love too talk about elites and commoners because “class” is invisible, not even the Soviet-educated dude fucking brings it up?
god damn
I didn’t express this properly. “ruling class” and “working-class” are mentioned, but reading it it’s like they are incidental features of groups not a realtionship to the means of production, it’s like the author has an anti-materialist brain tumor
it’s like the author has an anti-materialist brain tumor
Turchin was born in 1957 in Obninsk, Russia, a city built by the Soviet state as a kind of nerd heaven, where scientists could collaborate and live together. His father, Valentin, was a physicist and political dissident, and his mother, Tatiana, had trained as a geologist. They moved to Moscow when he was 7 and in 1978 fled to New York as political refugees.
yes
