They said “tens of thousands of years” and you thought that meant two centuries before the Russian Revolution. I think you’ve mistaken dominant narratives of history as a European discipline with what has actually happened in the past. Yes, there are very many accounts of hierarchal violence, but that isn’t descriptive of how human beings behave. Most of what we’ve built has come from cooperation (think about how dependent the internet infrastructure is on free labour and cooperation) and the greatest obstacle we’ve faced as our communities grow is the exploitation that arises from patriarchal hierarchies. Exploitation is the site of those brutalities youre referring to.
Marx also wasn’t a historian, and wasn’t very knowledgeable about societies outside of Europe at all. That isn’t something we can fault him for as though it was his responsibility, but it is something you need to take into account if you’re going to engage with this progressive history model (Hegel didn’t know about’em either).
Kathleen Duval makes an interesting argument in Native Nations that we have evidence that indigenous Americans, in particular those who lived in relation to the Cahokia (Mississippian) civilisation, intentionally altered the trajectory of their social organization in response to this same exploitation. This isn’t to say hierarchy never existed again, though certainly in a less stratified way than the European settlers that arrived a couple centuries later, but it does teach us that humans do not want to live that way, which means they do not have to.
They said “tens of thousands of years” and you thought that meant two centuries before the Russian Revolution. I think you’ve mistaken dominant narratives of history as a European discipline with what has actually happened in the past. Yes, there are very many accounts of hierarchal violence, but that isn’t descriptive of how human beings behave. Most of what we’ve built has come from cooperation (think about how dependent the internet infrastructure is on free labour and cooperation) and the greatest obstacle we’ve faced as our communities grow is the exploitation that arises from patriarchal hierarchies. Exploitation is the site of those brutalities youre referring to.
Marx also wasn’t a historian, and wasn’t very knowledgeable about societies outside of Europe at all. That isn’t something we can fault him for as though it was his responsibility, but it is something you need to take into account if you’re going to engage with this progressive history model (Hegel didn’t know about’em either).
Kathleen Duval makes an interesting argument in Native Nations that we have evidence that indigenous Americans, in particular those who lived in relation to the Cahokia (Mississippian) civilisation, intentionally altered the trajectory of their social organization in response to this same exploitation. This isn’t to say hierarchy never existed again, though certainly in a less stratified way than the European settlers that arrived a couple centuries later, but it does teach us that humans do not want to live that way, which means they do not have to.