Class War and Nativist Revolt

Or How Civilizations turn Inside-Out

(*I recently presented a version of the following paper at the 3rd Annual Conference of the Gabriel Marcel Institute of Philosophy in Sydney, Australia, developing ideas I’ve explored before, here, for example.)

Empires turn on their founding stock.

As a civilization declines, the elite will tend to hate its own core demographic: The pre-modern predatory empire, no less than the modern international system, does not rest content to “oppress” (displace, makes into a mere human resource) its outside or periphery as distinct from its core (to use the Latin American Dependency Theory terminology of Raúl Prebisch and others). The pathological or degenerate body is unable to engage harmoniously with its own self as well as others; it cannibalizes itself, parts of the body politic become increasingly parasitic and antagonistic to others.

That’s my claim.

Let’s clarify terms. The “core” refers to those countries in which wealth accumulates, as distinct from the “periphery,” to which manufacturing tends to be offshored and that serves as a source of cheap labour. Different countries occupy different rungs in the international division of labour, even as societies are internally stratified. The ‘core’ of an international system includes what Arnold Toynbee called the ‘internal proletariat’ (and which we may call the ‘core demographic’) whose ancestors built up the institutions and capital around which the system first developed.

Alienation

Writes Arnold Toynbee in “A Study of History” (my bolding):

“[W]hen, in the history of any society, a creative minority degenerates into a dominant minority which attempts to retain by force a position that it has ceased to merit, this change in the character of the ruling element provokes…the secession of a proletariat which no longer admires and imitates its rulers and revolts against its servitude…this proletariat, when it asserts itself, is divided from the outset into two distinct parts. There is an internal proletariat, prostrate and recalcitrant, and an external proletariat beyond the frontiers who now violently resist incorporation…the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points:

- a failure of creative power in the minority,

- an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority and

- a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.”

But I want to argue that this withdrawal of mimesis doesn’t just happen because a ruling class becomes oppressive. The internal proletariat is forced into it because it is made into a scapegoat by the ruling elite.

To be fair, the term proletariat does not, strictly speaking, apply to modern conditions: the modern worker, whatever else we may say, has more that his “proles,” his children, in fact, increasingly he precisely has more consumer goods and less children. But let’s leave terminology aside, except to specify that, whereas for Toynbee the internal proletariat exists within a civilization, and the external outside it, I want to use these terms to refer to the working and middle classes within the core of an international system and in its periphery. Both are within (albeit the “core” is increasingly made “periphery” as the system turns itself inside out). It would be more correct to speak of “core workers” and “peripheral workers.”

I would argue that the international system’s internal proletariat inherits identification with the state (generational allegiance reaching back to before their country became imperial, for example); and is more conformist, more socialized by the culture of the elite, more willing to make sacrifices pro patria.

The logic of history, however—a certain predictable momentum—works to alienate the established order from ‘internal proletariats’ and vice-versa.

The latter has developed a higher living standard than ‘external proletariats’ because it inhabits the core of the international system. It will therefore come to be viewed as a burden, an inefficiency to be replaced by an external proletariat willing to work for less.

We find a striking pre-modern description of this dynamic in Plutarch’s “Parallel Lives,” when detailing the conditions that led to the rise and eventual assassination of Tiberius Gracchus, whose political career aimed at re-enfranchising former land-owning Roman citizens after their labour had been transferred to foreign slaves and property to wealthy oligarchs.

The importation of foreign labour may also reduce domestic social cohesion. In 2020, an email leak revealed Amazon’s use of a union-risk “Heat Map” within its Whole Foods division, as reported by Business Insider. Whole Foods was apparently assessing the likelihood of unionization at individual supermarket locations using an interactive tool that assigned each store a “unionization risk score” based on various metrics. Management concluded that low ethnic diversity, particularly in economically disadvantaged areas, resulted in higher risk. Conversely, the higher the diversity, the lower the likelihood of unions forming. We find an earlier case studies in the late 19^th and early 20^th century practice by coal mine operators in the United States of hiring miners from an array of backgrounds to avoid their organizing in the face of gruelling conditions.

