My review of Peter Turchin's "End Times. Elites, Counter-Elites and Political Disintegration" might seem as critical to the point of scurrility. In fact, it is a very important book deserving the highest attention.
It is the second time Lenin strikes back on my watch. His definition of the "revolutionary situation": the elites cannot (reform or repress), the masses would not (obey and comply), all amidst common immiseration, is almost to the point identical to Turchin's signs of social collapse. And, certainly, Lenin knew a thing or two about taking and keeping power: first in the Party and then, the State.
The new notion Turchin added to this age-old -- literally -- routine was his notion of the "counter-elite". In his rendering, the masses themselves cannot produce structure and leadership for a large-scale social disturbance. Here comes a "counter-elite", a group of disenchanted social climbers who channel a social conflict into a cohesive social movement.
Turchin identifies the emergence of the counter-elite with the proliferation of the elite credentials and, at the same time, stagnation in the number of the elite positions. He does not mention a genial mechanism invented some time ago to utilize counter-elites and wannabes, which another prophetic voice, Graeber, characterized as "bullshit jobs". Not all, or even most bullshit jobs are used as a mechanism for countering proliferation of the elites but it is, certainly, the most efficient.
First, are the Graeber's "goons". The ranks include hedge fund managers and wealth trusts creation lawyers. The only function of these is not an iffy "price discovery" in the stock market. They are the rich people hiding assets of other rich people from taxes. Lower on the rungs of the counter-elite chute are the "box tickers": for instance, academic and municipal administrators and HR professionals. The lousier is the university the larger proportion of people it employs exist in different offices with Kafkaesque sounding names. For instance, there is an office of Academic Affairs, but also the offices of Academic Success, Office of Assessment, Office of Academic Advancement ('Advancement' obviously does not mean 'Success' and vice versa), Office of (Racial) Diversity under some name not including 'race' and Office of Sexual Diversity. This is despite of the fact that 50% of the Success office must occupy itself with diversity.
But the truly all-encompassing category is HR and its offshoots such as "Talent Acquisition" and the like. This was a genial invention of Harvard Business School. In 1970s it encountered with less and less demand for the MBAs -- not that Harvard graduates were employed in HRs -- but they needed endless proliferation of business programs to feed graduating PhDs. They took to the heart Stalin's 1930s adage "The cadres are the deciders", which resulted in establishing Departments of Cadres in everything from the Central Committee to the lowliest machine shop or a tractor station. [1] Before HR revolution, it was thought that managing people is the task, you get it, of management. Moreover, if the managers could not do it, they were considered unfit. After that, the top managers acquired cliques of people whose main distinction was complete innocence in the basic functions of a company or a department but who could be very useful in office infighting and intimidation of the employees. Competence, experience or success in previous endeavors became secondary in selection and promotion of employees. The prime criterion became an ubiquitous "good fit" and compliance with "institutional culture". With that HBS discovered the gold mine for endless demand for people who know nothing but have "people skills", i.e. the acuity in office infighting and, by extension, for the faculty who trains them.
Third way of channeling counter-elites is Graeber's "tape pasters" who can be of any rank. Giant IT companies such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Twitter employ endless numbers of highly paid professionals whose only business is to make user's data as harvestable as possible and to redesign endlessly the interfaces so that they can be paid for the newer versions of the product. These new versions are, typically, no better for an average user than the old ones and frequently require paying fees to the same company to make them work.
Turchin's book has other interesting points besides his obsession with cliodynamics, the discipline he himself invented or co-invented. Classification of human societies was stagnant since Marxist-Leninist (but actually, Stalin's) five-category division fell into disuse because of political correctness issues. [2] Namely, according to Turchin all human societies can be classified as having the following characteristics:
>Politocracy;
>Militocracy; and
>Kleptocracy.
In the modern world, pure forms are hard to find (maybe, North Korea as politocracy and Egypt/Pakistan as militocracies) but the point of reference is obvious. This has an obvious analogy in the description by this author, as well as in works of Soviet and post-Soviet historian Yuri Semenov.
There are many other issues with Turchin's book, but it is an important warning to the American ruling class. Sadly, as noticed by the French politician and historian Edgar Faure in his book La disgrâce de Turgot, the ruling elites during the turning moments of history usually either cannot or would not understand the signs of impending crisis.
[1] It was logical for Stalin, who, before the disastrous results of the 1941 and 1942 war years proclaimed that "everyone is only a bolt in a machine of proletarian dictatorship" and "we have no irreplaceables". After 1943 he, obviously, decided that unlike Party functionaries, some generals and weapons designers cannot be easily replaced. It could even work, if in Byzantine fashion, he did not retain Political Departments, Departments of Regimentation and Secret Information Departments at every significant workplace, which were constantly scheming one against other.
[2] These categories were: "primitive", "slave-owning", "feudal", "capitalist" and "socialist/communist" with linear progression between them. Despite their aversion to Marxism -- though actual classification was due to reading Engels by Stalin's propagandists -- Western historians largely inured themselves to the use of these categories -- with a possible exclusion of "communist" and addition of "Oriental despotism", the latter itself being introduced by Marx. Richard Pipes described everything from Grand Dukes of Muscovy to Gorbachev in terms of the "Oriental despotism", which totally smeared its meaning.
