[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.