The Problem with “Patriarchy”

An Anarcho-Marxist critique of the term Patriarchy

Farmers Whitby / Dinner Time (image via Wikimedia: Public Domain)

I was talking with a friend of mine about the Patriarchy a few weeks back. He was dating an artsy Berlin girl who was denouncing it and he found it rather off-putting. We talked about it and naturally, as two men talking about the Patriarchy will, we got to the roots of it. Now, I want to share my insightful perspective with the world so that I can do my humble part to save the world from this polarising discourse. In this renaissance of Free Speech when great men are putting the world to rights, it seems only fitting.

A Marxist Analysis of Patriarchy

Let’s start with definitions; this one from Oxford captures it for me:

“a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.”

ChatGPT gave me a little more:

“Patriarchy is a social system in which men hold primary power and dominate in roles of leadership, moral authority, social privilege, and control over property. It often extends to institutions such as government, business, religion, and the family, where male authority is prioritized and reinforced through cultural norms, laws, and traditions.”

Patriarchy then, is a system that favours men over women. So, if you want to fight “the Man” then it seems your natural opponent is men.

But something Ken Wilber wrote has stuck with me. He seems to have stitched it together from a few different Feminist sources¹ (but god knows Wilber does enough abuse to his original sources with his “orienting generalisations” that his misreading may be the nail in the coffin right out the gate). Wilber:

“Patriarchy has two rather different meanings in feminist literature. (1) For many radical feminists, patriarchy (as male domination) has been present from day one, from literally the beginning of the human race (Alison Jaggar takes this view); women who don’t feel dominated have been brainwashed to accept their condition. (2) For the ecofeminists, who feel that horticultural societies dominated by the Great Mother were in many ways ideal (Gimbutas, Eisler), the patriarchy refers to the shift from matrifocal (or equifocal) to patrifocal modes, and thus has been with us for the last five thousand years or so.

Patriarchy 1 is, in effect, the familization of the male via the role of the father, and that indeed has been with us from day one; that was not avoidable. Patriarchy 2 occurred across the globe as horticulture gave way to plow and horse societies, which selected for physical strength/mobility; nor was that avoidable either, except by developmental arrest” (Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality: )

So the argument is that a society’s tilt towards Patriarchy or Matriarchy is determined by the economic Base. When that Base is horticulture — a mode of production in which women produced 80% of the food² — we get a Matriarchal society. Once the Base shifts from horticulture to agriculture however things change. While even pregnant women could operate a handheld hoe, women would have miscarriages if they operated a plough while pregnant and men’s naturally greater strength made them more suitable for the task.

In a nutshell: it’s a classic Marxist argument about the mode of production (Base) in a society determining its culture (Superstructure). For the rare Marx and Jung nerds out there (there are dozens of us, dozens!), this is where things get real interesting. This shift in the Base leads to a transformation of the Superstructure. Wilber again:

“Peggy Sanday has demonstrated that predominant female deity figures appear almost exclusively in horticultural societies—about a third of them have female-only deities, and another third have male and female deities; whereas virtually all agrarian societies have male-only deities. Thus, one of the conclusions of volume 2 [of Wilber’s book series] is that where women work the fields with a hoe, God is a Woman; where men work the fields with a plow, God is a Man.” (Wilber 1995:225)

Now before anybody thinks we should be getting back to hoes, Wilber points out that these Matriarchal societies were no utopia:

“And thus the actual statistics tell the real story: as Lenski’s massive data makes obvious, an astonishing 44 percent of these societies engaged in frequent warfare and over 50 percent in intermittent warfare (which effectively challenges the notion that the Great Mother societies were “peace-loving”); 61 percent had private property rights; 14 percent had slavery; and 45 percent had bride price. And let us delicately ignore the fact that many horticultural societies practiced ritual human sacrifice, which was required, among other things, to insure crop fertility (one such site revealed eighty one-year-old girls sacrificed to the Great Mother).“ (Wilber 2000: 474)

Later in the book, Wilber connects the rise of Feminism from Wollstonecraft to Butler with a new evolution in the techno-economic Base: the Industrial Revolution. For the first time since horticulture, physical strength was becoming less central to the dominant mode of production. So, as we move further away from physical toil into the realm of Drucker’s “knowledge work”, the techno-economic Base makes a Superstructure of gender equality possible. Unlike driving a plough, you don’t need physical strength to pick up a phone and typing on a keyboard eight hours a day isn’t going to cause miscarriages at scale.

On an illustrative transhumanist aside: consider one of the current problems of gender inequality: the gender pay divide. I’ve seen right wing pundits talk about the need to factor maternity leave into this equation at which point the gender divide all but disappears. Assuming the truth of this statement for argument’s sake, in our Huxleyian transhumanist future where babies are born from an artificial womb you can see a tweak in the relationship between women and the Base. Women would now be disencumbered of their biological handicap in the workplace. Had we a pantheon of gods still, that is the point at which divine parity would reign in the firmament once again³.

The astute reader will have picked up on my rhetorical use of the term Huxleyian to imply the undesirability of said future. That seems like a good point to talk about my personal strategic point.

“Patriarchy”’s strategic problem.

As I was saying before I went off on the Wilber-Marxist rabbit hole: since Patriarchy is a system that favours men over women, if you want to fight “the Man” then it seems your natural opponent is men.

