Comparing and Contrasting and looking at my own theory

[degringolade]

The difficulty in making this kind of analysis is that one is always trying to batter square pegs.  Things don't fit exactly right.  I do realize that my taking liberties with Mr. Toynbee's magnus opus would probably set some scholar somewhere a-spinning at my complete misreading of the text and my subsequent misapplication of the theory.

Well, fuck him.

I painted with some pretty broad strokes during my discussion of the proles.  When you walk up to a person on the street that might be a prole, he/she could be in either camp or in the middle ground between the two.  The proletariat is a spectrum.  Right now the uniting factor is that they are getting progressively more annoyed at the shenanigans being played out in D.C.

Toynbee's concept of the internal and external proletariat is useful only in the sense that it gives you a mental framework to hang things off in a manner that allows you to make better sense of the problems and structures of a failing state.  What I found useful is the actual titles and the overall descriptions.  My feeling is that Toynbee, in his separating the internal from the external was merely trying to portray the physical/economic/belief distance from the political elites.

Post WWII, what I defined as the internal proletariat had the best deal of any proletariat in the history of the world.  Since our military and air forces took the liberty of blowing up all the competitors industrial base, the need for workers was such that the elite could afford to actually provide their workers a living wage and decent working conditions without cutting into their luxuries.  What we are seeing now, with the rebuild of industrial base in other countries and the subsequent offshoring of jobs, is that the elite have decided that the proles will just have to suck it in order for the elite's taste for luxuries to be fully explored.

Thus my identification of the internal proletariat tends to resemble that of Toynbee reasonably well.  It is my identification of the 47% as the external proletariat that will probably send the aforementioned scholar into gibbering fits.  Well, fuck him again, here we go.

My opinion is that, in a country/society as physically large as ours, the external proletariat does not need to be outside the borders as Toynbee envisaged, but one could simply say that the external is just the portion of society furthest from the elite political core.

It is my thought that the political elite have always separated these two.  Oh, it was never actually written down or anything, but we bought off the majority of the white proles and a minority of the minority's.   The very existence of the "war on poverty" and other such underappreciated programs in the post war period shows that even in 60's the distinction was there.

The minority population of the US and the lower rungs of the white underclass are the external proletariat.  The increasing closeness and camaraderie of these two sectors (which, by the way, I heartily approve of) are binding the class together. 

The internal proletariat is more homogeneous.  It really does tend toward the deplorable.  It is probably the most dangerous right now.  It is heavily armed and moving down the ladder pretty fast.