The question of whether class society first emerged in ancient times as a necessary historical function of economic development predicated on surplus production, or a historically contingent imposition through voluntary force, seems to implicitly assume a mind-matter, subject-object distinction, one in which the physical conditions of life and life as a living experience are treated in relative isolation from one another.
A framework like Process Buddhism challenges this distinction, recognizing that the physical and the mental as different abstract ways of analyzing the being of what is otherwise a concrete continuum of becoming. The physical and the mental are not two separate things (since they are partial phases of a greater process) nor are they one and the same thing (since their functioning depends on their differentiation). What is physical now was mental before, and what is mental now is yet to be physical. They are two abstract perspectives on the same concrete continuum of becoming.
My working intuition on the origins of class society is that before its emergence there were subjective preconditions for the voluntarist assumption of power by the few over the many, but it would require certain material conditions to turn that into an overarching power structure over whole societies. But the development of class society could not proceed out of some immanent necessity found from within these material conditions, it must be enabled by those latent subjective preconditions. This is the moment of contingency and “transcendence”, a moment in which multiple futures are possible but only one can be decided upon.
Things could have gone one way, but they also could have gone many other ways. Even when they go one way, they could still have gone in a number of different ways. The material conditions of society are necessary but not sufficient in determining its developmental trajectory, because in the last instance, it is always a volitional act, guided by a subjective aim, that decides how these material conditions shape the future. The shape of the future, imbued with the subjective aims that decided it, become part of the new material conditions that will succeed it, and these material conditions in turn will constrain (but not determine) the possibilities of the future beyond; through this temporal dynamic there are recursive feedback loops between the mental (the subjective, the ideational, the cultural) and the physical (the objective, the material-ecological, the politico-economic) dimensions of life and history.
This makes a Process Buddhist view of history neither strictly idealist nor strictly materialist. To sidestep any ontological commitment in either direction—including metaphysical alternatives like panpsychism or pan-experientialism, which most Whiteheadian Process thinkers embrace—we can instead describe this account of history as process-relational. This approach emphasizes that the ontological ground of any given entity or process lies in its internal relations with other things, and which emphasizes that the physical and the mental are dipolar or the two poles of an integrated dynamic. It can integrate the functions of Marxist historical materialism and anarchist theories of power into a more comprehensive and dialectical perspective that accounts for the unity-in-difference of the physical and the mental, of the material conditions of life and life as it is lived.
Class society may have necessarily emerged through the convergence of subjective preconditions for hierarchy and exploitation with material conditions for systemic domination, but its arising was always a historical contingency—contested at its inception, just as it is being contested now. Likewise no development of the material conditions of life, by its own immanent logic, could automatically give rise to freedom from class society, because in the last instance, it is always up to us to decide the fate of our future together.
Wherever there is unfreedom, there is also the very freedom that gives unfreedom its name, the freedom which struggles against it. There is no need to hope for an opportune moment to seize freedom or to fear that such a moment may never come. One simply needs to attune oneself to the movement of freedom that is always-already, continuously operative—resisting and undermining all forms of unfreedom as a function of its own nature.
By opening ourselves to prehend all that we can from this extensive continuum, we become empowered by a deep ancestry of freedom fighters and seekers—becoming world-historical crystallizations of everything they stood and fought for since time immemorial. We become avatars of freedom herself, capable of influencing others to fight for freedom from class society, for their own sake and for the sake of others. And yet, we do so knowing all too well that they always have the freedom to choose against that influence, to choose their own domination—even when the possibility of freedom is a real and present alternative.
Holopoiesis 