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.
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.