Why do we have one trillionaire and (thus far) zero guillotines? 

For a century humanity has been experiencing a counterrevolution. A counterrevolution staged by the very richest amongst us, waged against the idea that we all deserve to live in modest comfort, to work safely, and to be recognised as possessing human dignity universally, whatever our gender, skin colour, faith, class, or sexuality. 

These power elites saw the Civil Rights era and climate protests as just new facades of the envious unwashed masses coming to take their hoarded treasure.

From the early years of the twentieth century, Standard Oil money funded the academics who would lobby the proto–United Nations. Through their diligent groundwork, they would ensure US corporations’ ability to seize resources in the Global South. These intellectuals would plot a new political economy that would ensure the robber barons could rule. They touted ‘freedom’ but were in fact shaping Orwell’s boot ‘stamping on a human face – forever.’

From the ascent of Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher, the thinkers had their plutocrat-serving ideology accepted as the new reality. And now, today, many decades later along that trajectory, inequality in America is at least as dramatic as it was before the French Revolution.

There would be no guillotines this time.

Elon Musk is our first trillionaire. He is now in the lead of a posse of sociopaths who get a hard-on watching their ability to create bloodshed. A few tweets from Elon and a nurse in Belfast is homeless and terrified. What a use to make of such power.

We were told that it was the kids playing Call of Duty who would be the threat to our safety. It turns out it was the gifted kids playing Civilization. The tech fascists believe they can create the nations they want; it might just be they have to help reduce the earth’s population to the “best” million and start over with a super race to do it. (Naturally, the media they own does its utmost to leave this part out of our concocted reality.)

Musk’s new status is the direct result of the neoliberal agenda that overtook the Western world once Reagan and Thatcher got their claws into us. But a decade earlier, the first ruling class experiment of this epoch began with Augusto Pinochet in Chile. The intellectuals who had designed the neoliberal program visited the various Latin American tyrants who were ‘restructuring’ their economies and found it was good. Democracy was the tyranny of the masses. Locking out the populace and killing those who impeded the impoverishment of the majority were the necessary sacrifices for ‘freedom.’ 

The Global South would never be allowed to stand in the way of the imperial centres’ profits. The local (whiter) aristocracy joined the violence with alacrity, reporting their union leaders to the secret police for disposal.

The intellectual strategists invented a Freedom Index, where neoliberal intellectuals at the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal ranked countries by their degree of ‘freedom.’ The top-ranking countries were mostly the intolerable states creating refugees and mass slaughter.

There’s a myth that Maggie Thatcher or Ronald Reagan said that Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were their greatest achievements. The work of the Mont Pelerin Society’s intellectuals had so captured the consensus that potential people’s parties reformed to become the soft-spoken version of the owner class’s parties.

Now, in the US, we can openly see the machinery that works to ensure the party ostensibly representing the majority is held captive. We see the interests that steer promotion within them. The Searchlight Institute and the Majority Democrats are two new front groups channelling money to support candidates and produce propaganda that prevents socialists like Zohran Mamdani from winning primaries to represent a region. It’s not usually this overt.

In the UK, the population is being whipped into a frenzy of loathing for the Greens by the One Percent’s propaganda machinery. Zack Polanski’s party is the only force representing any interest in restructuring the UK from decades of impoverishment of the masses. Children in the UK now are statistically shorter than their parents’ generation because of the scale of malnutrition. The billionaires and multi-millionaires are flocking to support the fascistic Reform Party so there is no chance that Brits will have a fairer share of the spoils.

UK Labour is being steered by the interests bleeding out from far-right think tank Policy Exchange (headed up by wannabe-Lord? Alexander Downer) with its farcical “Future of the Left” project. Its founder, academic Maurice Glasman, is in the thick of the religio-ethnonationalist project called national conservatism. He’s one of PM Keir Starmer’s advisors.

Starmer is the perfect representation of a labour party leader for this Third Way “labour” politics. He is a hollow man who can make appropriate speeches. Canada’s Mark Carney is a more plausible version of the same phenomenon. Canada is being slashed open for the vultures to devour the guts. Carney, however, sounds like the real deal if we are not paying attention.

Another early experiment was in New Zealand, where Labour’s Roger Douglas delivered ‘shock therapy.’ ‘Rogernomics’ steered the country towards deep inequality. Now one of Douglas’s heirs is enacting the same kind of brutal reforms impoverishing New Zealanders and delighting predator capitalists with all the opportunities to profit.

In Australia, Bob Hawke trotted off to America for CIA meetings before forming a neoliberal-trending Labor government. There would be no more experiments in creating a national economy for Australians like Whitlam’s. The unions would be neutered. We too were a colonial resource field for the imperial centres to control and extract from. We would be managed to know our place.

The additional joy for the power elites was the discovery of quite how effective propaganda could be. The new ‘science’ developed in World War 1 would be deployed to control a rebellious workforce, disgusted by their own exploitation. The people developing this new technology with its polling and market research and growing use of the emerging mass media platforms quickly learnt that they could manage the population quite effectively.

The first sociologist to study the phenomenon was Australian Alex Carey. He documented the power the advertising and business councils, the think tanks and front groups had in flipping public opinion against our own interests. In the US in 1946, he recorded, the Opinion Research Corporation and the Psychological Corporation (oof) found 81% support for the Office of Price Administration’s prevention of wartime price gouging. From spring to autumn, a wave of propaganda plunged that to 26% support. The office was dismantled. Food prices soared by 28%. Other prices by 15%. The advertising campaign’s sponsors were delighted by the return to exploitation as usual.

The Voice referendum, anyone?

The new technologies and their fascistic owners mean that the global propaganda operation is cheaper and more powerful than ever. The collapse of the old news media domination of civic knowledge, deeply flawed as it was, has meant a majority adrift in mistrust and disinformation. The algorithms and the Cambridge Analytica-style micro targeting of messaging continues to fuel the rise of a grievance vote misdirected.

Historian Timothy Snyder has labelled this facet of the propaganda sadopopulism. That’s the self-powering cycle of energy for the One Percent. The more the power elites hurt the population economically, the more fuel is available to turn towards the hatred of selected vulnerable minorities. The more we’re divided into raging, mindless hatred of Muslims or migrants, trans people or feminists, the more they can screw us over. That creates a new well of pain to extract. There’s no downside for the uber rich.

Maggie Thatcher declared, ‘There Is No Alternative’ to neoliberalism and the softer version continues to hold our centrist politicians and civil rights voices. Substituting a rhetorical dedication to universal human rights for an actual fight for them leaves us with Pride flags instead of revolution. We allow the genocide of Palestinians and the path to the extermination of trans people at home because we can no longer see the machinery keeping us trapped.

There is no way out of this trap without seeing the system. Without that, we cannot break out of the doom loop dragging us down towards oceans of blood before the climate catastrophe drives us into starvation, fatal heat wave massed deaths, and permanent domestic displacement camps.

Everything rides on recognising that billionaires, multi-millionaires and enablers are the enemy actively trying to kill us, by tweet-games or as desk killers.

How do you plan to wake your friends?