Ruling classes mobilize their full reserves before revolutionaries reach power.

Evidence

The European bourgeoisie is more intelligent, and more farsighted; it is not wasting time. Everything that can be set on foot against us is being mobilised by it right now. The revolutionary proletariat will thus encounter on its road to power not only the combat vanguards of the counter-revolution but also its heaviest reserves. Only by smashing, breaking up and demoralising these enemy forces will the proletariat be able to seize state power. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2300

Categorization

• XREF: Pre-stages Gramsci’s hegemony apparatus: the bourgeoisie’s foresight is the whole reason consent, not just coercion, must be contested. Connects to Althusser’s repressive/ideological state apparatuses. — connects to: A spontaneous uprising can surprise the ruling class only once before it fails — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 98; Genocidal escalations begin well before the genocidal regime takes power. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 131