The rich? The ownership class? The executive/managerial/technical/administrative elites? The intelligentsia? The nomenklatura?

The poor aren't necessarily ignorant, or easily manipulated, or exploitable. But revolutionary movements do not arise from the masses. The leadership is usually aristocratic, those of education and ability who have been passed over by their own class, or forced out by economic or social forces. They are the second sons, the dispossessed, the ones who didn't inherit. The soldiers come from the middle class, who are convinced of their own moral righteousness, work ethic, family values and piety, patriotism and racial or ethnic superiority.