The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 91 of 125
Toynbee's two proletariats
In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon declared famously that Rome was destroyed by Christianity and the barbarians; and Toynbee’s analysis could be seen as an extended commentary on the thesis. For him, as for Gibbon, the untold millions of people enslaved by the dominant civilization break down into two huge groups, into what Toynbee refers to as two distinct “proletariats” (insisting on using Marx’s term and, one imagines, courting his own subsequent academic doom by doing so). First, an internal proletariat, which consists of almost everybody living within the dominant society: frustrated and, if you probe to any depth, basically desperate, with only the thinnest veneer of ideology masking the fact that they have no real control over their lives at all. Not that their existence is not luxury itself compared with that of the second, or external proletariat. This is formed by all those living beyond the increasingly militarized borders of the dominant civilization: those who bear the brunt of the exploitation and brute labor, and live and die lives little better than those of draft animals. Humiliated and treated with open contempt, this external proletariat finally explodes in violence. Fighting as terrorists and guerillas, they exhibit a ferocity and intelligence the mercenary troops of the imperium can never match. The two proletariats come together in a pincer movement, which defines the last days of the disintegrating civilization.