Furthermore, the internal proletariat is heir to traditions, institutions, and an identity, whose logic is out-of-sync with the pursuit of economic efficiency within an increasingly integrated international system, or that simply prioritize their own vision of “the good society,” inconveniently insoluble to the concerns of the political class. Perhaps that class needed churches, strong local community councils and the like to keep order, but with the advent of mass media, administrative innovation and new technologies, these seem not only unnecessary but, increasingly, like an impediment, an anachronism. Of course, this bias against inherited identities will apply to the foreign, imported labour force as well, albeit the gambit here is that, as it’s being uprooted and configured into a diverse labour force, this emerging atomized “multicultural” class will cohere around received, top-down, socially-engineered, values.

But there is a special sort of venom reserved for the internal proletariat by the political class and those who align with it (the so-called professional-managerial class, real and aspiring, society’s HR department, which we will touch on later). The fall in living standards wrought by competition with low-wage labour, the external proletariat, and the attack on inherited identity will tend to rouse political dissidence in the core demographic.

Elite strategy now emerges as two-pronged (often structuring party-politics):

• Setting up alternative crises to distract the internal proletariat, and;

• Setting up rhetorical escape valves to make them think their problems are being addressed.

The first avoids political mobilization by the internal proletariat, the second tries to deviate it (our culture may be “turning into steam” as Marx wrote, but slowly enough that the frogs don’t notice the steam is coming from boiling water).

Briefly, on the setting up of rhetorical escape valves to make it seem the concerns of the internal proletariat are being resolved: This might actually be genuine, but it will fail to arrest the internal proletariat’s degrading material conditions because it is not a break from the logic of the international system it is reforming. We have the example of Spain’s 17^th century Union of Arms which sought to share the burden of empire (the costs of Spain’s central European military commitments, on which it did not, however, renegue, which a genuine change of course would have required) beyond the impoverished core (Castile and others) by raising taxes on other territories. The results were poor (resulting in Portuguese independence, for example). Donald Trump represents a similar phenomenon when he pursues military cost-sharing with partners (in order to pivot towards China). Like Meloni and others, Trump’s nativism could not break from the system’s logic, and so began advocating for expanding H1B visas and excluding service and agricultural workers from deportations.

Politics of Perpetual Crisis

But let’s focus on the setting up of alternative, distracting crises.

If the core demographic is to react effectively to its disenfranchisement from the political order (manifesting in a fall of living standards and their demographic displacement, for example) it must reject the crises upon which the political class bases its legitimacy, and which are marshalled to create a sense of urgency in the face of which the internal proletariat’s grievances may be dwarfed.

The revolt of the internal proletariat is most easily channelled away from its radical implications when some overriding pressure is brought to bear. The critical conditions against which that demographic is reacting can be substituted by a (manufactured or genuine but opportunistically channelled) crisis (from climate change, Covid19 and vaccination roll-out to foreign threats).

John Ralston Saul’s “The Unconscious Civilization,” (after which the conference at which this paper was presented was named) correctly views legitimizing discourse, which he calls “ideology,” as relying on apparently technical prescriptions for objective, undeniable, crises.

“They offer two choices—no more. And those two are really only one. Accept the ideology or perish. Pay the debt or go bankrupt. Nationalize or starve. Privatize or go moribund. Kill inflation or lose all your money. We have suffered from this ‘either-or’ sickness for a long time.”

More specifically, Ralston Saul hones-in on the use of “time as a weapon,” which is to say: urgency, crisis.

“Perhaps there is one other essential opposition that should be added to the list: the acceptance of time versus the fear of it. Ideology uses time as a weapon. It plays upon our fears of death or of ceasing to exist, which are largely unconscious. It scratches away indirectly at those fears by turning time into a recurrent bogeyman of the most practical aspects of the human condition. Time is limited. There’s no time to lose.”

