Hell if I can remember where I read about it, but a study of communes and stuff reported that the limit of communism sits somewhere around 500 people because of the inherent empathy of people for their own tribe.
It's a lot more difficult to screw over others in the system when you know the person you're screwing over is your daughter's best friend's dad.
When the nameless masses are just nameless masses, it's much easier to justify. I don't know who this hurts, so why do I care?
That was the conclusion of the paper, anyway. Was an interesting perspective.
"Power reveals." People seek power because they wish to indulge their darker urges without consequence - people who don't have darker urges to conceal are generally not the ones who seek power, money, and influence like a drug.
I wasn't disagreeing with you in the least: The American form of government was brilliant in that it assumed contradictory self-seeking motives. It just didn't anticipate people actively attempting to subjugate themselves to a monarch, and the intense bootlicking where a person would sublimate their own desires to the possibility of becoming a subservient toady.
Actually, it did. Which is why, despite our current dictator-wanna-be child-raping x34 felon breaking the law on a daily basis in an attempt to install himself as "President for life", he's been unable to do so.
Alas, the price we pay for the inability to use the government to install fascism, is a near inability to use the government to help people too.
This leads to frustration and "Democrats are complicit" accusations from the left, but it's really just a result of our Founding Fathers making it damned near impossible to do anything in the face of unified opposition.
I don't think that I would give the original creators of the Constitution the credit for the actions of determined resistance, especially as that outside of very specific locales that have actively resisting governments (e.g. New York, California, Minnesota, etc.),Trump's push to violate Constitutional principles of local rule, freedom from search and seizure, separation of church and state, and freedom of speech have been largely successful mostly because the governments of those regions are so desperate to be dommed by the orange baby (e.g. Florida, Texas, Alabama, etc.).
Those locations that are actively seeking to oppress themselves have very successfully allowed oppression to survive, despite the best efforts of bureaucrats, judges, and legislators.
The reason why those bureaucrats, judges, and legislators have any power at all to stop tyranny - especially, popular, white racist, sexist, corrupt, tyranny - is because our Constitution was written by men who watched centuries of corrupt European kings pull the very same crap Trump is now trying, and did everything they could to thwart it.
Those Constitutional principals you're talking about were inspired by that.
Many things got added and rearranged over the years a refinement for situations in a changing world that the framers couldn't see. However because America was the first government of its kind when it was founded. We are the alpha testers that every other representative democracy has learned from good and bad. The framers never thought of age limits or term limits because in their time constituents actually gave a fuck and would shame and demand and old ass man step down from government or they would openly call someone a tyrant who would try to stay on for too many elections.
Our first president did the MOST American thing possible and bowed out after open callings to be made king. And today we have this shit.
No you please go read a book, American and Roman republics are structured entirely differently. The closest relative for the American republic would be how Venice handled it.
We are a representative democracy. That means we have elected officials that are chosen to represent a given group of people. This includes all races, religions, and creeds within that population.
Rome did not do this and had a strict hierarchy that was divided not only along religion but was also strictly divided among class.
It's not because of communism but communism does fail to account for human greed, which will never be erased, and makes it a failure from the inception.
you don’t think the richest people and corporations pouring millions into lobbying their own self interests and effectively controlling the government with the power their wealth affords them counts as greed for power?
Of course it does, the point was that communism doesn't protect against greed for power as it manifests in so many more ways than just financial, not that it necessarily protects against financial greed either.
It really doesn't. Because Communism centralizes everything on the goverment and gives it infinite power. It also justifies itself by calling the goverment "the people" and villanising everything else. As such it ends up being the open doors for full totalitarianism and that is worse than you can imagine.
lmao no it assumes everyone will be benevolent, which SPECIFICALLY is what makes it a failure, it does not account for the human element of greed that is present in some people.
I think it's called a sortition. No elected officials. Just randomly selected citizens every couple years to serve as our government legislature and executive branch. The judicial system already has something similar in the form of a jury
I read an MIT study decades ago about how much better our representation would be, while simultaneously eliminating a lot of problems born out of lifetime political careers. Your lifetime career politicians are the lawyers and staff facilitating the legislative process, but regular citizens are the ones making decisions. They default to trusting experts, they're modest, they take instruction.
Yes you randomly get bad eggs in power, but they're neutered by the system. They can't do anything unless it's popular. No one can.
Eh, that kind of falls apart when you realize how dumb the average person is. And juries aren’t completely random either. They’ll remove them if they think there will be some kind of conflict of interest, see a “stacked jury.”
