Peter Turchin’s book End Times is another bourgeois academic’s attempt at understanding history and the trajectory of capitalist society.⁽¹⁾ His method of analysis, though initially ridiculed, has attracted some interest and respect after he predicted in 2010, via his multipath forecasting (MPF) model, that the 2020s would be a period of sharp instability for the US. This prediction was made in the scientific journal Nature and the storming of the Capitol by Trump’s supporters a decade after the prediction brought a measure of recognition to Turchin’s approach. The book is largely about the US but attempts to apply the method of analysis to a broad sweep of history going back to feudal and slave societies. It is an indication of how worried the capitalist class is over the direction in which the capitalist system is heading. Like Piketty’s analysis of inequality in his tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century published in 2014, this analysis concludes the ship of capital is heading for the rocks.⁽²⁾ Turchin, like Piketty, is trying to offer capitalism ways of avoiding the civil wars or revolution which their analyses predict. Turchin writes:

Social breakdown and internal warfare kill people, wreck economies and roll back human achievement. We must develop a clear-eyed understanding of why it happens so that we can avoid the endless cycle of recurrent waves of instability and violence.⁽³⁾

However, both Turchin and Piketty’s works are empirical and so lack any theoretical understanding of the fundamental economic motive forces driving the capitalist system, or those driving earlier societies such as feudalism or slave society. These are the forces which compel the ruling classes to immiserate the subject class – hence the proposed remedies of Turchin and Piketty are little more than wishful thinking. Turchin identifies the solution to the catastrophic trajectory on which he sees the system heading as being a massive tax on the richest 10% of the population, and the stripping of the wealth of many members of this group. This was what, he argues, occurred during the 1929 slump and the New Deal from 1933 in the US. Turchin thinks these measures saved the day for capitalism. The wealth, which is stripped from this elite 10%, should, he recommends, be distributed to the immiserated half of the population, though this is not exactly what happened in the 1930s. Meanwhile, Piketty argues the natural operation of capitalism produces inequality and there is no way the normal operation of the system can prevent this. The system was, in his view, saved by the two world wars of the last century which massively reduced the wealth of the richest groups and reduced inequality. This forced interruption of capitalism’s structural tendencies allowed capitalism to start again from a more egalitarian position in 1945. However, continues Piketty, the internal laws of capitalism reasserted themselves in the post war period and the situation is such that by 2030 the US poorest 50% will receive only 15% of the social product. This is likely to lead to revolt. To remedy this, Piketty recommends a wealth tax on the accumulated wealth of the top 10%, rather than an income tax. The proceeds, he argues, should be distributed to the poorest 50%. In other words, both Turchin and Piketty are demanding the state suspend the laws of capitalism to save the system via an altruistic redistribution of wealth to the immiserated majority.

Empirical analyses can be used to support a theory or to derive patterns from which a theory is derived, as occurred in the natural sciences, but Turchin does neither. As Marx argued:

… all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.⁽⁴⁾

Turchin thinks the mass of historical facts can speak for themselves if properly analysed and social trends identified. However, unless we understand the economic forces creating these social trends and the mass of facts he assembles all we can conclude is that the future will resemble the past. However, history has progressed from slave society to feudalism and from feudalism to capitalism. This is not simply patterns repeating themselves. To understand this the underlying economic forces need to be identified and used to explain the social phenomena for which data is assembled. Turchin fails to identify any driving forces, in fact, he scorns such an approach. The data should, he thinks, speak for itself. His general conclusion is that all states have integrative and disintegrative cycles which typically occur over a period of 200 years (except in the case of societies where the ruling class is polygamous, where he reduces this period to 100 years because the ruling class breeds faster causing overproduction of elites). The identification of these periods is purely empirical and as we would expect there is no explanation for why these periods occur beyond the struggle between elites and immiserated sectors of society. The data again is left to speak for itself. If Turchin wished to identify fundamental economic forces causing these periods of integration and disintegration, the task would be compounded by the need to identify differing underlying economic forces for the different modes of production. Instead he tries to explain all societies through the framework of conflict between the elites and the immiserated.