Countering elite strategy, then, means constituting a framework in which the core demographic’s initial concern and emerging self-consciousness as political subject is crystalized as the overriding crisis by an independent, upstart elite (Toynbee’s new “creative minority”—albeit we are straying quite far from Toynbee).

Desire is a Weapon

Psychologically, this involves delegitimizing dominant discourse and its hierarchy of crises. In the West, we observe a very specific Girardian triangle of imitative desire working to maintain and further existing arrangements. René Girard argues that we often desire an object because others desire it; our desires are imitative, shaped by a model whose enjoyment of an object makes us want it too, often leading to rivalry—frustration that has to be siphoned off into a scapegoat.

Social prestige always depends on certain markers, and one of these involves caring about the right things (so-called “virtue signals”). Today, status is attributed to what Barbara and John Ehrenreich call the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), a term they coined in the late 1970s:

“We define the Professional-Managerial Class as consisting of salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labour may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”

Barbara Ehrenreich further summarized the moniker in an interview:

“There was a real difference between people who worked essentially telling other people what to do…and people who do the work that other people tell them to do. It becomes a difference between manual and mental labour, but it carries with it a [lot of] weight—I see it all the time, the contempt for especially white working-class people among leftists of college backgrounds.”

The aspirant to PMC status is a product of elite overproduction, that is, the proliferation of people with degrees and qualifications that, they were told, would land them stable, generous salaries, except that there are more people qualified to be PMCs than there are PMC positions. The oppressive model (unlike, say, the father or the mentor) always presents the subject with a false path to achieving his desire, which is sometimes the model’s own status. The PMC, for example, has long been told that a college education, progressivism and multiculturalism will deliver him recognition, money, and a good society (in terms of countries and history, we see the same idea when the U.S. sold free trade as a recipe for prosperity in order to open up other countries’ markets, despite itself benefitting from high tariffs early on in its history). Going beyond Toynbee, this is how we distinguish between his creative and oppressive minority: the first lays out a path that satisfied mimesis, the second lies to you (of course, these are just ideal-types, history is messy).

A scapegoat is needed, therefore, in order that the PMC will not rebel against a structure that renders his job expendable or, more commonly, in order that the aspirant to PMC-status will not let the brunt of his frustration fall on those whose status and material conditions he desires.

The scapegoat is the ideological opponent (often rural or working class). By representing older, inherited identities, this scapegoat is cast as a hold-out, restraining progress, where progress means future—ever-future, ever-deferred—fulfilment. Here, the scapegoat is the imagined past, the country hick, the redneck, white trash, etc., in an American context. They are precisely the internal proletariat, now seen starkly as the ultimate foreigner (indeed, notice the racist language here). Just as there is a desire to conform to dominant discourse, social conformity also rests on the distress or disgust provoked by the scapegoat. We may therefore imagine a second, inverted Girardian triangle:

The core demographic becomes external to the system, it is cast out as the scapegoat. This describes a current that has been dominant among the political class in the West for the last few decades.

Of course, in practice, individual emancipation from the past, for example by eroding old cultural homogeneity, simply functions to further undercut the stability would-be PMCs crave, in this case by bringing in cheap immigrant labour and making it an unspoken matter of principle that salaries need not allow young couples to start a family—that an existing population’s self-reproduction is not a matter for policy-makers, but GDP very much is.

Running Interference

What relationship is there between the Girardian scapegoat and the politics of perpetual crisis (Ralston’s “time as a weapon”)?

If the crisis is an external incentive to consolidate a body politic, the scapegoat is presented as a subversive, the cause of internal vulnerability (complicit with foreign despots, for example, like Putin, who mainstream Left media imagines behind every Right-wing populist). And if the crisis is internal, the scapegoat is its agent. We may think of the “climate crisis” and how mainstream media and politicians characterized the (abortive or now dormant) internal proletariat revolt represented by the farmer and trucker protests in Europe and Canada some years ago. These protested because rising oil prices were ravaging their livelihoods, and the media saw them as agents of global warming, unwilling to save the planet through EU regulation and such.

