Power-Point© Change

 “Winners Take All – The Elite Charade of Changing the World” by Anand Giridharadas, 2020

This book reveals another dirty secret of U.S. capital.  The corporations and their handmaids now have to pretend to be ‘for’ some social good in order to sell products or ideas or even their whole system.  It actually reflects the present ideological bankruptcy and economic stagnation of capital.  Prior to this, they pretended the ‘market’ alone would suffice.  Now they know otherwise.

Pretty soon if you buy a Goodyear tire, they will promise to plant a rubber tree that will mature in 30 years.  For a Hardees massive burger, they will feed a starving child with a tiny version of their toxic sandwich.  Cinnabon will donate to the juvenile diabetes association.  A Wall Street exchange will tell us if we buy a penny stock, they’ll give a homeless shelter a penny.  MSNBC promises that if you watch and register, they’ll hire a black janitor.  BP will donate money to a pelican sanctuary group after a fill-up.  Newport cigarettes will send money to the American Cancer Institute. Silicon Valley will encourage you to use your car as a taxi, ‘freeing’ you at $3.43 an hour.  Oh wait, Uber already does that.  It is all called ‘social entrepreneurship.’ 

Note how many products now have some social theme attached to their purchase, like they are not profit-making outfits but charities pretending to ‘save the world.’  The work of ‘change’ has become commodified and privatized as a new frontier of commerce nationally and internationally.  It has become part of what Baran and Sweezy called 'the sales effort.'  This is what this book focuses on.  The key idea is from the novel The Leopard:  “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

Giradharadas is not an anti-capitalist.  This is a fellow who calls imperialism ‘globalism,’ who calls class war ‘civil war,’ who confuses the left with the Democrats. He believes that government and vague politics is the solution, not private, anti-democratic attempts by elites.  He does note the added alienation when one frictionless ‘click’ on a computer magically brings a product to your door, hiding all human labor.  His book is required reading for CEOs, as one of the blurbs says.  Like others, he also appeals to elites.   

Giradharadas goes inside to dissect bourgeois attempts at ‘richsplaining’ imperialism, job losses and trickle-down change and the subsequent market solutions.  He takes the ‘win-win’ feel-good micro-solutions of corporations and their spokesmen and shows how they attempt to conceal their own role in inequality, environmental degradation, toxicity and labor exploitation with a veneer of jargon, TED talks, money and ‘intellectual’ adulation.  Some of the jargon:  corporate social responsibility, change agents, sharing economy, impact investing, green bonds, social enterprise, social value investing, change management, sustainable finance, entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurs.  If you hear any of this in a capitalist context, you know the scam is on.  Run!

Giradharadas profiles various denizens of what he calls “Market World.” A guilty upper middle class girl interested in social change ends up at McKinsey & Co. as a typical corporate consultant.  An anti-sexist professor finds herself advocating a ‘power pose’ at TED talks as the solution to female intimidation.  A black entrepreneur creates a fantasy football league with some profits going to charities in Africa.  A sensitive rich techie builds a subscription app that saves paltry sums so low-paid workers don’t get caught short.  A former musicologist facilitates deals with mining companies in Mongolia and now works for Soros’ neo-liberal foundation as a way to ‘change the world.’  A poor black child from Louisiana, now head of the Ford Foundation investment program, wrestles with capitalist inequality and ends up on the board of Pepsico.  Giradharadas' interviews humanize these 'change-makers', making them more sympathetic, which is perhaps an intended sub-texual consequence. 

Giradharadas describes some fake billionaire ‘rebels’ and thought-leaders.  Libertarian tech titans and venture capitalists on elite cruises who pontificate against ‘the system,’ decrying unions, government laws and praising Uber.  The three steps of these ‘thought talks’ are:  1. focus on victims, not perpetrators.  2. personalize the political. 3. have a bite-size solution. And please, no conflict!  He dissects the McKinsey protocol of how an ignorant consultant can suss any problem in easy steps, based on increased productivity, better supply chains and technology, with smart procurement and purchasing.   Creeps like David Brooks, Elon Musk, Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Pinker, Niall Ferguson and Neil deGrasse Tyson appear at ‘think lite’ conferences like Aspen Ideas, South by Southwest, and Summit At Sea for very large speaking fees.  ‘Non-profit’ foundations launder capitalist exploitation into social control through charities they can live with.  Charity / business foundations like the secretive Clinton Global Initiative unite profit and ‘doing good,’ becoming modern Andrew Carnegies.

