A quite interesting essay; a longish excerpt from near the end of the essay:
The great compression was rooted in the reforms of the New Deal and the expansion of union power, but it was World War II and the subsequent American-led global effort to rebuild that sustained the relatively egalitarian boom of the postwar decades. American industrial capacity doubled in the five years between 1940 and 1945. In 1946, the United States produced half the world’s total output. By the 1950s, America still produced one-third of global economic output. The historically unique conditions of this Golden Era meant that American industry could pay high wages and high taxes yet still book high profits.
However, by the mid-1960s, Germany and Japan had recovered. Their labor costs were much lower than those in the United States, and their capital stock tended to be newer and more efficient. Not only were the Europeans and the Japanese supplying their own domestic markets, they were also ramping up their exports. At the same time American consumer spending began to level out by the mid-1960s. Once-exotic luxuries like full-size refrigerators and electric vacuum cleaners had become commonplace. The postwar shopping spree was winding down. By the early 1970s, therefore, the growth and industrialization of earlier decades had led to a classic crisis of overproduction and overaccumulation. Suddenly there was too much production capacity, too much capital, and too many commodities already in existence, and not enough opportunities for profitable re-investment. American capitalism was suffocating from industrial success.
As Marx put it so long ago: “Modern bourgeois society … that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” During the inevitable crisis of overproduction, there was suddenly “too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they … endanger the existence of bourgeois property.” By the early 1970s, this expressed itself as “stagflation” or rising prices combined with high unemployment and sluggish growth. Most importantly, the crisis of overaccumulation expressed itself as a collapse in average after-tax profit rates. By 1973, average profit rates were only about a third what they had been in the mid 60s. When business attempted to restore profits by cutting wages, it was thwarted by a massive, militant trade-union counteroffensive; 1974 saw more work stoppages than any year since 1953.
The resolution to the crisis, in the end, came in the form of a new class war waged from above. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were its charismatic leaders, and Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve, was the financial executioner. By 1980-81, Volcker had jacked the federal funds rate to 20 percent, from around 9 percent in 1979. This massive contraction in credit triggered what was at the time the worst recession since the Great Depression. Unemployment soared above 10 percent. Simultaneously, Reagan, Thatcher, and their imitators across the globe cut taxes on the rich, raised taxes on working-class consumption, deregulated whole industries, and eviscerated health and safety regulations. Financial speculation boomed, which, in turn, drove deindustrialization as firms merged and rationalized. It was at this point that the American class structure began its radical bifurcation as the middle class was hollowed out.
What Turchin really seems to have in mind when discussing surplus elites in the American context—and what many readers seem to take him to be referring to—is the growing class of proletarianized knowledge workers who form an influential but increasingly beleaguered stratum. These downwardly mobile members of what Barbara and John Ehrenreich called the “professional-managerial class” (PMC) possess some bureaucratic and ideological power but have been losing autonomy and economic power along with the rest of the middle class.
As the Ehrenreichs explained in a 2013 pamphlet, “Death of a Yuppie Dream”: “By 2010, more than half of practicing US physicians were directly employed by hospitals,” compared to only “24 percent of doctors who were salaried employees in 1983.” The situation for lawyers is similar: Around 1960, most were sole practitioners or worked for small firms, “fewer than forty law firms” employed “fifty or more lawyers.” Six decades later, “42 percent of all practicing lawyers work in one of the biggest 250 firms or in other institutional settings (corporations, government, or the not-for-profit sector).” In other words, the old petty bourgeoisie, which enjoyed economic autonomy through the ownership of small businesses, has been increasingly absorbed into large organizations owned and controlled by wealthier and more powerful entities, and has seen its working conditions and economic status degraded in the process.
The PMC fits Turchin’s definition of elite because, to varying degrees, it wields bureaucratic and ideological power. But the members of the PMC increasingly do so as precarious workers saddled with educational, housing, and medical debt, bullied by employers, and bereft of any resort to the social safety net. These downwardly mobile professionals have degrees and social capital, and often have boutique tastes in music, food, clothing, and art that reflect their cultural capital, but they are nonetheless members of the struggling middle class. In classical Marxist political economy, they aren’t even that: They are just workers who, despite advanced training, don’t own the means of production and therefore must sell their labor to survive. Crucially, this distinguishes them from the old petty bourgeoisie who did own small businesses or operated as independent lawyers, accountants, engineers, architects, and doctors....
Across the most recent election cycles, the professional class leans increasingly toward the Democratic Party—in the same period it has evolved into the party most closely aligned with the true elites of the Davos class. A recent Pew survey found: “White voters with college degrees [who are far more likely to vote Republican than people of color with college degrees] had tilted Republican for several decades, but in the past four elections have favored Democratic candidates (52 percent to 47 percent in 2022).” The alacrity with which much of this class has, especially in the age of Trump, embraced fear-mongering about the white rabble of the heartland while aligning itself with elite preferences has made it an ideal constituency for an emerging authoritarian politics of the center....
If war is the health of the state, it would seem that domestic political unrest can justify growth of the domestic security state. It is hard not to worry that the structural tensions described by Turchin, rather than laying the groundwork for eventual regime change, are doing just this. In this case, the danger comes not from surplus elites, but from super-empowered elites who, in the face of extreme inequality, feel their privileges threatened and through the bloated security state are seeking to rule in an increasingly undemocratic and unaccountable fashion—and succeeding.
The PMC’s “fear of falling,” rather than prompting revolt, fuels the politics of elite social control. If downwardly mobile professionals see themselves as cultural elites because of their tastes and degrees, and see a threat to social stability as coming from the growing ranks of those immiserated and left behind by the current economic order, then siding with state repression may seem quite rational. This formula can work for both the left and right branches of the professional class: Right-wingers can fear immigrants and urban blacks, liberal professionals can fear the white, gun-loving deplorables; in the end, it all adds up to the same old reactionary middle-class politics that endorses the repression of the many in the interest of the few.
The fatal flaw of Turchin’s work is his emphasis on the struggling PMC at the expense of a deeper understanding of the real ruling class. Who are they, where are they, how do they rule? None of this is addressed. In this, Turchin makes an error common on the political right, where the “elite” are cast as pampered professors and snobbish yuppies, and not as rapacious, bailout-addicted billionaires. But the problem goes deeper than this. It is no coincidence that Turchin’s favored methodology, mathematical modeling, is beloved of contemporary authoritarians: It’s because it so often predicts a catastrophe that only a more empowered version of current institutions can avert. Likewise, Turchin unintentionally ends up offering a de facto rationale for yet more censorship, social control, and state violence. After all, what are most people going to support if they accept his prediction that America is on the verge of civil war?
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