Personal Blogs

I’ve been here for 35 years. I don’t know about you, but this is the worst decade I’ve lived in (so far).

I didn’t see much of the 80’s of course, but thinking about the sense of security and prosperity I experienced as a child in a typical UK household in the 1990’s, is it any wonder I feel nostalgic for it? Despite the initial shock of 9/11 and terrible misadventures that followed, the 2000s in Britain felt so relaxed as to be almost boring.

I was just a small child when the political scientist Francis Fukuyama theorized that we were at the “end of history” in terms of political development. The social peace (though obviously not without some significant warmongering abroad) of the next 20 years seemed to prove him right. But it was just as I hit my 20s that this theory started to look a little too confident. In 2008, there was the major financial disaster that rippled across the US and Europe; the 2010’s was a decade where politics steadily became more and more angry.

I think it’s fair to say that some of us did not understand the depth of the anger; only realising that something had gone wrong when the UK voted for Brexit in 2015, quickly followed by the US election of Donald Trump in 2016. This has only been followed by waves of right-wing nationalist politicians growing in popularity and winning elections across Europe. This would have been impossible at any point in the previous two decades.

In the 2020s we are living in a world that is becoming increasingly politically hostile – even apart from the “meta-crisis” we are facing from climate breakdown, artificial intelligence, superbugs, bioweapons, and nuclear power competition. What happened?

Perhaps émigré Russian social scientist Peter Turchin has an answer for us?

Cliodynamics – it’s all happened before…

Perhaps it’s the effect of growing up in such a peaceful generation, but up until about 2015, I’d sort of forgotten that we are all part of history. As we all know, history can be a dark place. I used to think that we would never repeat the terrible mistakes of history, but that only shows my ignorance of it. Societies repeat the mistakes of history all the time. The histories of most nations are peppered with brutal, bloody civil wars and revolutions, international history is chronicle of pointless death in the service of some ambitious or greedy leader.

What tends to happen after such terrible events is that everyone involved seems to decide it was a bad thing, and that we hope it never happens again, but invariably – it does.  Sometimes, only a few decades later – see the first and second world wars. However, sometimes, peace can last much longer. After the period of the English civil war, there was a social peace for at least a century before things began to sour again.

People have tried to account for how and why this tends to happen, but these attempts have been largely unscientific – that is, contends social scientist Peter Turchin, until now. He and others working in the field of cliodynamics or the study of “the forces of history”, believe they have enough data to understand why societies can’t sustain peace for long, and why they seem to go into cycles of political violence and sometimes, collapse. Reading about the collection of this database, relying on the work of numerous historians, social scientists, data analysts, etc – he makes it sound very impressive. He claims that cliodynamics has studied hundreds of cases of social crises and has found something in common with all of them.

The biggest factor involved in state crisis and collapse is what he calls “elite overproduction.” This stands out above all other factors, such as pressure from other states, or financial crises – though it often comes along with falling living standards for the poor and middle classes.

Too many kings?

The theory is actually fairly simple. Turchin argues that the key predictor of internal crises within nations is the overproduction of elites, and this leads to conflict between them. But who are they? Though it initially sounds like a conspiracy theory, there is a sociological definition of the elite. They are the people who hold the most power in society. Turchin outlines four kinds of power:

1.       Coercive power – the people in charge of the army, navy, air force, and police.

2.       Bureaucratic power – the civil servants, lawyers, politicians, employers who dictate the laws and rules of society.

3.       Financial power – central bankers, CEOs, billionaires – whoever can control money.

4.       Ideological power – media figures, government propagandists, PR agents.

The people who run these institutions that affect the lives of millions of people are the power elite. They usually get these jobs often by being either very wealthy (in the top 10% at least, having more than 1 million dollars) or having degrees from the most elite universities. However, there are only a fixed number of these elite jobs, and this is where the problems begin.

What if there are more wealthy, well-educated people than there are jobs? For some, this doesn’t matter. If they’re wealthy enough, they can just go yachting or golfing for the rest of their lives. But that doesn’t tend to cut it. People tend to want to “fulfil their potential”, “be ambitious”, or at least have a bit more cash to afford that big house or that second Porsche. So, competition for those jobs intensifies, and the more competitive things are, the more disappointed little rich folks there are. Some can accept their misfortune and slip into the middle class. But for some, that’s too much of a bitter pill, and that’s where things get dangerous.

It's just this oversupply of deadly ambition which sparked the events of the Wars of the Roses, argues Turchin – the series of medieval wars that form the basis of George Martin’s Game of Thrones. Shakespeare gave this murderous elite greed the face of Richard the Third, a key figure in the princely civil strife:

“Well, say there is no kingdom then for Richard; What other pleasure can the world afford?”
- Henry VI, Part 3: Act III, Scene 2

However, he also argues that similar elite frustrations were involved in the English Civil War, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, the Russian Revolution, the Taiping Rebellion, etc. etc. All of these examples make fascinating reading in his book “End Times.” But the frustrated elites couldn’t bring these events about alone. How would such “would-be-kings” do without an army to support them?

Desperate Men

Turchin imagines elite competition as a game of musical chairs, but instead of taking away a chair every time the music stops, you just add three times more people, and they can do anything to get a chair. In order to win the game in real life, you need an army of supporters, certainly, but quite often, a literal army. Who would put their lives on the line for such a game?

