Fuck, Teddy, at this point you’re just strutting around on the board cooing and knocking over pieces.

KS Robinson has the anonymous resistance send drones into plane engines shortly after takeoff, 6 private jets in one day. Things change in the novel quickly after that.

• Tell me about some of your favourite people when you were a child.

• Do you remember any interesting sounds from your youth?

• What was it like learning english? How did you start?

• What were your first impressions when arriving in the USA?

These are all just conversation starters of course. You have to be ready to jump on the thread of a story she really wants to tell and pull on it to get more details and viewpoints.

Using sensory anchors like sounds or smells will really get your questions closer to memory triggers. “What did your favourite bakery smell like?” And then stuff will come up, like shortages or foreign treats, and that’s maybe a good story to follow.

Basically whenever possible, encourage her to “tell me about” life back then, and follow up with short questions asking for clarification or details.

OK to be specific the USA is not pure capitalist as it has a huge number of public assets and social services, and the soviets were nowhere near pure communist, a long ways away from a stateless society run by a proletariat, more like state monopoly capitalism. Anyone who has studied the topic might be inclined to downvote such claims.

Anyway I was defending you not attacking, being pissy won’t help.

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Proving my point, eh

That’s such an American thing to say lol.

No we are very culturally distinct in subtle but important ways. Expats stick out here more than they think, it isn’t just about accent or removing your shoes.

I liked the Canadian government giving Trump a framed photo of a former family business established in the Yukon: a bordello!

You’re being downvoted probably because your take is unscholarly, but it is not wrong.

Marx predicts the withering of the state by developing democratic socialism further and further until capital and its hoarders are fully enclosed. Northern Europe is a good example of this trend on the long term, and this is as predicted.

I think a lot of ideologues have an element of religiosity to their adoption of marxist analysis and that leads to religious timelines: The End Is At Hand.

But it’s not. Our lifespans are short compared with history. Late industrial capitalism will wither, and information capitalism will be further developed, before capital is enclosed by democratic development. Just waiting for how crazy genetics tech will make things… but I think we have to get through the fundamental questions that ownership of biology poses before we see the capacity for economic phase shift. History is accelerating, so…?

The Paris Commune is a great example of the class war being brutally engaged by the bourgeois.

Calling the skill and ambition distribution a pyramid is really an artifact of history, not biology. If you want to take on ‘human nature’ you have to examine millions of years of evolution as mostly egalitarian troupe hominids, and state that groups bigger than 100 people are something we haven’t had time to evolve for yet.

So you put in checks and balances, it’s what makes governance complex, and egalitarian governance is ironically going to be more complex and relational.

The Haudenosaunee / Iroquois Confederacy is a good example of how to approach such a problem.

Well communism has never been achieved, so the name is always aspirational.

But aside from that split hair, you might be interested in reading about communism in India:

“The Communist Party in Kerala has functioned under the conditions of a liberal democracy, relying on success in multi-party elections to remain in power. CPI’s 1957 constitution stated it would allow the existence of opposing parties after it had a parliamentary majority.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism_in_Kerala

In other words: state monopoly capitalism. Wrong direction from marxist withering of state: instead seeks to establish a permanent totalizing state, oppressing all, including the vanguard. Stalin’s paranoia metastasized and now oligarchs pick over the bones.

Well, they wanted to stay “sleep”, and got it.

Because the USA is still operating under a caste system, so in that sense they never lost.