The silent majorities and the masses: is In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities a contemptuous dismissal of the working class as inert and dupable, or the precise diagnosis of strategic silence as the form counter-power has taken under integral reality?

Jean Baudrillard, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The masses are not duped. The masses are not inert. The masses are the absorbing screen that has neutralized the social by withdrawing from the operations of meaning-making that the social requires to function. Silent majorities names the strategy: the refusal to constitute oneself as the addressable subject the political-representational machine demands, the refusal to form opinions the polling apparatus can measure, the refusal to mobilize as the class the productivist categories require.¹²

The polling apparatus measures something — it measures the noise of the screen — but what it measures is not opinion in the eighteenth-century or even the nineteenth-century sense. It is the absorbing register the mass has installed in the place of the social. The absorption of the social is the structural fact: the social has imploded into the mass, the political has been absorbed into the operational, and what the political-representational machine attempts to mobilize is no longer there as a mobilizable substance.

This is not contempt for the masses. It is the diagnosis of a strategic intelligence that the productivist categories of the left could not perceive because the categories themselves require the mobilizable substance the masses have withdrawn.³⁴

Sources

It was necessary to seek out another hypothesis. Therefore, in 'The Silent Majorities' I proposed that this silence was a power, that it was reply, that the silence was a massive reply through withdrawal, that the silence was a strategy. It is not just a passivity. It is precisely a means of putting an end to meaning, of putting an end to the grand systems of manipulation, political and informational.
Baudrillard Live - Selected Interviews, p. 88
If you understand the polls in this sense, you see that they achieve exactly the opposite effects of their stated objective. They function as a spectacle of information (information is like revolution: people care only for its spectacle), therefore as a mockery of information and of the political class.
Fatal Strategies, pp. 122–123
The social won. But, at this point of generalisation, of saturation, where it is no more than the zero degree of the political, at this point of absolute reference, of omnipresence and diffraction in all the interstices of physical and mental space, what becomes of the social itself?
In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, p. 23
The masses are not dumb enough to get rid of representation, power, or responsibility - all decayed values, worn out by a long history and which would continue to bear the cost if they were invested in. They are too content to discharge their own 'representatives'. Women use the same trick. We believe that they are defrauded. What nonsense! They unburden themselves of power.
The Uncollected Baudrillard, p. 106

Where the argument is made

In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1978) — the entire book, especially the chapters on the absorption of the social, the masses as the silent majorities, the strategic silence as withdrawal of meaning-making, and the implosion of the social into the mass
The Consumer Society (1970) — the early sociology of consumption that read the masses as objects of the code
the early Utopie-period writings collected in Utopia Deferred (2006) for the May-1968-period engagements
The Ecstasy of Communication (1987) for the late-modern updating
Cool Memories I-V (1980-2006) for diaristic-aphoristic reflections on the masses and the social

How the argument was received

Kellner's reading treats the silent-majorities thesis as the apex of Baudrillard's contempt for political work — the working class is dismissed as inert, the project of class mobilization is declared impossible, the masses become a pretext for the abandonment of the left. Gane's reading in Baudrillard's Bestiary (1991) is the canonical sympathetic counter-reading: strategic silence is counter-power, the withdrawal from meaning-making is a form of resistance the productivist categories cannot register, and the diagnosis identifies a real political fact rather than dismissing the political. The text of In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1978) is closer to Gane's reading than to Kellner's. The contested ground is whether the strategic character of the silence is inherent to the masses' position under integral reality (the position) or projected onto the masses by a theorist who had given up on political mobilization (Kellner's reading). The position is defended.