Even if they are not socialists, more and more people see that the institutions and power centers of this country are laughable and transparently bogus.  This book exposes in detail the corporate ‘social change’ sector from the inside, ending with an interview with Bill Clinton. The possibility here is that Giridharadas, because he is not an anti-capitalist but a left liberal, is becoming one of those ‘thought leaders’ he makes so much fun of, pulling his punches so that the ruling class will listen to him.  After all, he’s now a commentator on MSNBC, used to pundit at the Aspen Institute and worked for McKinsey.  This book got positive quotes from the NYT, Washington Post, the Ford Foundation, NPR, the Financial Times and of all people, Bill Gates. His own book will ultimately hang him.   

P.S. – The funnest question of all:  Who has more privilege – Warren Buffet, Oprah Winfrey, Carlos Slim, a black farm laborer in the Mississippi Delta, a Mexican farm worker in the Rio Grande valley or an old white miner living in a trailer up a holler in West Virginia?  Now expand that idea to the class system in the U.S. as a whole and its various components.  Privilege – it’s not always what you’re told.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box upper left:  “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers Again,” “American Exceptionalism and American Innocence,” “McMindfulness,” “Giants – the Global Power Elite,” “The Happiness Industry.” 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

We’re open 1-5 PM due to CoVid. Due to crime, knock if the door is locked.

Red Frog

February 2, 2021

Next Time You Get Stuck Having to Say Grace...

 Workers Grace

If you’re tired of religious ‘graces’ before a meal, here is one that is secular and pro-labor, starting with a simple part my Ma used to say. Why it is called a ‘grace’ is beyond me.  Anyone can adapt the idea of course.

The Workers’ Grace

For this Food which We are About to Receive, Let us be Duly Thankful …

To the farmers and farm workers who seeded the crops,

To the sun, rain and soil which grew the food,

To the farm workers who harvested it,

To the production workers who processed it,

To the truck drivers and teamsters who transported it,

To the wholesale and retail workers who organized it,

To the family members who worked to buy it,

To the family members who also grew it,

To the family members who cooked it.

 And …

To the mechanics who built the machinery and tools,

To the auto workers who built the vehicles,

To the construction workers who built the stores,

To the metal workers who built the appliances,

To the steel and ceramic workers who made the plates, knives and forks,

To the woodworkers who made the dinner table and chairs,

To the clothing workers who made our clothes,

To the nurses and doctors who keep us healthy enough to eat,

To the teachers who helped us gain knowledge,

To the construction workers who built our housing.

 And …

To the earth for providing the minerals,

To the miners who dug the soil,

To the trees which provided the table and chairs,

To the lumberjacks and mill workers who cut the wood,

To the power plant workers who keep the lights on,

To the designers, engineers and scientists who had a hand,

To the earth for providing the seeds,

To the bugs, bees, birds, bacteria and worms for fertilization,

To the air for… well, the rest.

 And …

To 'Saint' Karl. 

For, as he said in the Critique of the Gotha Programme,

Labor and Nature are the sources of all wealth.

Let’s eat!

Red Frog

January 31, 2021

Country Mouse or Hidden Dragon?

