Essentially he thinks that, because surveillance is so powerful, and because of 21st-century advancements in the military, there is no way that a socialist uprising could happen, if any at all. The news already does a good job of showing that the US has this new incredible surveillance tech!! and could send these brand new, ultra-powerful drones to bomb you!! and it’s all powered by really smart algorithms that can show all your history!!. They are very opaque about how to stop it, and it seems almost like a form of state-terrorism where the US shows its most freitening new technology to the media so that the people feel helpless, thus disinclined to start groups critical of the government. It seems that there is a strain where people like my friend see changing material conditions, and interpret the change as shutting off revolutionary potential once and for all.
I really want to know what you guys think. It really feeds into a lot of Anarchist notions to just leave alone the possibility of overthrow and tend to your own garden and write poems, or Liberal notions of simply voting because nothing else could possibly work.
The problem is not the tech. Czarist Russia had no problems infiltrating and imprisoning revolutionary groups in the early 1900s and they didn’t even have a national electricity grid.
The problem is class consciousness. The class antagonisms in america and the agitation by socialists have not reached a critical mass. Tech might be hampering agitation efforts but the class antagonisms are making up the difference. They can’t stop people from realizing that everything that sucks is capitalism’s fault and they can’t catch everyone who says it out loud.
The job in the imperial core at the present time is to talk shit about capitalism. Remember every complaint you hear is a chance to tell people that it is capitalism’s fault.