Paul Cockshott — The US crisis

Back in 2010 the materialist historian Turchin predicted in an article in Nature that 2020 would see a major outbreak of social disorder in the USA.

His work distinguished between the long term stress that a society experiences and short term triggers. The long term stress predisposes a state to social breakdown, riot, insurrection or civil war. Once the society is in a highly stressed state, then some otherwise common event – the killing of an innocent man by the police in this case – can trigger the breakdown.

What was remarkable about Turchin is that he took historical materialist ideas [Marx was a historical materialist], dressed in a language to make them acceptable to US academia, and gave them precise quantitative numerical form. He gave social stress a formula....

Paul Cockshott's Blog
The US crisis

Paul Cockshott |Scottish computer scientist, Marxian economist and a reader at the University of Glasgow