And they’re not calling all the black people murdered by cops lynchings I bet

It’s not violence when the government does it, that’s just sparkling conflict

First off, Turchin isn't a Marxist. He accepts Marxist and Marxian ideas though especially when proven through empirical data. He obviously must he's a sociologist. He's ambivalent / neutral about Marxism.

His model is summed up as: When excess elites are not absorbed into the existing power structure and are locked out due to lack of space in that power structure, they become aggrieved by their low status and seek alternatives to that power structure in various ways. Since they are elites they have some means whether knowledge, skill or material, thus have the means to destabilize the power structure itself.

This quite literally describes the conditions that made Lenin and much of the intellectual vanguard themselves as they related to the power structure of Tsarist Russia. One of the things that many here do not really focus on is that Lenin and the Bolsheviks weren't just solving a problem for the proletariat, they were solving a problem for themselves too.

Here's a good blog putting together the historical info but focusing on the general nobility rather than the Bolsheviks only.

https://novum.substack.com/p/elite-overproduction-a-story-of-russia?s=w

Turchin's book is called Secular Cycles.

Turchin's substack is here: https://peterturchin.substack.com/archive?sort=top

He has a fairly interesting series called "A Chronicle of Revolution" that talks about the meta of revolutions themselves and relates it to current/historical happenings.

I was shitposting but that is actually interesting and useful contextualization, thanks for the info.

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.

Parable of the Sower is such a good fuckin book. Practically all of it has already happened or is happening.