In The Inertia of Fear, the Russian cyberneticist and Soviet dissident Valentin Turchin developed a critique of Marxism based on the cybernetic theories that shaped his scientific work. Published in 1981 after Turchin fled from Soviet Russia, the book offers a distinctive critique of socialism directed not so much at the ethical aberration of the gulag as the deformations caused, in his opinion, by Marxism’s unsound scientific basis. For Turchin, the error of Marxism resided in its attachment to the physics of the nineteenth century. A ‘mechanistic picture of the world’, rooted in thermodynamics, he argued, furnished Marxism with a worldview in which the ‘state of the world is determined, in a unique way, by its preceding state’. Seeing human societies as ‘aggregates of particles’ moving in preordained directions, Marxist determinism was totalitarian because it provided no room for human agency.

Against historical materialism’s thermodynamic model, Turchin developed his own ‘historical idealism’, based on theorising society as a ‘multi-level cybernetic system’, which ‘affirms that it is precisely ideas which dominate society’. For Turchin, cybernetic principles would be the basis of a new and anti-totalitarian model of the social world that would overcome the ‘barbarous socialism’ of Soviet Russia. Cybernetics, Turchin argued, provided a template for the full integration of individuals into society as ‘complex subsystems’ which encouraged individual freedom and creativity to flourish. Cybernetic society would be a social ‘metasystem’ that ‘[would guarantee] the free exchange of information and ideas’, continuously reshaping social life for the better.

Turchin’s hypothesis relies on the proposition, common in the mid-twentieth century, that cybernetics superseded thermodynamics as a new scientific paradigm and then maps this teleology onto forms of social organisation. The totalitarian present of Marxism is thus derided as antiquated while, conversely, hopes for a new utopian society rest on reconstructing the social world in novel cybernetic configurations.