Not saying this would happen but I find most of your arguments to be either wildly ahistorical or childish. First of all, the social murder of the poor is not an all or nothing game. And it does not require the most cartoonishly evil murder weapon possible to be done. We’ve seen it happen multiple times in history without Boston dynamics dogs strapped with guns executing order 66 for your Reddit epic awards.

>rich people do not see themselves as a collective in group

(Citation needed)- hundreds of years of history in everything from self consciously bourgeois revolutions to collective action within political parties to squash “populism,” even into personal lives in where the extremely wealthy are educated (in a place like England for example, they’re all largely together in a group of schools from the time they can read, and continue onto one of a handful of elite universities), even just to the modern intermingling of celebrity, business, and political culture all coalesce to tell me you already have no idea what you’re talking about.

The rich do in fact have a sense of class solidarity, that’s why in almost every western country, income is the most accurate predictor of voting outcome. Not race, gender, or social sensibility. Of course there’s infighting within the upper classes, that’s why you have (in America) democratic billionaires who recommend austerity and deregulation, and republican billionaires who recommend the same. The base of the parties are different, but as you climb the ladder of wealth it becomes increasingly easy to hop back and forth with cultural affect as it suits you. This is why someone like Elon could be a darling of the Democratic Party one year, because they’re more likely to pass policy benefiting an electric car baron, and republican the next, for some nice tax cuts, and an “Antiwoke” affect amongst other things.

Of course there are internal lines within an income bracket, a shopkeeper and a lawyer or doctor will have different interests, and these interests have interesting consequences within politics… but we won’t get into that, the fact is you start off your argument by saying “class politics don’t exist”

Laughable. Truly laughable. I don’t even feel the need to continue. But I will. Just a little while.

Any moral argument can be dismissed because of historical precedent. The Eugenicist political movement did not start (entirely) as a fight for racial purity but as class war coming from the upper class of England. See, Malthus popularized the idea that overpopulation was a serious problem and subsequently academics argued that things like poverty and criminality were familial, heritable traits. I can link some papers if you’d like, or some modern academics writing about it, or even a fun podcast about it.

The rich sought to, and enacted in government and private industry, policies to purposefully and systematically kill the poor through what would come to be called “social murder.” It’s from the social movement that brought us the workhouse that we still get a lot of our talking points about overpopulation today, even if “heritability” has at least partially been stripped out, but that’s neither here nor there.

Only later, did this expand from familial and class based thinking into racialized thinking, specifically when these ideologies were exported to the United States (especially the south, although a majority of states would enact at least a handful of directly eugenics-based laws), and then from there back to Europe again.

If you don’t think such a thing is at least possible to rise again as a method of class war under say, unprecedented and worsening climate crisis leading to lower crop yields and heightening social tensions, i really don’t know what to tell you.

As for the idea that the rich are slow to build up mass killing machines powered by robots, what do you call the massive expansion of drone warfare? They may not be autonomous, but since the great War liberal internationalists have written about and theorized a “humane War” to be fought without soldiers, or waged on enemy combatants without putting a soldier in harms way. That’s not to say that all the poor and wretched of the world will be killed in one fell swoop or anything like that, just to point out that between surveillance capitalism and automation within the military (and eventually the police), we could be headed for a more brutal world for the underclasses.

The idea that the rich would have any trouble investing in violence rather than practical solutions that could be cheaper is laughable if you take even one look at even local politics, and how much money can be demonstrably saved by housing the homeless for free. Costs on policing, costs on hospitals, costs on social services, all around, could be saved several times over, and it’s been done before. But where does money in the largest cities tend to go instead? Directly into police budgets.

Now as to any action like this requiring a United front, I think this misunderstands collective action as well. We’d much more likely see the return of poor houses accompanied by lower wages and harsher policing as a means to accomplish the social murder of the poor than some single mass culling of the poor like you’d see in a science fiction movie. This seems to be where most of your problem comes from. You’ve already picked the method, and decided that intent is necessary. But the Victorian bourgeois didn’t need everyone to be on board. Only the ones with political power. Hell, most of them didn’t need to be conscious of what was happening on the ground for the impoverished. Their own world was segregated enough that they could dismiss it as inevitable or unfortunate.

So what do I think is likely to happen as a worst case scenario if not exactly the “mass culling” you imagine?

A slow, grinding reduction of quality of life amongst the middle and lower classes, a collapse of the middle class altogether back into the working class they arose from, a steep increase in deaths by preventable causes, continued and steepening asset price inflation preventing the lower classes from building wealth, consolidation amongst corporations and property owners, increased wealth inequality, the return of the company town, increased police militarization, the criminalization of parts of life previously untouched by a police presence, increased surveillance, harsher penalties for deviance or delinquency, and violent crackdowns on social unrest, the return of great power conflict and proxy wars. Anything sound familiar with processes already historically under way?

Much more akin to the conversion of parts of the world into an open air prison than the machine war from terminator.