There are strong and persuasive arguments that state violence and patriarchy respectively preceded class historically, and that inclines me to think that class isn’t neccessary the anchor a lot of old school marxists make it out to be.
Edit for clarity: class is one of the most important axis of struggle, and cannot be abandoned. I’m saying that the struggle against patriarchy and state violence need to take equal precedence.
I would argue that the complete avoidance of class among progressives during the 2010s led straight to the rising fascism we see today.
Patriarchy perhaps, but I’m not sure you can even have a state without class division, let alone state violence.
Nevertheless, even if racism etc are superstructure we still need to fucking fight it.
There’s a hypothesis for the beginning of the state that goes as follows:
Sedentary communities are often surrounded by nomadic raiders sustain themselves in part off the products made by the sedentists.
But, raiding too often is unsustainable, so they’d keep track of who they’d raided, and the collections became more routine. For various reasons, the nomadic raiders would settle down as a ruling class.
So in this account, the state doesn’t emerge to manage class contradictions, but as a form of class rule.
That’s…interesting…matches some things like the Nordic invasions of England etc.
But once the raiding is formalised, that’s kind of an immediate class contradiction in production isn’t it?
As far as I understood it patriarchy was actually a result of class society, and prior to its emergence societies were typically egalitarian, as evidenced by many of the societies that were encountered by European colonists. A Marxist anthropologist and feminist named Eleanor Leacock wrote about this in the 80s, in a book called Myths of Male Dominance, here is a short article about her work. Also I don’t really understand how you would be able to abolish patriarchy if it really was inherent to humans, wouldn’t always stick around in some sense?
Defining gender was the original division of labor, the idea that women should rear children and thus reproduce the social relations in a primitive society is the original class divide. Engels describes this well in the Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.
These concepts aren’t distinct struggles. Class is the base and gender is a superstructure of that base. Struggling against gender based oppression is also struggling against the way capitalism exploits gender to reproduce class relations.