 “White Tiger,” film directed by Ramin Bahrani, 2021

This white tiger is no Slumdog Millionaire.  There are no lucky breaks on TV here.  This is a different kind of Horatio Alger story. Nor is anyone optimistically selling aging Brits on a run-down retirement home in Rajasthan.  Balram’s a broke but clever country mouse from rural India who travels to Delhi and talks his way into becoming the #2 driver for a wealthy family. Even though this same family of masters loots his village, repeatedly, taking 1/3^rd of the rupees the destitute village earns.  This “most holy of the landlords” includes a young son and his American wife.  These two aren’t as crude and backward as the father and other brother, the Mongoose, but eventually they are shown to be no different.  Ah, rich young liberals…

Driving the Nice Masters

Balram knows “not to be a poor man in a free democracy.”  Not to be a “rooster in a coop” ready to have his head chopped off.  Being a rooster is like the threats high caste masters have against poor, low caste (class) families if their employees or servants go astray.  To become less of a poor man, Balram pulls a Parasite and gets the #1 driver fired.  And what a ‘free democracy’ it is!  The central transactions in the film involve bribes paid to politicians, including ‘The Great Socialist,’ a female taking millions of rupees from the wealthy so they can avoid taxes on their profits.  She is probably a member of the Congress Party.  (This is 2007.) 

The film is narrated by Balram as a letter to Chinese Premier Jingtao, a ‘Naxalite” visiting India and Bangalore.  It is from the point of view of Balram’s newfound success and his poverty-stricken background.  He narrates his hatred for the masters and his abandonment of his stultifying family.  He knows “There is no Servant without a Master” and he’s made his choice in a society that only contains both.

The key event is like something out of Bonfire of the Vanities, the death of an innocent poor man Balram the servant is forced to take the blame for.  Like the Peaky Blinders, money, not justice, is the payment for manslaughter.  Balram takes his revenge on the master and becomes the white tiger in this social jungle.  By the way, white tigers are heavier and larger than normal Bengals.  In reality, many are cruelly locked in zoo cages – they never escape ‘the rooster coop.’

Indian Farmers, low caste and not, rebel

This is a film of caste rebellion, of class rebellion, of a virtual slave’s rebellion, but only on an individual level and eventually not even that.  It is a singular reflection of the conflict that is going on in the rest of India.  Balram joins the masters, trying to be a good one, as he knows “crime or politics” is the only way to the top.  Thinking about Premier Jintao, he says now is the time of the “brown and yellow man,” no longer the time of the white man.  Perhaps a statement of the rising Indian bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie.  The only penalty is the retribution murders of 17 in a small village in northern India, his own extended family. 

This film is based on the 2008 Booker Prize novel by Aravind Adiga, who also wrote Last Man in Tower, another political book about gentrification in Mumbai.  Adiga also wrote Between the Assassinations, a fragmented book set in Bangalore which is not as good as White Tiger.   

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left: Last Man in Tower (Adiga); Walking With the Comrades, Field Notes on Democracy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Capitalism a Ghost Story (all by Roy); The God Market; Celebrate Indian Women; Annihilation of Caste (Ambedkar/Roy); Arundhati Roy; Behind the Beautiful Forevers; The Story of My Assassins; Factory Days or type “India”.

The Kulture Kommissar

January 25, 2021     

Community Activism in San Francisco

 “White Knight,” by Henry Hitz, 2015

This is an unpredictable left-wing novel about San Francisco and environs, the high-profile assassinations carried out by Dan White and the tragedy of the People’s Temple mass suicides in November, 1978.  It centers on community organizer Barney Blatz, who is deeply involved with all these people, and through a few careless comments, thinks he encouraged these two disasters. 

A member of the communist Progressive Labor Party (PL), Barney and his wife Linda Jean quit the Party after the local leadership is expelled for going against a national Party edict.   What happened is the national Party demanded the local start a rent strike at a public housing project, Geneva Towers, after serious fire threats.  This even though most of the rent is provided by Section 8 vouchers and non-payment would endanger the resident’s right to live in the Towers.  

Then Proposition 13 passes in California in June of 1978.  This results in an additional burden on the Towers. It leads to the defunding of the local kindergarten facility in the Towers by the School Board.  A group of residents, including Barney who is a teacher there, object and organize to keep the school open.  They are successful for a time, running the school on their own. Their fight to keep the school open involves getting money - appealing to the somewhat suspect People’s Temple and the charismatic Jim Jones, the vagaries of councilperson Dan White, the capitalist Bank of America, friendly Mayor Moscone and others.  For Barney and Linda Jean it is a far cry from their prior work with PL.  But after some victories, they lose and the school is forced to shutdown due to lack of funds.