What all the big data and mathematical models tell us is that there is recurrent struggle between different groups in all these societies, the elites and the immiserated. Turchin specifically denies that these groups are classes. He is aware of Marx’s view, stated in the Communist Manifesto, that “The history of hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”⁽⁵⁾ But he argues that his elites and immiserated are not classes because “These groups are not defined by their relations to the means of production.”⁽⁶⁾

Of course, though they may be defined another way in Turchin’s glossary, in reality these groups are fundamentally defined by their relations to the means of production and there is little point in Turchin trying to deny this. What his models produce is a class analysis of sorts and are, in fact, a confirmation of Marx’s description of history as history of class struggle quoted above. In each mode of production there are specific forces driving the respective classes to confront each other. Turchin does not want to be bothered with identifying these forces, he does not describe these groups as social classes as he wants to apply the same method to feudal and slave societies, and instead thinks his mathematical models will tell us all we need to know. But how has Turchin constructed his models?

Turchin’s Models

Turchin claims his work is an attempt to turn history into a science by assembling masses of data, creating the so-called “big data”, and making sense of it by use of analytic mathematical models. He christens the new science of history “cliodynamics”. He is, however, aware that philosophers of science, like Karl Popper, had insisted that a science of history was impossible since human societies were too complex, but thinks that the enormous computing power available today can make sense of this complexity. Turchin was initially, he tells us, an ecologist who studied the dynamics of populations of beetles, butterflies, mice and deer. His success in understanding the expansion, collapse and recovery of these groups by means of collection of “big data” and computer modelling made him think the same general principles could be used in studying human societies, in particular state formation and state collapse.

Turchin assembles data from bourgeois statistics such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), wages, taxes, working population numbers, life expectancy, health, heights of population, protests, riots, opinion polls, historical data compiled by historians and other things he considers relevant. These are culled by his team of helpers and entered into a database to produce his “big data”. This is then analysed mathematically.

Models’ Predictions

The studies look at the relationship between the elites and the immiserated sections of societies; in the case of capitalist society, this broadly translates into the capitalist class with its agents and hangers on, and the working class. His models indicate that social breakdown or instability arises from overproduction of elites and immiseration of the working classes. Overproduction of elites arises when there are too many elite aspirants with degrees or other qualifications and insufficient positions in the ranks of the ruling class and its state. The immiseration of the lower orders of society such as the unskilled or manufacturing working class is a result of the actions of the ruling class via taxation, reduction in wages, reduction in benefits healthcare, etc. The ruling class sets up what Turchin calls a “wealth pump” which pumps wealth from the working class to the elites causing immiseration of the working class. The overproduction of elites produces a group of “counter-elites” who are bitter at their exclusion from the elites. Violence or social breakdown occurs when the counter-elites place themselves at the leadership of the immiserated masses and lead their resistance.

All this sounds more or less like a classic statement of the class struggle which we do not need mathematical models to predict. In fact, it is. The prediction that the models arrive at for the US is that the 2020s will be a decade of instability and violence and it is too late to prevent this.⁽⁷⁾ He supports his predictions by unpicking some of the rosy statistics provided by the bourgeoisie.

He is not the first to point out that the averages of official statistics disguise the vast disparity in income but he gives some useful figures to demonstrate this. For example, a worker in the bottom 5th of the statistics earns approximately $20,000 annually while a CEO earns $13.6 million (both figures are in inflation adjusted dollars). This produces a median wage way above that of the bottom 40%. Also, the adjustment for inflation is highly problematic because items purchased by the bottom 40% are different from those of the top 20%. Another misleading statistic is household income. In the 40 years since 1976, annual household income has, according to US statistics, gone from $61,000 to $89,000; however, the average household now has more than one person earning. For example, the participation of women in the US workforce has risen from 30% in 1955 to 60% in 2000. A more useful statistic might be the median wage which in the 40 years went from $17.1 per hour to $18.9. Yet, US statistics divide the population into 5 groups and if we look at median wage for the lower groups there is an actual fall. Workers with only high school degrees saw their average wages fall from $19.25 per hour to $18.57 per hour in the 40 years. Those without high school degrees saw a fall from $15.5 per hour to $13.66. In an attempt to get round the problem of inflation adjustment Turchin introduces what he calls a relative wage, that is wages in current dollars at the time of the statistic divided by GDP per capita again in dollars at the time of the statistic. He finds that between 1976 and 2016 relative wages of workers have decreased by 30%.⁽⁸⁾ This statistic is a ratio which also does not tell the whole story. For example, in the 1930s, when the situation of the working class was catastrophic, Turchin finds the relative wage was increasing. Presumably this was because of the decline in numbers of the elites. While it is clear bourgeois statistics hide the real scale of immiseration of the working class, the relative wage does so also.

