Both are true really. Yes, global north working class people (I personally don’t like the term ‘labour aristocracy’ but I think the point is true-just me being a pedantic prick) are largely pacified by superprofits from global south manufacturing, but it is also true that those radicals among us do face a technologically vast and all-penetrating regime of governmentality and surveillance. Intelligence services can know everything about your lives from your phones, laptops, can connect your accounts across websites by IP/email/device, can hear you through Alexas and such, can track you through dense networks of CCTV (especially in London where I live), and can generally know as much about you as YOU do. If you go to a socialist meeting, they can know. If you go to a protest, they more than likely have the capacity to know (unless it’s in an area with little CCTV and you use good opsec). If you do anything actually more disruptive (e.g., even on the level of Just Stop Oil/Extinction Rebellion, let alone blowing something up like the good old Suffragettes did) then they will have all the resources to track you down.

The only limitation for them is capacity. e.g., in mass protest events it is unfeasible to figure out literally everyone there, but they can still decapitate the leadership (as they did post-Ferguson when they executed the organisers) and make an example out of a few. It’s like when you hear about these Salafi-Jihadist terrorist groups-they’re almost always already “known” to security agencies. They know because these Jihadists go on certain websites, they go to small meetings which are still infiltrated by the state, they communicate about it on their phones and laptops, etc. Police and such disproportionately focus on left-wing and environmentalist groups here in the UK even though they’re all small and pathetic (especially the former-environmentalist groups have been kicking up more of a fuss lately) because capital retains some of its paranoia about socialism even after its pacification.

The problem is, you can’t have a mass movement too big to realistically track without being a small movement first-and small movements are easier to track. Then the bigger you get, the easier you are to infiltrate, and the more visible the leadership is-the more vulnerable they are.

I don’t want to say it’s impossible, but organising ‘revolutionary’ groups (even if all they’re doing is mutual aid, protesting, campaigning, and discussing theory) without the eye and boot of the state coming down on you is incredibly difficult and faces challenges never seen in the history of the world just because of how deep modern technology can penetrate into every moment of your life, and how easy it is for state intelligence agencies to get access to it. The only real hope is that you just have mechanisms of vetting people in important positions to limit the importance of infiltrators and that you somehow make yourself a low priority for as long as possible so they don’t bother investing resources into tracking you.

All that, on top of a population not receptive to socialism anyway, makes for a near-impossible job for us global north socialists. I have absolutely no answer for it (I’ve tried organising w/ other socialists and it never works because the orgs in the UK are all shit and everybody hates them) and it’s part of why I am so badly mentally ill and blackpilled about the future (haha!).