But as we’ve seen that’s not really the case. All the world’s a techno-economic Base and all the men and women merely players. The story of Patriarchy isn’t a story of men oppressing women; it’s a story of a mode of production oppressing women.

That is to say: the real enemy is the System.

My argument then, is that Patriarchy discourse shouldn’t be framed as a binary but as a ternary. There are women; there are men; there is the System. There are three forces at play — not two. Of course, when the System is favouring another side of the ternary this group are going to be incentivised to protect said arrangement but they will ultimately betrayed by the System.

The System is fickle — sometimes favouring women (horticulture), sometimes favouring men (agriculture). The incentives of the System drive innovations in the Base which ultimately transform the Superstructure thus leading the dominant group to undermine their own hegemony.

Fold class and colonialism into the mix and things change again. The recent historical version of the System hasn’t just favoured men. It favoured men born in a certain techno-economic system — most commonly born between a latitude 60ºN and 30ºN⁴. Following Jared Diamond’s argument in Guns, Germs and Steel⁵ this has little to do with the people living there but is more like a game of musical chairs. Had the continents arranged themselves differently, the System could have favoured 30ºS to 60ºS just as easily. On Venus, the closer proximity to the sun would have pushed this range further north; on Mars, further south. As it stands, the historical lay of this world facilitated a smooth flow between the citizens of these latitudes. This movement was rhizomatic — not like the communication of one government department with another but like osmosis where water moves where it is easiest to move.

All of which to say: the favouring of men over women is contingent, not necessary. Patriarchy is not the design of a god but the path of least resistance to “the System”. Therein lies the strategic problem with “Patriarchy”. Framed as men oppressing women, you make war on other victims of the System and even if you win (i.e. women achieve world domination) you only end up recapitulating the same System; the house always wins.

There’s plenty more rambling I could do about “the System” — this strange non-conscious entity inhabited by a ghost (by which I mean the uncannily agentic nature of said System). But I would only be embarrassing myself further. For more on that I’d recommend Expressive Egg’s post “The Technological System”. After tracking this down again just now from my reading list I see a lot of his thinking mixed in with Wilber in the gestation of this article. It’s a long enough read but here’s a relevant highlight taster:

“So what is The Real Problem? What is the ‘woods’ that so very few people can look at squarely and which is, ultimately, behind all the terrible ‘trees’ that they target? What is that which both the right and the left serve, which runs their lives and ours? What is the cause of the horror we see around us — and feel within us — and that, many of us now know for sure, can only get worse? It is the technological system, and it is the human ego which built and maintained it. I’ll restate that. The horror, the nightmare world we live in, which is set to get worse and worse and worse, is the result of the unnatural technological system we have built, and, deeper than that, the ego which built and which continues to maintain and defend it. Until this is understood and acted upon, we will get nowhere, either collectively or individually.”

And a nice edge of the inside swipe at leftism:

“Here we might make special mention of ‘the left’, that group of people who pour their energies into getting a fairer wage for Bangladeshi sempstresses, defending minority interests, promoting what they call ‘democracy’, trying to save the sea-plankton, criticising the American military juggernaut and battling away at greedy, ‘undemocratic’ landowners. Not that any of these aren’t real threats, but that, overall, attacking these targets draws fire away from the real source of our troubles; which is why leftism (in all its forms) is the most effective means by which the system can protect and perpetuate itself.”

I’ve long had a gag reflex to Anarchists talking about “unnatural” culture, After all, culture is by definition unnatural but that doesn’t mean the natural is better. But alas when it comes to this juncture, it’s hard to disagree. For more reflections on the system coming from the more techno-optimist-right-wing-Rationalist adjacent side of the aisle Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch is always a (protracted) hoot.

The point being, talking about the Patriarchy in terms of “men bad; women good” is perhaps not the best frame. It might be effective rhetoric and thus ressentiment-churning algorithm-nourishing but perhaps that falls into Expressive Egg’s point about perpetuating the system.

Am I wrong? I suspect I am. I’ve consumed more “Patriarchy”-critical discourse than Patriarchy-critical discourse so my thinking is likely to be populated by strawmen. Minds being what they are, I can’t see my blindspots but I’d love to know them. My gut tells me there’s a lot of academic usage of the term that goes past men bad; women good that so much of the early Feminist blogosphere and tumblr Feminism evangelised. But my gut is ill-informed in this domain so I don’t trust it.

P.S. playing with the Marxist theoretical toolkit is fun; I see why it took off.

1. Though it’s equally possible he just lifted it from Habermas as so much of his worldview seems to be

2. A point Wilber repeatedly, but without citation, mentions.

3. llustrative transhumanist aside #2: once lab grown meat becomes cheaper than…animal incubated meat and puts (already struggling) farmers out of business, I suspect that statues of non-vegans will be toppled. We all know that there are horrors in the way we treat our animals but the Superstructure being downstream of the Base, our consciences can’t follow our dimly felt ethics. Vegans are on the right side of history.

4. Jared Diamond’s argument in Guns, Germs and Steel. This band would cover everything from Saint Petersburg in the north to the Fertile Crescent in the south.

5. Another point of possible criticism. See: here for a good summary and here for an attempt at quantitative analysis