The WHITE KNIGHTS

Barney is the only ‘whitish’ person in the Towers and this is a sub-theme.  Linda Jean, his wife, is darker.  For this he gets baited and this is part of why the book is called White Knight – although there are other reasons.  He’s a bit of a white knight trying to organize a poverty-stricken community.  Dan White, the future killer of Mayor Moscone and Councilperson Milk, actually saves a family from a Tower fire.   His last name is White, another so-called ‘white knight.'  ‘White nights’ was the name given by the People’s Temple for their suicide practices.  And the ‘White Knights’ are a rumored group of People’s Temple vigilantes that probably don’t exist. 

The book illustrates the somewhat unstable personality of Barney, who zig-zags through infidelity, gay sex, paranoia, macho, belligerence, carelessness and drugs, all the while trying to ‘do the right thing.’  It almost makes you wish he was still in PL.  He and his wife buy a muddy patch of rural land as an escape.  His idealist ideas about education conflict with the harsher circumstances some children grow up in.  He’s mad at his wife for not standing up to him.  Barney’s family celebrates black nationalist Ron Karenga’s Juneteenth after an argument. He says stupid things sometimes, especially one remark he makes to Dan White and one to a tough guy named Mike, who ends up in Guyana with the People’s Temple.  But at the same time, his heart seems to be in the right place.  The book uses a font change to show Barney’s internal thoughts.

Dan White Gets Off Easy

COMMUNITY

Part of the book is drawn from Hitz’ personal experiences at a very trying time in San Francisco for someone politically active.  Hitz himself was a grade-school teacher for 35 years and probably a member of PLP for awhile, as was I.  It is a good picture of community organizing – its pitfalls and strengths, dealing with flawed humans and a political system that gives no quarter.  The People’s Temple was popular in the Towers, so not being friendly to them would be a problem.  Bourgeois black people show up from the School Board, as do petty criminals just trying to get by. 

When all is said and done, the Geneva Towers were a community. Each month for years the capitalist owners pocketed $200K from the U.S. government while letting the Towers fall apart.  At the end, what happened?  The cover of the book shows the 1998 demolition of the Towers in Visitacion Valley, San Francisco after the residents were thrown out.  White got an ‘involuntary manslaughter’ jury decision based on his Twinkie defense, even though he planned the murders.  A large number of proletarian black people paid with their lives for being part of a religious cult, no matter how ‘communistic.’  Now gentrification in San Francisco is rampant.  And people like Barney were damaged in the process.

Ultimately a dark story, but worth reading.

Prior blog reviews on San Francisco fiction, city issues and activism, use blog search box, upper left:  So You Say You Want a Revolution? (Levin/Silbar); Last Man in the Tower (Adiga); The Daminificados, (Wilson); Rebel Cities (Harvey); Cade’s Rebellion (Sheehy); How to Kill a City (Moskowitz); Capital City (Stein); Passage of Rebellion; Revolution in the Air (Elbaum); Darlingtonia; There, There; Clandestine Occupations.

Thanks to John Levin for the gift of this book!

The Kulture Kommissar

January 22, 2021    

Class Lives

 “One Night in Miami,” 2020 film by Regina King

This film is based on the stage play by Kemp Powers written in 2013.  It fictionally depicts what happened mostly inside a motel room in Miami on the historic night when Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston for the heavyweight boxing title.  The date is February 25, 1964.  In the audience was Malcolm X, taking pictures and cheering Clay on and Jim Brown, working as a boxing analyst of all things.  Coming from the Fontainebleau Hotel nearby was Sam Cooke, who had worked on a new song and was watching too.  The four of them all actually met later at a low-end motel, the Hampton House, in the Brownsville area of Miami where Malcolm X was staying. 

Victory Party?

This film/play is sort of the “Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf” of black leadership, as its centerpiece is a raw hard argument between Sam Cooke and Malcolm.  All we needed was James Baldwin and MLK in the room too. As imagined, the text is based on what each ‘might’ have said given their public personas – a political, religious and cultural clash of ideas, not actual people.