For its part, as I’ve already said, the rebellious core must structure a convincing alternative crisis or call to action and corresponding social capital (which always exists to some degree, there are always subcultural currents that celebrate the dispossessed element).

Toynbee describes this process in terms of the creation of a “universal church,” a spiritual, doctrinal source of cohesion and resistance for the internal proletariat. On the twilight of the Roman empire in the West:

“We described the creators of the Christian Church as the internal proletariat, and the creators of the barbarian war bands as the external proletariat”

The phenomenon is similar to what scholar of religion Patricia Crone described as the emergence of “nativist prophets,” charismatic leaders who reinvent and weaponize their people’s identity, usually along ‘religious’ lines, to push back against an imperial core.

“Modernisation, whether concerned with arms, technology, economic growth, or religious ideas, and whether consciously undertaken or not, is in essence an attempt to adopt the thinking held to lie behind the strength of the most successful society of the times so as to be able to overtake that society, or at least to hold out against it.”

Where Crone writes of “modernisation,” we would refer to the desire to keep enjoying the prosperity globalization has brought, without enduring its ravages (social atomization, etc.). Crone continues:

“A common response is appropriation of some features of the dominant society accompanied by strident affirmation of the superiority of the native tradition: appropriation does not imply friendly feelings, nor does hostility preclude borrowing.”

Crucially, the rebellious prophets are not foregoing desire for advancement, prosperity and the like (political revolt does better to use these than attempt to wave them away.) The Girardian object of desire, in some sense, remains unchanged, but rivalry with the model is allowed to develop, and a new model worth imitating and through whom this object may be attained emerges (the ancestors, an idealized past, the prophet himself—the more distant, the better). Crone’s reflections here help us delimitate Toynbee’s “secession” of the proletariat, the “answering withdrawal of mimesis.”

Like Toynbee, Crone foregrounds the “spirituality” that often accompanies political revolt as necessary to marshal desire (this is wholly consistent with Girard), but she highlights “nativism,” a certain romantic appeal to the past and to local identity, as conducive to political mobilization. I think this is critical.

Technically, she is describing what Toynbee would characterize as “external proletariats” (her exploration focuses on Persians and others within an Arab-led empire), but, I argue, during late civilizational stages, the internal proletariat has become external, been made foreign in its own homeland—they are literally alienated, made alien. Even “official” culture tends to make the conditions that are marginal or minoritarian in a society (from sexual preference to ethnic origin) into its protagonist. The system turns itself inside out.

What Comes Next

What we usually describe as “multiculturalism” today is the body turning inside out, the self-cannibalizing final stage of civilizational decline. The opposite to that disorder is Plato’s ideal nation-preserving, supra-national Hellenic federation, per The Laws. Writes Eric Voegelin in The Ecumenical Age:

…the course of history must be understood as an advance of civilization in time through inventions and arts, improvement of transportation and discoveries, population increase and density of settlement to the point when culturally homogeneous peoples in contiguous settlement appear as distinguishable units in history.

Therefore,

a noetically [intellectually and spiritually] satisfactory order is possible only if the unit in question is indeed culturally an ethnos and not a jumble of former peoples held together by a conquering power as in the Persian case; the population of a multi-civilizational, ecumenic empire is not an ethnos that could organize itself as a federation of paradigmatic poleis [Plato’s ideal].

What Voegelin calls Plato’s “noetically satisfactory order,” the recovery of a primordial sense for the “society in cosmological form…experienced by its members as an analogically ordered part of the divinely ordered cosmos” is precisely the point, the political intuition and imagination, the true ideal, of Toynbee’s “universal church” and Crone’s “nativist prophets.” This is what the alienated internal proletariat’s revolt must give way to, if it’s to be valuable.

Of course, that “universal church” and those “nativist prophets” can appear to be examples of Spengler’s “second religiosity,” where religion is but a cultural and political pose, often at the service of so-called Caesarism (Spengler’s penultimate phase of civilizational rise and decline). But not necessarily. And even where they are, much good can come from them.

