askchapo

Technologies of today and experience of the past:

1. Propaganda addressed to many different layers and partitions of the "metropoly" and "colony" societies, individualized more than previously,

2. Twiddling everywhere - fast, precise, automatic reaction to whatever you're doing,

3. Surveillance everywhere, more feedback than people of the 50s could imagine,

4. Worldwide economic integration being much harder to "abuse" (to disobey its hegemons),

5. For some time it seemed that the Marxist part of the specter generally failed in fixing its problems and delivering upon its promises, and the "imperial" part generally didn't, it's only recently that it became visible that both were doing it as part of the Cold War,

6. Minimization and computing create necessity for reexamination of all the political and social knowledge of the past, because that was based on the possibility of secrecy, privacy, and the reality around us generally changing not too fast for human psychology,

7. Learning lessons of the colonial elites getting the wrong fashion (Marxism) from the metropoly, thus separation of layers inside the metropolitan societies, to both have an empire and not have new decolonization efforts.

And also it's not worse, it just seems harder to defeat, but it's not worse. Workers even in poor countries live better today than then.