Farmers’ revolts and geopolitical instability portend a year of flux in 2024, with the winter of 2023 becoming a touchstone for history books to mark as a transition for the international system and, specifically, the end of U.S. global hegemony. The American incapacity to hold together a coalition necessary to maintain essential cargo routes along the Red Sea—and losing face against Yemen’s Houthis, who are equipped with cheap drones—is likely a significant, if under-reported, milestone.
Geopolitics aside, what social transformations might Europeans and Westerners in general expect at home? What have imperial breakdowns meant for those who lived through them in the past? The following touches on a few of the factors that might cause what Arnold Toynbee called “the internal proletariat” to rebel against the political class in the West.
Empires turn on their core demographic
Empires do not only oppress the ‘periphery’ of the international system that they constitute as distinct from its ‘core.’ It is true that different countries will occupy different positions within an international division of labor, but societies are also stratified internally. The ‘core’ will include an ‘internal proletariat’: that core demographic whose ancestors built the society from which the empire initially developed and against which the imperial elite tends to turn.
As compared to the other peoples within an empire, the ‘core demographic’ has two qualities:
1. It tends to identify with the state (an identification reaching back to its pre-imperial phase); and,
2. It has been socialized into conforming to that state’s policies.
As a result, political elites will lean on that population for exploitative purposes. As an historical example, early 17th-century Spain overburdened the Castilian people (or, more exactly, Castilians, Asturians, Galicians, and Andalusians) during its military campaigns in central Europe. When it tried to share this burden with other populations by equalizing taxes (the so-called ‘union of arms’), revolts followed, ending in (e.g.) Portuguese independence.
Even without disdaining the ‘internal proletariat,’ empires tend to overexploit it. The Spanish example demonstrates how a course correction that involves alleviating pressure on the core demographic, by increasing it on other populations, may end in disaster. The proper approach—albeit one that goes against the inertial forces of political and economic interests—is to retreat from imperial overstretch.
For 17th-century Spain, for example, siding with Toynbee’s “internal proletariat,” to would have meant giving up its overseas campaigns (n.b., I say this as a simultaneous Castilian nationalist, Spanish patriot, admirer of the independent Dutch Republic, and believer in a future return of Portugal to the Spanish fold).
In the U.S., Trump’s 2016 campaign was not only an attempt to ‘share the burden’ of imperial expenditure—in the manner of Spain’s union of arms—by trying to get other countries ‘to pay their share’ for U.S. military enforcement of the international system, but even beyond this, it was a half-formulated movement to retreat from empire.
Why they hate you
Today, we have an obvious example of elite hatred towards ‘internal proletariats.’ The ‘redneck’ or ‘white trash’ of the U.S. is more or less the only demographic against which one can level explicit racial invective (like both of the former terms) without facing backlash from the culture’s politically correct discourse enforcers.
There is a link between the elite’s disdain for such people and the fact that ‘internal proletariats’ tend to have a higher living standard than ‘external proletariats’ (at least during the ascendant phase of an empire). This means, in turn, that they will eventually seem to be an economic burden upon the economic elite. At a certain point, it makes sense to try to replace them with migrant laborers, who are willing to work for less. Plutarch describes this (very modern) dynamic occurring during the Tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus, who resisted it by advancing agrarian reforms, and was murdered for his troubles.
The elite also tends to become suspicious of traditional ways of life, identities, religious institutions, and national symbols, given that these make people harder to control, bestowing communities with too much self-will and with moral principles that do not derive from the power structure. Therefore, although the ‘internal proletariat’ initially identifies with the imperial state and is socialized into conformity, it will face two pressures that push it towards breaking with that state:
1. The fall in living standards on account of political elites preferring low-wage labor from the ‘external proletariat.’
2. The attack on their culture and communities on account of political elites developing more effective states that
a. No longer need inherited communities and traditional institutions (family, church, etc.) to manage local affairs; and,
b. See identities and values outside the power structure as rivals to that power (partly by stimulating the elite’s lust for control, St. Augustine’s libido dominandi).
To summarize, elite hostility against the ‘core demographic’ of the society to which it belongs is partly owed to:
1. The costs involved in sustaining that population’s living standards compared to the ‘external proletariat’; and,
2. The insolubility of that population’s communal ways of life with respect to the elite’s rising managerial ambitions.
Rebellion begets rebellion
Just as today’s technical advancements in administrative capacities have led the West’s political elite to alienate its ‘internal proletariat,’ so too has technological advancement in warfare and logistics—fruits of the imperative to develop military deterrence and wage effective campaigns—resulted in less expensive means of warfare. This has made it more feasible for Toynbee’s ‘external proletariats’ to disrupt the international system, as we are seeing with the Houthi use of cheap drones to impose a blockade on the Red Sea.
