions of social reproduction. People cannot afford homes. They cannot raise children without economic anxiety. They cannot care for elderly relatives when work devours their time. They cannot maintain relationships under the stress of permanent precarity. Planning becomes impossible when every aspect of life has been made contingent.
The Entrepreneurial Self and the Monetisation of Despair
The destruction of the postwar order did not only dismantle institutions. It dismantled the figure who stood at the centre of them. The male breadwinner was not simply a cultural ideal. His was a position grounded in material supports: a stable job, a predictable wage, a home that did not drain most of his income, and a set of public services that reduced the cost of living. He exercised authority in the household because the wage made him indispensable. His identity was shaped by competence, skill, and the solidarity of shared labour.
What emerged in his place was the entrepreneurial self, permanently responsible for optimising his own value in a competitive marketplace. Stability became a sign of complacency. Security became a trap. Masculine success was no longer grounded in anything material. It became an attitude.
This transformation required decades of ideological work. Unemployment was reframed as a shortcoming of character rather than a failure of economic policy. Precarious work was sold as freedom. Low wages were justified as an incentive to improve. Every structural crisis was reinterpreted as a personal deficiency.
Reactionary politics succeeds by meeting people at the point of their anger and channelling it away from capital.
Thatcher’s claim that there was “no such thing as society” was more than provocation. It was a programme. If society does not exist, then social problems cannot exist. Only individual problems remain, each requiring individual solutions.
Jordan Peterson gave this logic a therapeutic accent. Clean your room. Stand up straight. Sort yourself out. Take responsibility.
Placed in the context of modern Britain, these instructions become surreal. A man whose rent rises each year is told to tidy his room. The room is often a damp bedsit in a carved-up Victorian terrace, rented by an absentee landlord who avoids repairs. Black mould grows behind the wardrobe. The boiler breaks each winter. Personal discipline does not touch these conditions. They are products of landlordism, wage suppression, and the financialisation of housing.
Peterson’s moment has passed. Andrew Tate’s peak has also faded. Yet their message endures among young men raised inside precarity who reached for any language that made sense of their situation. The personalities move on. The structure remains. Both men taught their audiences to understand structural crises as personal inadequacies and to treat blocked futures as puzzles to be solved through discipline or swagger.
On Reddit’s menslib and AskMen, on Discord servers and TikTok comment sections, the vocabulary is consistent: grind mindset, self-improvement, sigma mentality, getting your life together. The language changes. The underlying logic does not. Structural failure is recast as personal inadequacy. Economic defeat becomes evidence of weak character.
The entrepreneurial ideal promises autonomy while delivering insecurity. It teaches men to treat themselves as small firms: always improving, always anxious, always ready for the next opportunity that never arrives. The world becomes a ledger. Intimacy becomes labour. Care becomes inefficiency. Time becomes something to be monetised. Under these conditions, the traditional masculine expectations of providing, planning, and leading cannot be met.
This produces despair that feels personal but is systemic. Men experience economic defeat as masculine failure because the ideological scripts they inherited have never been rewritten. Their fathers achieved adulthood through institutions that no longer exist. They are told to achieve the same results through self-help, discipline, or the performance of confidence. They are told to stand up straight in rooms they cannot afford.
