On TikTok and Twitter, at campaign rallies, and on Etsy, the old class warfare quip feels newly urgent.
By Talia Lavin
GQ
November 5, 2019
In 1793, the streets of Paris were in an uproar. A few years earlier, citizens irate over poverty, a grinding and brutal famine, and disenfranchisement had toppled the monarchy and smashed the Bastille fortress, sending shockwaves throughout Europe and the world. It was a transitional time of declarations and riots, blood spilled, and unchecked, revolutionary hope—and a new, more equitable form of government was blossoming into being in the capital. But years into the new order, the people were still restive and unsettled: The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen may have been passed by the National Assembly, and the king himself executed by guillotine, but there still wasn’t enough food to go around.
With the monarch bloodily dispatched, the people had found they could eat neither rights nor freedom, and lacked sufficient bread to enjoy either. Citizens complained that speculative merchants were selling moldy bread, adulterated wine, and diseased, blood-bloated meat to the poor, saving their best wares for the wealthy. In the ten-volume History of the French Revolution, author Adolphe Thiers summed up the spirit of the era with a quote by the then late famous social theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “When the people shall have nothing more to eat,” Rousseau apocryphally quipped, “they will eat the rich.”
Two hundred years later, Rousseau’s bon mot still resonates; on social media, at political rallies, in the streets, and in our secret hearts, the carnivorous id of class struggle is surging up again to prominence. It’s no wonder that Twitter wags and street protesters are embracing the guillotine aesthetic; America feels frayed by its own striation. While adulterated wine might not be our biggest problem as a society, the country has a very real crisis of hunger simmering in our cities and towns; some 37 million Americans lived in food-insecure households in 2018, according to data newly released by the USDA, including six million children. Scenarios more Dickensian than Jacobin are playing out in schools as a result; one New Jersey school district barred students with more than $75 in school lunch debt from attending prom, field trips, and extracurricular activities, then denied a local donor the opportunity to pay down the entirety of students’ debt.
As is all too common in America, the up-by-the-bootstraps myth that austerity and punitive policy in the face of poverty will lead magically toward abundance held sway in New Jersey. The school district’s superintendent, Joseph Meloche, told local media that “simply erasing the debt does not address the many families with financial means who have just chosen not to pay what is owed.” The idea that children should suffer in school for either the neglect or poverty of their parents feels cruelly airlifted from another era, one in which the bootstrap was more commonly used as a lash than a metaphor.
In 1793, the streets of Paris were in an uproar. A few years earlier, citizens irate over poverty, a grinding and brutal famine, and disenfranchisement had toppled the monarchy and smashed the Bastille fortress, sending shockwaves throughout Europe and the world. It was a transitional time of declarations and riots, blood spilled, and unchecked, revolutionary hope—and a new, more equitable form of government was blossoming into being in the capital. But years into the new order, the people were still restive and unsettled: The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen may have been passed by the National Assembly, and the king himself executed by guillotine, but there still wasn’t enough food to go around.
With the monarch bloodily dispatched, the people had found they could eat neither rights nor freedom, and lacked sufficient bread to enjoy either. Citizens complained that speculative merchants were selling moldy bread, adulterated wine, and diseased, blood-bloated meat to the poor, saving their best wares for the wealthy. In the ten-volume History of the French Revolution, author Adolphe Thiers summed up the spirit of the era with a quote by the then late famous social theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “When the people shall have nothing more to eat,” Rousseau apocryphally quipped, “they will eat the rich.”
Two hundred years later, Rousseau’s bon mot still resonates; on social media, at political rallies, in the streets, and in our secret hearts, the carnivorous id of class struggle is surging up again to prominence. It’s no wonder that Twitter wags and street protesters are embracing the guillotine aesthetic; America feels frayed by its own striation. While adulterated wine might not be our biggest problem as a society, the country has a very real crisis of hunger simmering in our cities and towns; some 37 million Americans lived in food-insecure households in 2018, according to data newly released by the USDA, including six million children. Scenarios more Dickensian than Jacobin are playing out in schools as a result; one New Jersey school district barred students with more than $75 in school lunch debt from attending prom, field trips, and extracurricular activities, then denied a local donor the opportunity to pay down the entirety of students’ debt.
As is all too common in America, the up-by-the-bootstraps myth that austerity and punitive policy in the face of poverty will lead magically toward abundance held sway in New Jersey. The school district’s superintendent, Joseph Meloche, told local media that “simply erasing the debt does not address the many families with financial means who have just chosen not to pay what is owed.” The idea that children should suffer in school for either the neglect or poverty of their parents feels cruelly airlifted from another era, one in which the bootstrap was more commonly used as a lash than a metaphor.