The immiseration of the lower orders of society and elite overproduction are combined in the mathematical model to produce what Turchin calls a political stress index (PSI), used for MPF, which keeps track of radicalisation and moderation processes. He finds that the 30% drop in relative wages mentioned above has not been seen since the three decades before the US Civil War, 1830 to 1860. This is part of the data input to his model which predicts the US is in a situation similar to that before the Civil War.

He is at pains to show that the US is a plutocracy. He points out that the US ruling class is a coalition of top wealth holders, the 1% and the top degree holders, the 10%. After 1980 the flood of wealth from the working classes to the economic elites ballooned. This was the “wealth pump” transferring wealth from the working classes to the elites. At the same time the corporate elite reduced their taxes thereby starving the Treasury and accumulating massive resources for themselves. Turchin predicts this is leading to

The fate of the Roman, Dutch and Habsburg Spanish empires.⁽⁹⁾

Turchin’s Solution to Avoid Social Collapse

Turchin’s failure to analyse the fundamental economic relationships which underlie the dismal picture he paints means that the solutions he proposes are based on empiricism – he concludes that the future must be made to resemble the past by actions of the capitalist state. A Marxist understanding of the internal relations of capitalist production shows that elite overproduction and working class immiseration are symptoms, not the cause of the instability and violence Turchin predicts. There is overproduction of constant capital. Put simply, this means the mass of machinery and raw materials used in production increases in value faster than variable capital, by which is meant the value of the labour-power used in production. The increase in the ratio of constant capital to variable, in turn, leads to a tendency for the rate of profit to fall.⁽¹⁰⁾ It is the fall in the rate of profit which forces our rulers to attempt to restore profitability by whatever means they can. It is this which is behind the attacks on working-class wages and conditions and restriction of the numbers of the elites. These things are therefore symptoms of the deeper problems of the internal workings of capitalism itself.

Turchin, however, wants the elites to change direction and reverse the “wealth pump.” He urges them, like the proverbial leopard, to change their spots and change from predatory beasts into altruists. They should distribute a large section of their wealth to the lower 50%. As mentioned above, Turchin argues this is what was done in the US New Deal in the 1930s and so should be done again.

