Plutocrats like Thiel are constantly thinking about the fact that ordinary people vastly outnumber them and can kill them at any time. They think about it way more often than ordinary people do. It’s a point that they are acutely aware of at all times. It consumes their attention. They are always working on manipulating public consciousness to ensure that we don’t think as much as they do about how many more of us there are of them, and how we don’t have to put up with their domination of our society if we don’t want to.
As Michael Parenti once put it:
“I tell students when they say, ‘Oh they don’t care what we think. They ignore us’, and all that, and I say, ‘Oh no, no. That’s the only thing they care about you. The only thing they care about you is what you’re thinking. They don’t care if you eat correctly, they don’t care how your living conditions are, they don’t care that they’ve built up an inhuman and irrational traffic system that’s strangulating us and polluting our air, they don’t care about anything. The only thing about you they care about is what you’re thinking. In the morning, they start, ‘What’s going to be the story today? How do we manipulate, how do we control, how do we contain, how do we influence, how do we act upon what it is that they have in their minds?’”
Manipulating public consciousness is of existential importance to the ruling class, because no matter how many billions of dollars you amass, at the end of the day you’re still a soft skin sack of blood and bones like anybody else, and you share a society with huge numbers of people who can very easily hurt you if they want to. That’s why our minds are constantly being hammered with propaganda into accepting the status quo politics upon which our rulers have built their kingdoms.
That’s how things are going right now, yes. And it’s going to lead to more cop cities, more surveillance, and fewer civil liberties.
The French revolution was a very different situation. It was bourgeois revolution that overthrew monarchs, replacing feudalism as the dominant mode of production with capitalism. It wasn’t a revolution by, of, or for the masses. It was a small group of wealthy people overthrowing an extremely tiny group of wealthy people, who couldn’t simply be replaced. Power under capitalism is much more diffuse, distributed, and resilient than under feudalism.
The only reason we’re talking is because we just saw people giving a shit about Brian Thompson getting popped.
The half or so that own property and 401Ks do. Those numbers are shrinking and will continue to shrink under grinding neoliberalism, continuing wealth concentration, and collapsing empire.
To be fair Luigi is a member of the bourgeoisie.
Also re cop city, that was going to happen anyways. the state has been steadily consolidating power and removing the ability of meaningful dissent for decades now - arguably since 9/11 but even before they were clamping down on the left although with less of a security state apparatus.
And they’ll blame anybody but the elites responsible. If only they’re good little boys and girls they too can be members of the elite. The idea that society will revolt en masse is comical in 2024. Unlike the late 1800s early 1900s there was not nearly as much propaganda and brainwashing as there is today. The elites already won when it comes to manufacturing consent for labor slavery.
Which is why stochastic terrorism will be the way forward. Pluck off enough elites and they’ll be frightened into serious reforms.
History rhymes it doesn’t repeat - this revolution will not be a repeat of any prior one.
Could be that we’d get some temporary, milquetoast reforms, which they’ll inevitably claw back.