Meanwhile, it seems as if the outlays of the wealthy are getting more and more recherché. Social media has long appealed in part because of its ability to show us the rarefied world of fabulous wealth and abundance, but as California burns due to PG&E’s obsession with profit maximization over power-line maintenance, and New York installs increasingly draconian surveillance measures to ensure subway riders don’t skip out on the $2.75 fare, it’s hard not to feel the sting of class resentment. The country has the feel of the twilight of a monarchy, under the rule of an erratic sovereign who has done his level best to reduce the vast machinery of government to a reflection of his own will. He issues his edicts, often enough, from an array of gilded private residences that evoke, with neither taste nor elegance, the excess of Versailles. Meanwhile, the super-wealthy aristocracy acquire more and more: The recently released floor plans of Jeff Bezos’s newest mansion reveal 25 bathrooms, a whiskey cellar, and an entire spare house for entertaining. Adam Neumann, the tall, handsome, and totally reckless tech executive behind the spectacular demise of WeWork, is walking away with a $1.7 billion golden parachute as a reward for his abject failure, leaving thousands of laid-off employees holding the bag.
With the swiftness of any good digital backlash, countless ironic takes on the “Rich Boy Check Challenge” bubbled up almost immediately. Under the hashtag #eattherich, a young woman played “Minuetto” as she used her phone camera to scan a tiny bathroom with a moldy-looking toilet. Another young woman scanned a meager room shrouded in darkness; a third tied a shoelace around her waist as a belt.
A separate but related endeavor, the TikTok hashtag #eattherich has also spawned hundreds of videos, which abound with a nascent class-based resentment sprung from the pages of Marx and into meme-ready soundbites. To the minor-key emo rock song “I Hate Everything About You” by Three Days Grace, a teenager in black nail polish pours water from a cup labeled “UNETHICALLY RICH” over a printed-out picture of Jeff Bezos. Another professes her desire to “vore” Bezos, using the Internet slang word for fetish-inspired cannibalism. In yet another video, a teenage girl in a black hoodie performs a signature TikTok maneuver—using progressively appearing snippets of text—to point out that “the only minority destroying America is the rich.” On Twitter, there are countless posts not just urging the eating of the rich—but asking for, or providing, recipes. (“Simmer £100,000 cash in the blood drained from the carcass. Serve on a bed of rocket with a side of coleslaw.”)
In prior periods of excess, Rousseau’s enduring quote has resurfaced to spice up cultural artifacts. Most entertainingly, the greed-is-good ’80s gave rise to the 1987 movie Eat the Rich, with a soundtrack by Motörhead, the mesmerizing trans actress Lanah Pellay in a lead role, and some truly visceral scenes centered around the minced meat of the wealthy, eagerly consumed, with French fries, by their monied peers. In the overconfident, imperial bloom of the early ’90s, Aerosmith made their own sally into class warfare, and their song “Eat the Rich” has surprisingly literal lyrics. “With this here fork and knife/Eat the rich/There's only one thing that they are good for,” yowls Steven Tyler, wearing an incongruous pair of devil horns.
These days, politicians have slowly begun to awaken to the restive national mood, with progressive bellwether candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders explicitly focusing on taming the excesses of billionaires and demanding further contribution to the public good from the gilded class. It’s no wonder that, faced with a stump speech about systemic change and the necessity of a wealth tax, the crowd at a recent Warren rally began spontaneously chanting, “Eat the rich!”
For Rousseau, the notion of eating the rich was a Swiftian exaggeration of the struggles of the starving masses, in response to a quite literal famine that was the French Revolution’s most proximal cause. In memes and on social media, “Eat the rich” is a slogan that serves as both a signifier of class struggle and a play on literal consumption of the flesh of the wealthy. On Etsy, you can buy “Eat the Rich” dinner plates; on Redbubble, a customizable merch site, there are countless items for sale with the slogan, and several have replaced the hammer in the hammer-and-sickle of communism with a fork.
In some ways, “Eat the rich” is the perfect revolutionary slogan for the digital era: It’s succinct, easily shareable, and built for risqué humor. It’s hard to get edgier than cannibalism, and no would-be Internet humorist worth their salt can resist the lure of a Bezos bulgogi. But for all the waggishness of the slogan, revolution is usually born of an authentic powerlessness and privation; it’s hard not to feel, in the waning days of 2019, that the American populace abounds in both.
Talia Lavin is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her first book, 'Culture Warlords,' is forthcoming in 2020 from Hachette Books.