Two problems arise with all this. The first is that it wasn’t the New Deal which saved the day for capitalism; it was the devaluation and destruction of constant capital which occurred during the Second World War which saved the day for capitalism. The New Deal, which Turchin so admires, was the capitalist class’s response to the depth of the crisis which started in 1929. This crisis was so severe the ruling class was faced with the prospect of introducing state capitalist measures to mitigate the catastrophic conditions of the working class or prepare for revolution. A few statistics illustrate this. Between 1929 and 1932 US national income halved, 15 million were unemployed, steel production - an indication of capitalist vigour - dropped to 12% of what it was in 1929, farm income dropped from $12bn to $5bn, $10 million of savings were wiped out as 5,000 banks collapsed. Millions were evicted from their homes, and lived in boxes and shacks made from tin cans on the fringes of the cities in the so-called “Hoovervilles”. There was hunger in the cities and the countryside while, as is normal in capitalism, food was being dumped and poisoned to prevent the hungry from eating it. This was in order to keep prices up. The system was on the brink of collapse and the normal operation of capitalism was only making things worse. Roosevelt’s New Deal was, as Turchin says, an attempt to use the state to save the system. Various state bodies were set up to attempt to counter unemployment with these agencies paying less than prevailing wages. They reduced unemployment but did not eliminate it. The work done by these bodies, such as the Civil Works Administration, was not productive and did not go into accumulation of productive capital. Hence, these organisations did not address the fundamental problems of capitalism. The passing in 1935 of the Social Security Act and the National Labour Relations Act, which allowed workers to organise in trade unions, created the impression that the New Deal was a concession to the workers. In fact, the rights given to workers to organise resulted in strikes being controlled by the unions, including the newly formed CIO⁽¹¹⁾, and thus less effective. Turchin’s “wealth pump” was not reversed, it was stalled. All this did produce a brief recovery from 1935 to 1936 after which the recession returned with a vengeance. By the end of 1937 steel production, for instance, dropped from 80% of capacity to 19%. War production, which started in 1938, provided some relief for the unemployed but in 1939 there were still 10 million unemployed. Production of armaments, which has been described as military Keynesianism, still does not solve capitalism’s problem of profitability since arms production is simply waste production. The products do not re-enter the production cycle as new constant capital, they are destined to be destroyed in war. In the war itself half of all US production became war production and accumulation of capital ceased. This brought a massive devaluation of capital, as constant capital was used up but not replaced. This devaluation of constant capital, together with reductions in wages and rationing during the war, laid the foundation for the increase of profit rates which underpinned the post-war recovery. The capitalist crisis was ended by the war, not by the New Deal. This means that Turchin’s claim that the present crisis could be ended by another New Deal is just wrong.

The war restored profit rates for a period of about 30 years. The post-war boom ended in the 1970s, which is also when Turchin’s findings show a decline in his relative wage measure. The return of the crisis of profitability meant the relative wage could no longer be easily increased by the capitalist class through concessions to wages and conditions. Which brings us to the second problem, that the leopard cannot change its spots. The elites of capitalism are forced to attack and immiserate the proletariat because of the internal working of capitalism itself. The constant accumulation of capital in relation to labour tends to reduce profit rates. To counter this, the capitalist class tries to increase exploitation of the workforce by drives for efficiency. These entail the replacement of workers by machines, robots, computers and AI, or simply speed ups or longer working hours. However, since exploitation of living labour is the only source of surplus value which forms capitalism’s profit, excluding workers from production ultimately reduces the amount of profit in each commodity produced with the reduced labour input, and so tends to make rates of profit fall further. It therefore makes the situation worse for capital. This is the driving force which Turchin thinks there is no need to understand, but which controls the fall in the relative wage which he discovers. The tendency for the rate of profit to fall became acute in the 1970s. The elites who control capitalism reacted by increasing the exploitation of the working class through lower wages and worsening working conditions and exporting capital to countries where labour-power is cheaper. However, the immiseration of the working class has its limits and these problems drive our rulers towards imperialist adventures. These involve eliminating competitors, gaining cheaper raw materials, gaining cheaper labour-power or control of strategic trade routes, all this by military force if other means fail. Leaders such as Trump are saying all this quite openly.

A period of violence and revolt, which Turchin predicts, may indeed be coming. Turchin thinks it is now too late to avoid it. Unless it leads to revolution and the overthrow of the capitalist system all the problems which we have described will continue. As it stands, the immanent forces behind capitalist competition are pushing each national section of the ruling class to become more violent, making generalised war an ever more real prospect. The conflicts raging today will then only appear as a prelude before the main act.

The real choice facing the immiserated working class today is either revolution or war.

Notes:

(1) Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, published by Penguin Books 2024

(2) See review of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, leftcom.org

(3) Turchin, End Times, p.295

(4) Marx, Capital, Volume 3, ch.48

(5) Communist Manifesto, section 1

(6) Turchin, End Times, p.78

(7) Turchin, End Times, p.202

(8) Turchin, End Times, p.79

(9) Turchin, End Times, p.206

(10) See Capitalism's Economic Foundations, leftcom.org

(11) Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO) formed in 1935 as a committee within the American Federation of Labour