Clearly, only people who are desperate enough to risk death for you, meaning, of course, poor people. But not just any poor people. Turchin’s data pinpoints moments in time in which non-elites are especially poor, when wages and living standards are falling or have been held down for long periods of time. This is what contributed to the revolutionary period in Europe from 1790 to the mid 19^th century, but has also been a factor in most cases of social crisis. “Immiseration”, the general stagnation of wages and poor living standards, creates a population of potential foot-soldiers ready to try something new, and thus easily swayed by elites who didn’t quite become kings.

What is most interesting is that immiseration and elite overproduction tend to go together. This is because the entrenched elites find ways to pump wealth out of the poor over long periods of time. They do this by increasing rents, keeping wages low, taxation, forced labour, or even slavery. This extra wealth accumulates so much the wealthy can afford to keep all kinds of retainers, make heirs and bastards, and even though most people are getting poorer, the numbers of the very wealthy are actually increasing as this “wealth pump” becomes more efficient. In short, immiseration is often a correlate of elite overproduction.

Perhaps this doesn’t give the general population enough credit though. Maybe it isn’t merely a case of being swayed by frustrated elites, but more that when the time is right, people find leaders prepared to help them out. Turchin shows that full scale civil wars can be avoided if elites make efforts to redistribute wealth and make the social contract a little fairer. This, he argues, is what happened in the US and in parts of Europe during the 1930s – in part because the elites feared the spread of the Russian Revolution. The super-rich of 1920s America took a big hit, allowing the top rate of tax ultimately to go up to 90%, in order to stave off the pitchforks.

We don’t tend to appreciate the delicate state of the social peace of the interwar period. But there is a reason that John Steinback made this assessment of the American people’s mood in his 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath:

“… in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

In the end, the revolution never came – but Turchin argues that this was largely due to the attempts of the elites to compromise with the immiserated mass through President Roosevelt’s New Deal, perhaps for fear that a frustrated lawyer or socialist son of an oil baron would try to take his opportunity to be a great man of history and start a second US civil war. Just as important however, was the fact that the Wall Street Crash of 1929 had already wiped out the economic power of a swathe of potential counter-elites, meaning that competition for top jobs had been reduced. 

Yes – we’re back in history, and it’s not pretty

Strangely enough – or perhaps not so strangely, Turchin predicted the turbulent 2020s ten years ago, following the findings of cliodynamics. He argues that since the 1980s, wealth has yet again been pumped from the poor to the rich in the US, and this has funded a huge increase in the number of billionaires and elite aspirants; this state of affairs has reached a head only now, when competition for the top jobs has reached high levels, against the backdrop of popular discontent resulting from the financial crash, and now COVID, inflation, and the high cost of housing. Elite educated aspirants like Tucker Carlson and entitled old wealth like Donald Trump are using this discontent to gain power. But instead of attempting to turn off the wealth pump, so far, they are just directing anger away from wealth inequality and towards so called “cultural” issues. This means that unless something changes, the US is only going to get worse – and Turchin says that the predictions are bad. Even a huge reverse now will not save the US from a significant social crisis in the 2020s.

A similar story could be told about the UK – though I haven’t seen his data, it’s a demonstrable fact that wealth inequality has boomed, wages have been depressed for decades, and the two major political parties are struggling with a huge crisis of legitimacy. The wealth pump was turned on when Thatcher liberalized finance in the 1980s and declared “there is no alternative” to the free market. She also attacked trades unions that helped wages track inflation, and gave cheap public housing into private ownership, laying the groundwork for the current housing crisis, and fuelling the transfer of rent from poor to wealthy asset holders talked about by economist Gary Stevenson. We may be a few years behind the US, but I feel we are heading in the much the same direction. What’s the solution?

On the one hand, Turchin’s theory is hopeful. The right compromise can avoid disaster, but crucially it takes an elite who are ready to make that compromise for the good of the nation as a whole. The turn towards cultural politics, in which we argue vehemently about the morality of what we had all largely come to accept as personal choices, represents a massive dead end – the more that elites turn attention towards those things, the more likely a kind of religious civil war becomes, since this kind of culture war does absolutely nothing to stem the flow of money towards more and more wealthy aspirants looking for a way to power – the ultimate driver of social instability. For the good of our nations, we need to address wealth inequality, otherwise the future is the kind of plutocratic failed democracy we can see elsewhere.

On the other hand, Turchin’s theory is a little disappointing for people with a more progressive (maybe utopian) vision of a possible society. Turchin doesn’t question the existence of states. States must exist, because polities that don’t organize into states get crushed out of history – they can’t defend themselves. And where states exist, so must elites. It is naiveté to believe that a leader will take you to full political equality – where power is concentrated, an elite will hold it. What matters to him is not whether such institutions exist or not, but who they work for – everyone, or just a wealthy few? If elites fail to manage this, then history tends to catch up to them, sooner or later.

Does this mean history is just doomed to repeat itself? Over the next few months, I’m going to be trying to get my head around how this theory relates to other topics I’ve been looking at in this blog – and trying to work out what this says about any possible future turmoil. 

Bibliography

Peter Turchin (2023) End Times, Penguin

Peter Turchin (2023) Cliodynamica, available at: https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/