PARTY DOWNER

As you might expect in the film, Malcolm comes off the worst.  He’s a bad ‘party’ host who invited no one else, has no booze, no women, not even any music on the stereo – just some vanilla ice cream and two Fruit of Islam (FOI) guards outside.  He starts a long, ferocious argument with Cooke for being a pampered sell-out.  This in front of Clay, who is thinking of joining the Nation of Islam (NOI), and Brown, who is starting a career in acting.  Quite a bummer of a victory party for Clay, whose ferocious energy is taken up jumping on beds. 

Hiding behind all this for Malcolm emotionally are the FBI tails outside, his distant children, fearful wife and the imminent split with Elijah Muhammad.  

Cooke defends himself by saying how his music company is promoting black musicians, getting writers royalties and owning the masters.  He says that black people too have a right to success.  This is the classic black entrepreneurial claim.  Malcolm accuses him of writing pap (Cooke wrote all of his own hits, including Chain Gang).  Malcolm plays Dylan’s Times They Are a Changin’ as a great example instead, though Malcolm being a Dylan fan is hard to buy. (The song was actually played to Cooke earlier by his partner.) Cooke himself had already written A Change is Gonna Come before this argument, so he could have easily deflected Malcolm.  Brown tries to hide his role in a movie from Malcolm, which he was paid well for, while not being as physically damaging as football.  At the end Malcolm improbably tells the group, in whispers, that he will be leaving the Nation.  Malcolm hopes Clay will leave with him in the new organization.  Clay explodes and they have to hold him back, as he feels he’s been used by Malcolm.

THE CLASS BONES

That is the bare bones.  What is really at issue here is a line Clay has in a car while he and Cooke escape the dismal room to buy booze.  Clay says that the 4 of them have to stick together because no one else will understand:  They are - “You know:  young, black, righteous, famous, unapologetic.”  This is the nut of the issue here.  Every single politically-aware middle and upper-class African American has wrestled with the class question, which is what this is.  As did the playwright and the director probably.  Malcolm always styled himself a ‘field Negro” and he was the brokest of this bunch.  At one point in the text, Malcolm makes a comment about ‘boushie Negroes.”  Brown points out Malcolm might be feeling guilty about being a ‘high yellow’ – an identity politics observation that might reflect a more modern sensibility.  The opening scenes show that even these stars have problems with white people.  While still subject to bigotry, they nevertheless have risen above the majority of African Americans and they know it, and so does Malcolm.

What Cooke might have said to defend himself is that the NOI is also based on creating black businesses and self-reliance - but he doesn’t.  The NOI owned bakeries, printing plants, farms, retail stores, groceries, etc. - all propping up the lifestyles of the top leadership in Chicago.  Cooke hints at this.  Malcolm knew the rot in the NOI on the ideological and personal side, but ignores the economic side.  (Now under Farrakhan, they have joined with the Church of Scientology cult.)

You can see here that some of the writing is intended to exaggerate their differences or hide certain issues

Nice 'black' neighborhood in Atlanta

This is another version of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual posed by Harold Cruse in 1967 or the arguments W.E.B. Dubois had with Booker T. Washington much earlier. It is apparent that there is now a layer of middle-class ‘black’ people who have political, intellectual and economic power, mostly due to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.  This is Dubois' 'talented tenth.'  The majority of their political representatives are a shabby lot that have thrown in with the (white) ruling class.  They run cities full of poverty.  They run police departments that are killing people.  They oversee businesses that are just another capitalist concern. They fill the pathetic 'Black Caucus" in the Congress.  They buttress systemic racism while nibbling around the edges.  Black Agenda Report calls them ‘the black mis-leadership class.’  Others hawk liberal or crappy culture or join the Republican Party and become even more reactionary.  They are, in a word, pretty comfortable in the system as it is.

