Gender, in the abstract, is the class-ordered division of labor and property. Patriarchy is the logic of gender that forms the basis (or substructure) of all consequent patriarchal class societies, which from ancient times was predominant across the Old World, comprising most of Eurasia and much of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Yet patriarchy is not the only possible, nor the only existing, organizational structure of gender – gender emerges according to the earliest divisions in labor – nor is every society fundamentally labor-divided, that is to say gendered. However, owing mainly to colonialism – although, long before them, also merely to migrations – patriarchal gender became global in scope. Patriarchy, therefore, forms the most ancient substructural bedrock of a globally connected modernity. This is why our analysis is concerned specifically with patriarchal gender ontology.
The principle element of patriarchy is its gender binary. This binary took form during the earliest division of labor (reproductive vs. productive), and the transition to collective-exclusionary property, especially with the advent of the home during the Neolithic Revolution, the transition to early agricultural society. Expressed simply, this binary is the division between womanhood and manhood; although, it is not really quite so simple. A common mistake, including among feminists, is to conflate the ideological reflection of patriarchal gender with its structural substance. That is to say, that the gender-categories of “man” and “woman” are, as used in common speech, merely ancient ideological conventions, categorical forms, aspect of social identity arising from actual productive relations.
Likewise, the existence of other gender-categories than “man” and “woman” (non-binaristic genders) is possible within patriarchal societies – such gender-categories have also existed from ancient times to the present day in a variety of traditional and (in modern times) coercive patriarchal societies – yet necessarily without ever meaningfully eroding the gender binary, the very “core” of patriarchy.
During the modern-colonial period, gender became inextricable from race, with ancient patriarchal-gender categories subject to a fundamental alteration. The racialization of gender is not the first such major alteration in the structure of the patriarchy, but it is probably the only such alteration on a comparable, worldwide scale since the emergency of the patriarchal class-structure.
How does gender structure class? First, through the division of labor. Simply put, productive laborers and reproductive laborers constitute, at first, two separate classes. These classes construct ideological gender-categories, which over the millennia, have become abstracted from their substructural (that is to say, labor-economic) substance. It would therefore be incorrect to say genders, by which we mean here social identities, are classes. But it would be incorrect to say that gender does not structure class. In fact, a class-distinction between reproductive and productive laborers prevails today. Waged workers in industry; unwaged workers in the home; these are two separate classes on account of different productive relations. However, under capitalism, reproductive labor is becoming increasingly proletarianized, brought out of the home and into industry, and made more efficient.
