APR: I'm pretty sure I don't trust almost all of 19th C anthropology... but assuming we accept the claims Marx and Engels drew upon - and they were far far superior to the silliness Durkheim embraced - I agree with you I'm not sure how it cuts here... Bookchin, however, would say that the cut it makes is one which necessitates explaining the origins of domination (in our case, exploitation... but he, of course, had a very problematic account of original sin and a rather lame understanding of the science of mutualism.)
Combining my response to your Geertz query with thoughts about what you wrote in response to Carrol in this same thread (where I fell, the vast majority of the time, on your "side")... I think we agree about the centrality of class analysis, exploitation and struggle... and I'm beginning to think we agree that - at that level of abstraction - we don't know very much.
^^^^^^
CB: In a certain sense, the class struggles from the past are "history", belong to the ages. On the other hand, it is important to retain Marx and Engels' fundamental observation concerning "The Realm of Necessity" or the common tension in all those societies that was based in exploitation, and apply that discovery in irradicating the specific capitalist form of exploitation ; in other words, move on to a Realm of Freedom in Marx and Engels specific sense. The anthropological principle is that exploitation goes against human nature. That's why exploited classes always came around to struggling to change the system one way or another in Marx and Engels theory.