Spengler’s Caesar reabsorbs finance and the intelligentsia back into the state in order to preserve some version of the original political and legal tradition that brought these about. It does now seem that this path is more fraught even than in the historical examples he wades through. Finance, intelligence services and mass media, which I would describe as the actually-existing three branches of government (or the so-called “deep state”), are often larger than the state and not readily digestible by it. If Spengler’s map of history is to be entertained, we seem to be moving not from Civilization’s borderless sprawl to Caesarism’s statist solidity, but directly into Barbarism’s dissolution. But Toynbee’s social secessionism is relevant to the present condition, even if Spengler’s Caeserism isn’t, at least for the moment (successful withdrawal of mimesis by a social class might change political conditions such as to allow the capture of institutions).

I take Eric Voegelin’s view that the breakdown leading from, for example, Roman slave villa to medieval village isn’t a fall out of history (as Spengler would characterize Barbarism) but a fulfilment of what came before (the European Middle Ages manifest Caesar Augustus’ Golden Age; Virgil is realized in the medieval European ethos, as T.S. Eliot saw). So how do we transition? How do we keep the fruits of late-stage civilizational advancement (for technical prowess often follows a different arc to social rise and decline), without disintegrating? How do we abandon the ship of empire and avoid drowning?

If the internal proletariat is to resist its managed decline, it will need a (nativist, prophetic) “creative minority” capable of redefining what is desirable and what is urgent. The political class wields power in part through mimetic desire and manufactured crises; an alternative elite must assault that near-monopoly by creating new cultural attractors that redirect imitative desire towards a different vision of the good society.

From the above, we conclude that such a rising elite’s project would consist of: spirituality; alternative desire/crisis-framing; path to prosperity instead of scapegoating; not accepting a Caesar (a political saviour) who has not really broken with the economic logic of the system; understanding the nation and its integrity as the basis for politics and mass migration as a feature of decadence (turning inside-out), which we can describe as “nativism.”

One interesting feature of dissolution is that it tends to produce its own solidifying structures not only by galvanizing a reaction but also by creating problems whose solutions allow for a more effective reaction. If we consider blockchain and Bitcoin’s solution to the “double spending” or “Byzantine Generals Problem,” for example, we find the local node in a network emerging as a powerfully coherent body at what is supposed to be the cutting-edge of (Deleuzean, de-territorializing) global capitalism. Nick Land has explored this. The overthrow of third-party verifiers, in other words, does not deliver us into some final entropic homogeneity (“in danger is the saving power,” as Hölderlin writes and Heidegger quotes). A straightforward example of this basic idea is how new media allows dissident narratives to proliferate more easily than in the pre-Internet era.

It’s the time for prophets, sowers of dissatisfaction, seers of golden ages, culture-makers, and of the creative use of the very technologies that melt prior forms away.

Secession from the political class, from systemic desire, requires political imagination, alternative visions and framings.

There is no return, or rather, return is always re-creation.

Bibliography

Crone, Patricia. The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt And Local Zoroastrianism. Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and John. “The Professional-Managerial Class.” Radical America, vol. 11, no. 2, 1977, pp. 7–31.

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

Peterson, Hayley. (2020, April 20). Amazon‑owned Whole Foods is quietly tracking its employees with a heat map tool that ranks which stores are most at risk of unionizing. Business Insider: www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionization-risk-with-heat-map-2020-1.

Plutarch. The Parallel Lives. Translated by Bernadotte Perrin. Vol. X: The Life of Caius Gracchus. Harvard University Press, 1921.

Saul, John Ralston. The Unconscious Civilization. House of Anansi Press, 2005.

Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1928.

Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History, vol. IV: The Breakdowns of Civilizations. Oxford University Press, 1939.

———. Civilization on Trial. Oxford University Press, 1948.

Voegelin, Eric. The Ecumenic Age. Vol. 4 of Order and History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974.