It's always the patriarchal conquerors like the Ancient Romans or the Ancient Greeks that they idolize and never the people like, say, the Picts or the Celts or the Gaul that rebelled against the brutal Roman empire. It's never the Scottish or the Irish heroes who fought back against the British Empire that followed in Rome's footsteps. None of them probably even know who Boudica is.
Ironically, a lot of the stuff you could call "white culture" was burnt at the stake, banned, brutalized, and literally demonized by the Empires that chuds think are so civilized. A lot of pagan culture was lost to time, or warped by Roman 'scholars' for propaganda purposes. If they truly cared about their 'culture', then "Muh Christian trad wife' would be seen as killing the identity of pagan women, rather than an aspiration.
I don't think you could easily separate Marx from his predecessors or people who came afterwards. He was very much operating in the western philosophical tradition, his PhD was even about Greek philosophy, his contemporaries were western philosphers. Marx's economic work heavily cites Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Not to mention the modern fields of sociology and anthropology were forged by people well read on Marx's work. I heard someone here once say he was the last Enlightenment thinker, he was the final culmination of that whole group of guys before him like Hegel, Hume, Kant, etc.
But that's just Marx the guy and scholar. You're more correct if you said there are two lines through contemporary western thought: liberalism and Marxism.
We have functionally no evidence at all for what any European culture was like pre-Indo-European migration. I'd like to know what reason we have to think they were a matriarchal society.
We know that the Minoans had lots of images of women, and that those women were frequently depicted as high status, but that's not really evidence that the society itself was matriarchal.
Were the women depicted regular people? Priestesses? Rulers? Deities? We don't know. But there's a lot of space between "not as patriarchal as their neighbours" and "A Matriarchal society".
Archaeology without an associated written record is necessarily speculation, and while we can always interpret more interesting conclusions from them, they're not any more valid than the less interesting ones that can be supported on the same evidence.
Minoan dudes were simply paypigs who loved making art of their findoms.
The white goddess is one of the most wrong books in the classical record. It actually managed to get the inverse of the truth somehow. Look into the bronze age solar goddess to see how religion functioned before the Italic, Germanic, and celtic migrations.
IDK for a quick overview online. Gist of it, there's evidence of shared religious ideas around the Mediterranean due to contact between Myceneans, Hittites, Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, and Ugarits. They had a shared religious language, a sort of koine, and a common repeating symbol was the solar goddess, generally depicted as the Potnia theron(πότνια θερον), the lady of animals. After climate catastrophe ended the bronze age, her worship fell and indo-european worship thundered down the steppe. This focused on the oak god of storms predominantly, Zeus to the Greek, Jupiter to the Italics, Tarans to the celts, and Thor to the Germans. Some aspects of the solar goddess get reworked into the bride of the thunder god, but in different ways between the cultures. In earlier Greek texts, Zeus' wife is Dione, and she is sometimes preserved poetically as the mother of Aphrodite. This is linguistically fitting, as Zeus and Dione both derive from the Proto indo European root for light, *Di-. The Greek ζ has a d sound our z does not. Anyway, Hera flanked by peacocks takes over this role, and is so firmly established by the 8th century that Dione isn't even on the list of Zeus' wives in Hesiod's Theogony
Oh also Graves would just read stuff and see what his poet's soul thought was true, so like the opposite of research.
yea we do, the Etruscans. Romans would write about how embarrassing it was that their women were full equals and stuff
All their rulers were men. Their women were allowed to read and attend banquets, but were not equal in power.
my bad, I was paraphrasing from stuff I read years ago
still, they were more equal than in Roman society
Depends on the period tbh. The were more equal than the early romans, but women in the late Republic on ward could own some property. Either way better than the Greeks by a mile.
The Etruscan language was not Indo-European, but all historical accounts we have of them are all well past the Indo-European migration.
So? That would still mean their culture was more reflective of the native Europeans
Your dichotomy makes Stalin an imperialist. This is anti-materialist and simply hegel before Marx refined his works.
Hunter-gatherers tend more towards egalitarianism, and early societies may have been matriolinial, but matriarchy has never existed.
the archaeological evidence doesn't line up with this, apparently. Graeber, in Dawn of Everything, expands on this at length - the evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies routinely experimented with all kinds of social organization, ranging from deeply hierarchical to completely egalitarian. they didn't tend to stick to any one system of organization - a surprising number changed political/administrative systems semiannually (this may be the root of various holidays in the early spring, where social hierarchies are inverted for a day). this tendency persisted into the earliest agrarian societies - in the Americas, it lasted until European contact in many, many places. there were, of course, plenty that did maintain systems for hundreds or thousands of years - the lack of consistency across civilizations is perhaps the only defining feature.
Marx, of course, could not have known this. the archaeological evidence was just not available. it's worth re-exploring historical materialism in light of the now available evidence - Graeber's analysis is extremely useful in this light.
What kind of evidence supports a hierarchy among hunter-gatherers? Genuinely curious, I've never seen this suggested before. People living in those societies generally have the same kind of gear to my knowledge, it would be hard to differentiate based off grave goods then, and they don't leave a written record.
The one I know about off-hand are the Chumash people of California. They had complex social hierarchies throughout the possibly thousands of years they spent as hunter-gatherers, and most of it had to do with control over labor specialization by their elites. They would regularly move around their territory, sometimes going more inland, sometimes more on the coast, and sometimes on the nearby North Channel islands, all of that depending on tides. And so their hereditary elites were usually the ones who knew the land and when the tides were due to change, so they're the ones who'd direct productive labor.
Most of their social hierarchy was hereditary, although they at times had legit cult-like secret societies that would influence whoever the hereditary chiefs were. I'm an amateur at anthropology, but it seems to me like the Chumash had such a stratified social hierarchy due to their relatively complicated production. They had much more advanced boats than most other indigenous Americans, so advanced they'd navigate dozens of miles out into the Pacific ocean. Their boats were so good they'd even regularly go whale hunting (image of a modern version of a Chumash boat) . They had rock quarries and complex basket weaving as well. They had a rudimentary currency based around carved beads or bones, and even contingencies against counterfeiting because their beads were made using a specific kind of drill bit.
A vulgar way of describing it is they somehow had some kind of vague feudal mercantilism while still existing as a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer society. The Chumash are really interesting and I'd suggest reading about them.
That is definitely interesting. I'll have to give them a look. That does sound significantly more nomadic than hunter gatherer though.
I just don't think you can meaningfully delineate things like that. The church has spiritually and mentally uplifted many people, as well as holding back others. Some of them obsess over the enlightenment and think we should go to that. Take Marcus Aurelius. He was literally an emperor of Rome, and we have his stoic diary for reading. Many fascists and right wing shit heads read that, and retain their views. But I've met some left wing people, and some at least anti-bigot people, who read it and found it deeply inspiring. Lots of queer people grow up finding something fascinating in Greek mythology, just as do the bigots. Shakespeare is not a bad thing, but right wingers flock to it or sometimes despise it. I'm sure there are return types who like Blake. Casper David Friedrich was an artist who the nazis used as an example of great German art. He wasn't a fascist, but his art was used by them. Now it's more broadly enjoyed again.