Excellent article, but I have to take issue with the statement "Without male violence class hierarchy would collapse". Certainly it's hard to imagine a non-patriarchal (not just an "equal opportunities" society where women are free to emulate male behaviour) class society. But alleging that removing "male violence" is the catalyst to creating a completely egalitarian society is just the other extreme of the old skool Marxist dogma that asserts that overthrowing capitalism will magically eradicate patriarchy. The point, it seems to me, is not to argue over which is the more important struggle, but to acknowledge that both social hierarchies need to be confronted together (add to that the state and white supremacy). And in any case, men still need to retain a few violent tendencies to take on the system, just as women do :)

Otherwise spot-on, even the bit towards the end about "making male domination through violence the central issue on the left (sic)". It's certainly something we need to address a fuck of a lot more than we do at present and I don't see how it's any different to other current leftist obsessions like the war on terror or corporate globalization. If anything, an issue as fundamental as male violence - a feature of authoritarian society that has been a constant throughout its history - would potentially be a much deeper and radical indictment of the principle of domination and subordination as a whole.

we had all this stuff in the 1980s and all it seemed to do was function as a power base for the labour party. In practice, this kind of thinking tended to encourage attacks and lambasting of the horrid working class male, while exculpating the nice middle class designer man. it also tends to permit attacks on revolutionary men while excusing capitalist politicians. for example, feminists tended to defend bill clinton for his flagrant exploitation and subsequent discarding of his intern 'that woman'. karl marx has been accused of similar conduct with his house maid (unproven, it should be said) and condemned for it.
a genuine socialist society will (as marx often pointed out) remove social categorisation, not build on it.