Let me clarify, I think both those statements ARE TRUE, but I feel like there's some caveats. Like, if you're a 100% Herero masculine man who doesn't have much empathy for others, the patriarchy probably kinda rocks. I hate cooking and cleaning personally and would love if a robot could do it all for me, but I can see why a less moral man would be fine with just having a woman do it for them.
Same with racism, sure it's used to divide the working class, but that divide is facilitated in part by giving the more privileged workers more goodies, and some people REALLY love those goodies.
Now sure we can tell people "things would be better under socialism!" But let's be honest here, things would be better under FALGSC, and FALGSC is farther off than many of us would like to admit. Even if we pulled off global socialism tomorrow there's probably at least a 100 years or so of "transitional period" before we get to a socialism that works that good that we'll have replicators and shit. In that period, I think the more privileged sectors of the working class are probably gonna experience some belt tightening, and they may not be happy with that. Sure, your grandkids (or maybe great grandkids) are gonna be doing great but I don't think Bob the Union Truck-driver is gonna be happy about losing his jetski and his wife getting shoes and not making him steaks in the kitchen anymore.
Mind you, I'm not a Maoist Third Worldist, I think there are workers in the imperial core for whom socialism is appealing, but I think we kind of need to be honest with the fact it's not like everyone who technically qualifies as a proletarian is gonna reap the same benefits here.
I know this is kind of unfocused and scatter brained but it's just a shower thought I've been having.
Yeah patriarchy & racism don't really hurt the oppressing classes in a material way. Usually talk of this type focuses on the, idk, spiritual aspects? Like if you hold these hierarchical views on gender and race you fundamentally see the world in a way that isn't true. It's distorted. So a lot of things don't make sense to you and this keeps you in a fairly frustrated state. Like picture a patriarchal man meeting a woman who is smarter than him, which probably happens pretty often. He immediately has to start jumping through mental hoops to reduce her achievements, or finds some nitpicky way in which she is wrong to "expose" her. It's just a very fraught way to exist. Versus if you're fine with the idea that women are equal to men it doesn't really bother you when you meet a brilliant woman, you're just like "cool I met a smart person" and continue along. Not having to constantly be jockying to justify your position in some imaginary hierarchy is pretty nice.
It's not a spiritual aspect that cis men have a lower life expectancy than cis women, it's almost entirely due to materially self-destructive aspects of toxic masculinity. Boys are tought from an early age to treat their bodies as disposable, to accept injury and discomfort, to prove themselves through a callousness towards injury and it shows. Patriarchy has perceptible ideological overreach, but has 100% materialist roots. It is, among other material things, a gendered division of labor. The patriarchal binary does not only unload reproductive labor that is necessary, but does not generate profit on women, who are not only tied to child-raising, but are also overrepresented in necessary, but low-profit nursing and education jobs. It also assigns destructive labor like warfare to the opressor class of men, and being part of that opressor class means you can turn out to be a redshirt at any time. The same holds true to the way men are nudged to embrace self sacrifice in not physically violent positions, how they learn to see it as honorable to perfomatively overwork and overextend themselves while never showing weakness. This disregard for their own wellbeing in the name of being manly and a provider is highly exploitable on a material level, and it very definitely has a health toll. Masculinity in a capitalist system is inherently harmful, it makes men harm others for the sake of the ruling class, and that ability to be a harmer comes with a marked tendency to self harm.
I hate to do the "as a trans woman" thing, but if people have tried to raise you as a boy and completely failed at that because you just do not want to be seen as a man, this shit becomes super fucking obvious. I don't pity men, like i said they're an opressor class, but this is capitalism we're talking about, the deal it offers always sucks if you're not haute bourgeoisie. There's always a catch, that catch is always material so it pays off for the ruling class, and in the case of male privilege that catch is that performing manlyness in a convincing way gives a ton of guys a heart attack before their 50th birthday, or that men are four times as likely to die in a car crash because the way they drive is outright para-suicidal, or that they're three times more likely to drink themselves to death because they've never learned to maintain an emotional support system and so on and so on.
Yes