Historical Laws

 “Can History Predict the Future?” by Graeme Wood, The Atlantic, Dec. 2020 Issue

If your answer to the title of this article is ‘of course’ then you’ll be wondering why the liberal Atlantic is asking what is a leftist question.  This article goes against liberal bromides. What gives?

This article is based on an interview with Peter Turchin, a former Russian who emigrated to the U.S. at the age of 21 in 1978.  Turchin borrows from Marxist method via mathematics and data-crunching. Turchin studied 10,000 years of human history and created a database to find patterns in history.  In 2010 he predicted severe social unrest based on 3 markers, starting in 2020. 

MARKERS of CONFLICT

Turchin’s three markers are:  1, a bloated elite class with too few elite jobs to go around.  Part of this is the over-production of PHD’s, MAs and college grads across the world. 2, declining living standards for the general population, but especially the ‘commoners’ – the working class, farmers and proletariat; 3, governments deeply in debt, verging on insolvency.  As you can see, all of these trends are happening now.  Regarding point 3, modern corporations actually have higher debt levels than governments and that impacts society.  The large number of indebted zombie corporations is a danger signal.  Turchin’s mapping is not based on capitalism, as you can see.  Debt is actually a more general and broader term than he uses.

Turchin’s data predicted 2020 to be the start of intense upheaval in the U.S. and other societies – perhaps lasting 10 years.  For the U.S. his team looked at 1,590 violent incidents over 230 years and claims that ‘brutality cycles’ occurred in 1870, 1920 and 1970 – a 50 year cycle.  Turchin leaves out the Civil War in 1860 as a ‘statistical outlier’ and the article leaves out 1820.  The American Revolution was from 1775 to 1781, the start of Turchin’s cycles.   The ultra-rightist political riot in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 showed a sort of amateur and delusional ‘civil war’ strife is possible, but no major capitalist sector is advocating it, nor is capital in an existential crisis yet.

Turchin’s database also reveals that complex societies arise through war, which he theorizes solidifies countries on a collective and ‘democratic’ basis.  That idea seems to be somewhat fanciful.  Wars encourage authoritarianism and state collapse too.  According to historian Michael Graeber, war nearly always results in state debt – one of Turchin’s keys to social fraying. Must be why peaceful Switzerland and Iceland are such a mess!  Or not.

The “Global Database of Events” and John Bieler’s “Protest Map” are historical databases that could also be used to look at social patterns based on the frequency and scale of protests, strikes, general strikes, insurrections and revolutions - and everything in between.  Acorrding to the Hack website, another professor who has worked with Turchin, Jack Goldstone, uses a similar method to predict social turmoil, though with different dates popping up in that story – citing the 1860s and 1930s.  “Factional elites” is something Goldstone mentions as a source of breakdown, unlike this story in The Atlantic. So Turchin's rigid '50 year' pattern might not be quite accurate given the inconsistencies or the underlying data may be incomplete.

HISTORY

If you are saying “duh” as to taking an overall view of history, you’d be in the minority.  Most bourgeois historians believe history is too complicated to understand and there are no patterns beneath it.  This is why they get lost in the factual weeds of history and specialize intensely.  They hate any form of ‘systems theory’ – even Jared Diamond’s partially flawed geographic one – and distain Marxism or anything close to it.  Thomas Piketty borrows from class analysis to look at wealth accumulation over time as a key indicator of social disorder.  He’s an outlier in the bourgeois history crowd.  Turchin too is on the outs with his fellow U.S. academics and historians.  He comes from a science background in biology and ecology, which partially explains how he thinks.

UBIQUITY

Turchin’s basic method isn’t all that new, though Wood, the journalist, seems not to know it.  This Blog reviewed a 2001 book called “Ubiquity” which focuses on the probability of different events happening, charting across a large number of issues including some human ones.  Mark Buchanan, its author, thinks that complexity many times hides simplicity, a position also held by Turchin.  Chaos theory leans in this direction as well – positing rules beneath apparent confusion.  Buchanan posits that ‘time’ has to be used to study systems, which Turchin obviously understands with his 10,000 year stare.  Buchanan calls the inverse math relationship between the likelihood of an event and its actuality, the ‘power law’ – predicting when a critical state is reached ‘out of equilibrium.’  Smaller events occur more frequently, while larger ones do not.  But the latter finally do occur, as change, even quick or revolutionary/counter-revolutionary change, is inevitable.  Quantity into quality, as dialectics posits. 

Buchanan thinks ‘ubiquity’ and the power law apply to landslides, earthquakes, forest fires, freezing substances, magnets, solar flares, disease transmission, traffic jams, species extinction, the 1987 market crash, price movements in the Standard & Poor’s, wars and the assassination of Duke Ferdinand.  Both authors use empirical methods to discover patterns in history and, for Buchanan, in nature.  Between the two, Buchanan is years ahead on theory, but not on Turchin’s focus on humans.  Turchin understands, like a Marxist, that history has underlying laws, laws he has christened ‘Cliodynamics.’

Alexander Bogdanov

SOVIET SYSTEM ANALYSIS

Russia and the USSR have produced many systemic analyses, not just Lenin or Trotsky or Bukharin.  Alexander Bogdanov, a Bolshevik, is credited with being a founder of ‘systems theory’ in the early 1900s.  Vassily Leontiev understood that ecologic environmental costs had to be added into any economic accounting measures – something he advocated in the 1920’s USSR.  Nikolai Krondratiev, a Soviet NEP economist in the 1920s, tracked severe capitalist depression ‘waves’ every 70 years. (He was shot in 1938 during the purges.) Mikhail Budyko predicted global warming in 1972 while studying the atmosphere.  All these thinkers were influenced by Marxism and dialectical materialism and were the first in their fields to develop these general views – far ahead of scientists or economists in the capitalist world. 

A present Marxist economist, Michael Roberts, graphs capitalist crises and the falling rate of profit based on 4 different cycles and their overlay – depressions, major social construction, recessions and inventory cycles. He borrows one of these from Krondratiev.  Turchin, though he might run from it, is part of a long methodical history that identifies broader patterns.  He himself is against Marx, as he thinks that Marxism says socialism is inevitable.  It does not.  He has no prescription as to how to stop these cycles, seeming to think that financial elites and debt are eternal givens.  He views history as circular and ‘ever recurring’ which is a common bourgeois view, though nonsensical on the face of it. 

MATERIALIST DIALECTICS

Turchin’s method might remind readers of certain features of materialist dialectics:  historical time involving changes; quantity turning into quality; negation of the negation (contradictions within everything); all based on material facts.  This leads to the most basic fact for Turchin - class conflict regarding rigid wealthy elites and declining living standards for the working classes.  Turchin’s idea of debt is linked to this, because debt weakens governments – and corporations - from solving the problems of class conflict.  Bankruptcy increases class immiseration and class impermeability.

Wood, the Atlantic journalist hopes Turchin is not right as to increasing and imminent turmoil.  But then again, he works for the Atlantic.  During the interview Turchin erroneously calls Wood ‘ruling class’ - another funhouse mirror insult of what a real ruling class looks like.  But at least he knows the term.

Prior blog reviews relevant to this, use blog search box, upper left:  “Ubiquity” (Buchanan); “Red Star” (Bogadanov); “The Long Depression”(Roberts); “Planning Green Growth,” “Collapse” and “Guns, Germs and Steel” (both by Diamond); “Capital”(Piketty) or the words ‘dialectics’ or ‘science.’    

You can buy many left-wing magazines at May Day, but not ones like the Atlantic.

Red Frog

January 10, 2021