[nimih]

> When has power ever been limited?

The question isn't really whether power has been "limited" (it's unclear to me what that would even mean, honestly), but the form in which it is constituted and what institutions it rests with. Like, it's pretty clear that the institutions which control and manage daily life and politics in 21st century America are of a much different character than the ones of the mid-20th century USSR, which are again much different than, say, 16th century Europe or what have you.

> did the Roman’s not have this problem?

I'm relatively confident that Roman society did not have to contend with the accumulation of power by multi-national corporate bodies and the relative weakening of democratic institutions that results, nor the degree to which such corporations are able to leverage 21st century technology to exert control over individuals' lives.

[azinman2]

Of course the institutions are different. But is the problem of power any different? If anything, it seems like there are more ways that power is limited in current America than 16th century Europe or the USSR.

Roman was absolutely multinational. I don’t think it had corporations, but rather the entire empire acting as a single business… which is even worse.

[nimih]

> But is the problem of power any different? If anything, it seems like there are more ways that power is limited in current America than 16th century Europe or the USSR.

I certainly think so. I think many of the way in which modern institutions exert power over individuals are of a fundamentally different nature compared to, say, slave economies, or the pre-reformation Catholic church, or the Aztec empire, or whatever. In particular:

> If anything, it seems like there are more ways that power is limited in current America than 16th century Europe or the USSR.

I half-agree here. I don't really think "power" is a one-dimensional scale where you can strictly order societies in terms of the degree to which it exists. Take, for instance, the way in which advertising companies are able to leverage their understanding of psychology and their fine-grained control over media content to directly shape our desires and emotions; these are tools which flat out didn't exist 100 years ago, and represent a mode of control which seems orthogonal to, say, a monarch ordering a summary execution of one of their subjects. These aren't theoretical distinctions, either: recognizing them can help point us in the right direction when trying to imagine what a better world looks like, and is useful for understanding what the available avenues of resistance and change even are.

[aylons]

You're not completely wrong, it is just a way too crude of an assessment.

The way power evolves from ancient times, to middle ages, to modern times and finally contemporary times, how the institutions of capitalism are different in form, but not in essence from the institutions of feudalism and other themes are a central topic of Marxist theory.

You seen to agree with him about the root of the exploitation problem, but GP is also right in that there are differences on how the institutions operate and how advanced they are in comparison to those of the past. These new institutions and techniques and dynamics require different tools for analysis.