In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel argues that, in relationships of domination, the servant will tend to accumulate more knowledge and skill than the master on account of having to get things done for that master; and, as a result, the servant will tend to become more competent, making him likely to succeed if he chooses to rebel. I would suggest that this is similar to the dynamic we are seeing play out in the international system today.
The ‘external proletariat’—impoverished persons living in the system’s periphery (such as overseas colonies)—will tend to engage in openly violent action, such as the anti-French, economic nationalism of recent coups in Burkina Faso and Mali. Historical examples of this dynamic can also be found in what scholar of religion Patricia Crone termed the ‘nativist prophets,’ charismatic figures seeking a return to their people’s tradition, engaging in campaigns against the imperial core, but also reconceptualizing their native identity in ways that integrate the core’s political theories and advanced technology.
A rising tide of disaffected factions is liable to be cobbled together by competing would-be empires. It is now becoming clear how competing empires, or coalitions of regional hegemons, can appeal to such nativist moments among another empire’s ‘external proletariats,’ as is the case in Africa, where anti-Western (specifically anti-CFA Franc) politics is generally BRICS-aligned.
Crucially, the rebellion of an ‘external proletariat,’ including its effect on advancing the interests of rising powers, can constitute a new cause for the fall in living standards among the internal proletariat. To the degree that the periphery of an international system is tasked with providing that system with material resources, rebellions by ‘external proletariats’ will interrupt supply chains and increase the cost of living in the core, encouraging rebellions by the ‘internal proletariat.’ This is likely to be happen in 2024.
Current Western hegemony (in which context Europe is a part of the core of the internal system) is facing revolts from the ‘external proletariat’: from the string of coups in Africa, to Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces attacking U.S. bases, to the Houthi blockade of the Red Sea. If this continues or even escalates (e.g., a tightening of the Straits of Hormuz by Iran), then energy prices will go up, and Gilets Jaunes-type protests in cities and Dutch farmer-type protests in the countryside will increase in number and frequency.
But just as an international system or hegemonic power has a choice between retreating from imperial overreach, doubling down on burdening its core demographic, and trying to spread the costs of empire, so too does the ‘internal proletariat’ have a choice between
1. Rebellion; or,
2. Seeing the ‘external proletariat’ as the cause of its troubles, ignoring the role of its own elite, and doubling down on misguided loyalty to that elite.
A “prophetic” moment ahead?
It does seem that, however slow moving, the first option will come to predominate in 2024, as geopolitical factors result in supply chain and energy-access instability. Indeed, the Red Sea blockade has already led Volvo and Tesla to announce that they will freeze output from their European factories. Signs of rebellion include the farmers’ revolts in the Netherlands and Germany, Spain’s ‘National November,’ Ireland’s riots, the earlier Canadian trucker convoy, and other similar movements.
Toynbee observed that the ‘internal proletariat’ will tend to preserve itself by producing a ‘universal church,’ by which he loosely meant some kind of binding, spiritually based system that may act as social glue and a source of resistance against the elite’s predations. Following this, then, some sort of ‘prophetic moment’ might lie ahead for the postmodern West. This may take the form of something like the charismatic style of leadership of Crone’s ‘nativist prophets.’
So far, however, the West’s working and middle classes have given rise to occasional flare-ups of political mobilization rather than millenarianism or a call to greater piety, as in earlier historical examples with similar dynamics. This is partly owing to a thoroughgoing secularization among Westerners as well as a stigma around quasi-spiritual, romantic expressions of national identity. But if Toynbee’s ‘church’ does finally emerge, it must face two main intellectual challenges:
1. Distinguishing what is worth keeping from the crumbling imperial civilization (for example, technological advances and those aspects of political liberalism that are most compatible with older common law), and what is not worth keeping (wokeness and its ideological roots); and,
2) Distinguishing between its own identity, on the one hand, and the universal human identity, on the other, in order to arrive at a universal principle on which to justify its own particular identity’s right to assert itself.
The nature and content of Toynbee’s ‘church’—including both the strategic orientation it might take in political matters, and its scenarios for stabilizing the wider geopolitical context in ways that do not permanently depress European living standards—remain questions worth developing in separate essays. For the present, an increased attention to the roles of the internal and external elite must suffice.
