The image at the top of the article has incredible meme potential
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
One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war. The effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale. “No one wants to accept that we live in the societies we do”—rich, complex ones with universities and museums and philosophy and art—“because of an ugly thing like war,” he said. But the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex societies because they kill off simpler ones.
oh fuck off
Damn if only there was some school of history that has existed for nearly 200 years based on some pretty straightforward economic models saying things are gonna get worse as a shrinking class claims an increasingly larger share of wealth.