This is what Malcolm was getting at, though none of those here could change their circumstances.  Malcolm was dead more than a year later from an assassination plot hatched by the FOI in the Newark Temple – aided by the NY police and the FBI.  Cooke died about a year later, shot in a shabby motel in Los Angeles, though there were a number of people who wanted him dead – his soon-to-be ex-wife, his manager and various racists.  At his wake it was observed by Etta James that his head was nearly severed from his neck, his nose smashed and his hands crushed – due to a single gunshot?  Clay declared himself a Black Muslim and changed his name the next day, but his fighting career led to severe brain damage at 29.  Only Brown survived relatively unscathed, getting out of football in time and becoming a full-time actor.  Brown is portrayed as the most level-headed of the bunch in that room.  He's not being separated from his mother's pork and sex for the rigidity of the Nation. And he knew something was troubling Malcolm X, so his emotional intel was better than the rest. 

Like the Good Lord Bird, this film reflects the conflicted feelings of black artists and professionals when confronted by hostility to the whole system they are succeeding in.  No amount of films or books can fix that.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left: Who Killed Malcolm X?; Malcolm X – A Life of Reinvention (Marable); I am Not Your Negro (Baldwin); Da 5 Bloods (Lee); The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois); The Good Lord Bird; The Plot to Kill King and Orders to Kill (Pepper); Selma. 

The Cultural Marxist

January 19, 2021

Statues Come Tumblin' Tumblin'

 DRIVIN’ DIXIE DOWN

On Sunday 1/10/20, National Government Radio (NPR) did a lame segment on the Confederate ‘Lost Cause’ and its possible links to current white supremacy  One mainstream historian seemed to be arguing that there was no real continuity between slavery, the destruction of Reconstruction, Jim Crow and present white supremacy – the latter still especially strong in the South.  The liquidation of native Americans, the seizure of land from Mexico and European colonialism went invisible in this segment, as did the overall role of capital and labor exploitation. 

In the process they played originals of the song The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by The Band and also Joan Baez, a somber song about the damage wrought to the South by the North in the Civil War.  Some tried to find some small progressive meaning to the lyrics.   The song was denounced in "Loaded"  by Dunbar-Ortiz as an example of rightist culture.

Here is a new, leftist version of the lyrics.  The tune is certainly great and I love the Band, but …

The Night We Drove Old Dixie Down

“Virgil Lane is the name

And I served on the Nashville train

'Till Forrest's cavalry came

And tore up the tracks again

In the winter of '65

The Rebs were hungry, just barely alive

By May the 10th, Richmond had fell

It's a time I remember, oh so well

The night we drove old Dixie down

And the bells were ringing

The night we drove old Dixie down

And the people were singing

They went, "Na, na, la, na, na, la"

Back with my wife in Ohio

One day she called to me

"Virgil, quick, come see,

There goes Grant, not Bobby Lee!"

Now, I don't mind chopping wood

And I don't care if the money's no good

You take what you need

And you leave the rest

But the Rebs should never

Have taken the very best

The night we drove old Dixie down

And the bells were ringing

The night we drove old Dixie down

And all the people were singing

They went, "Na, na, la, na, na, la"

Like my father before me

I will work the land

And like my brother above me

Who took a Union stand

He was just 18, proud and brave

But a Reb laid him in his grave

I swear by the mud below my feet

You can't raise a Lane back up

When he's in defeat

The night we drove old Dixie down

And the bells were ringing

The night we drove old Dixie down

And all the Freedmen were singing

They went, "Na, na, la, na, na, la"

The night we drove old Dixie down

And all the bells were ringing

The night we drove old Dixie down

And the North was singing

They went, "Na, na, la, na, na, la"

At this late point in the Civil War, Nashville was controlled by the Union and served as a rail hub for supplies going east and south.  Minnesota regiments had won the battle of Nashville in December 1864 by turning the Confederate left on a high hill. The Minnesota state flag still flies over this battlefield.  Forrest was a brutal Confederate cavalryman operating in the western and central theaters.  A former slave trader, he founded the KKK and carried out the Fort Pillow massacre of captured black soldiers and their white officers.  Hard core scum.

Originally written by Robbie Robertson, The Band’s Canadian lead guitarist; sung by Levon Helm, from Alabama, The Band’s drummer.  From The Band’s concert The Last Waltz.

Prior Blog reviews on the Civil War, use blog search box, upper left:  "Civil War."

The Cranky Yankee

January 14, 2021

 

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