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The Scholar Who Predicted America's Breakdown Says It's Just Beginning
(www.newsweek.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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"Turchin wrote in the journal Nature in 2010, forecasting a spike in unrest around 2020, driven by economic inequality, 'elite overproduction' and rising public debt,"
Turchin has a Capital reading group?
Turchin's father was Valentin Turchin who was a fairly famous Soviet cyberntician who left the USSR after defending Sakharov, because he didn't want his science career to plummet in the same way. His life story is literally based in elite over reproduction.
Turchin was at the University of Moscow before his family left the USSR.
I was shitposting but that is actually interesting and useful contextualization, thanks for the info.
Nah, he is on severe grind about elites, kinda toozy vibes, but from "this is our aristocracy, when they fail to renew, we don't ball"
I mean, reading how he defines elites, it almost seems like he is trying to recreate the definition of labor aristocrats.
(shitpost below) A bunch of laborers given bits of capitalist plunder in order to siphon off revolutionary inclinations? Sounds a tad familiar. We're gonna have the US revolutionary body call themselves Turchinists.
To me it seems like anarcho-influenced interpretation (e.g. progression of hierarchy->aristocracy->porkies (+their house servants, so like top decile), only observing that not material reality changed, but the top becomes unsupported/overproduced and tips over). Only don't think i've seen other traces of anarchist thought in him, so
I was gonna make a pithy joke about expecting ideological consistency from a neolib at first But to me, it seems to be that dude is trying to rediscover dialectics within neoliberalism as a framework and force it together with whatever ideological components may serve as an explanation. It's a marriage of convenient ideas as he has seen something at play. I am still behind on theory though and this is the only article I've seen from him so I could be wrong.
What does elite overproduction mean? Surplus of educated people?
Yeah, the way it is phrased is a bit odd here but in essence, it seems he is referring to laborers whose labor power demands higher commodity costs due to the cost of production of them as a laborer being higher due to being better educated and trained. Quite literally appears to attempting to reinvent sections of Marxism with the spooky stuff cut out. Hell, even the criticisms levied against him are regurgitated.
In the modern era that's basically it (because higher education represents the biggest generation of elites), but it's more general.
Elite in this case is simply the highest caste, class or social strata that enforces some form of power over the lower ones.
Let's say there's X amount of elite "positions" (cuz being a King is not a job and this applies to history as well) every year, presidents, senators, bankers, CEO's, all the way to some upper middle class jobs.
Every year this set of jobs can expand or contract. These positions require (through culture or ability) social elites to fulfill their function, people of privilege, college educated, connected, skilled, etc. Let's call the amount of elites Y
Elite overproduction essentially is a phenomenon in a country where Y > X and grows Y at a greater rate than X year over year.
In Tsarist Russia for example Y (represented by the nobility) grew at a rate of 2.5 over ~75 years. In that same time X had only grown through fake make work councils which could not subsume all of the elites being produced.
However that's not all the Y there was, Russia was also growing like the world was and petty bourgoisie were also growing adding to Y.
Historically the conflict between the nobility and the bourgeoisie has been a conflict of the nobility refusing to make de jure space for the bourgeoisie and being de facto evicted from that space. That's literally the French Revolution.
This isn't just Marxism rebranded because this applies to socialist countries in history such as the USSR, and currently such as China.