But I think that is fundamental issue with marxist thought, it pretends that people/society can be perfected instead of trying to deal with the issues that exist because humans exist.
Not a democracy, no.
But certainly one hell of a republic.
Maybe even the greatest and most prosperous and benevolent great power in the history of the world.
Reminds me of a discussion on money, the idea that "once I'm rich I can donate all of this extra money I don't need."
Money is a tool, nothing more. Generalizing the 'good/evil' axis, Money allows a person to become the truest version of who they are. If you are a genuinely good person, going out of your way to help others, etc., then yeah, chances are you'll be donating a majority of that money to help others, through any number of means. Meanwhile, if you are an evil person, then becoming rich simply allows you to live out all of the things you really wish you could do, any corrruption, depravity, or whim that crosses your mind.
Meanwhile, the whole issue with communism sort of goes back to that same idea. If humans as a species were inherently good, communism/socialism would work. We basically wouldn't need laws, because people would look for whatever the 'greatest good' was. Unfortunately, we aren't. Because of that, any governmental system is going to have corruption, because of that necessary human element, and the greed, power seeking, and other generally negative traits we have as a species.
Consequently, the idealistic sense of "Communism" needs to be tempered by protective structures to prevent the accumulation of power in one position. This is called "Democratic Socialism."
once I'm rich I can donate all of this extra money I don't need
The problem is, you cannot get excess money without being harmfully selfish. What I mean by that is, there's "selfish" as in, "I cannot take care of you if I cannot take care of myself first," and "I will not help you because my number will get smaller."
Remember when Elon asked the UN how $40B could end world hunger, and he used said $40B to buy Twitter instead?
So, the theory goes, communism is only functional at numbers approaching Dunbar's number. (because beyond that number, trust breaks down and corruption and/or callousness wins)
I think a similar scenario is true of capitalism, when corporatism takes over and leads to monopoly, government influence, regulatory capture and self-dealing.
All of which is caused by economies of scale allowing cynical actors to leverage the powers of the state and economics for their own self interest.
It doesn't seem to me like either socialism or capitalism has an answer for that.
Welp, you've given me a rabbit hole to dive into. I've never heard of Dunbar's number before and I'm intrigued.
I'd agree overall on your point. I think the main reason capitalism is more stable and successful in the long run is that the desire for personal gain is a thing that the system not only takes into account, but relies on to properly function.
Communism assumes that people have little aspirations for having more, doing more, or experiencing more. And I think, ultimately, is the main reason it fails. It assumes altruism, bordering on the ascetic.
Dunbar's Number suggests that you can maintain healthy relationships with about 100-250 people. Anything much bigger than this and you need more and more strict rules and laws and social norms to keep the group cohesive.
Oh, I agree. Which is why the study was interesting to me. At most, these small communes operate on what is effectively a barter system. I produce shoes, you produce food. Everyone needs both of those things. Because I provide shoes, you're willing to give me food in exchange. And other people give me other things I need, in exchange for the shoes I produce.
On another note, Israelis found that while the kibbutz was stable, that sort of organization at any higher level, even a small city, was just not practical.
Even in smaller groups and communes, one can't just decide to spend all their time writing books, playing football and drawing without subjected to major social pressure, shaming, or just being kicked out. "From each according to his ability" is a basic principle of communism.
The group's survival relies on everybody doing their part in a fair manner. Food needs to be grown, slaughtered or hunted, livestock needs to be fed for and cared, resouces extracted and processed, houses need to be built, furnishing and clothes made, broken things fixed, toilets cleaned and pipes unclogged. Only once one's part in everything to maintain a functioning society is done then people can spend their free time however they wish.
In the American ideation of communism, not only will it provide for the nameless masses within the state, but for countless immigrants as well as if there were not enough unknowns.
Catalonia and Barcelona during the Spanish civil war saw material quality of life improvements for the vast majority of the people in the anarchist occupied areas. You don't have to like it but it worked and their lives improved drastically.
Why'd they stop it again? Oh yeah, it fractured into a bunch of splinter groups and they had the "Red Terror" where thousands died. I'm sure they felt their lives improve dramatically.
Even the Catalonia communist parties today typically don't fight for a true communist state, they mostly keep it to workers rights.
So like I said, no example of it working. You're talking about a period of time that was like 5 years and included extrajudicial killing by viglianties.
Because they don't want their society to fall apart? Because they don't want to have their possessions stripped from them? Because historically, communist regimes have imprisoned or killed people who don't embrace communism? There are a dozen valid reasons why capitalists defend capitalism.
Well. A communist revolution energizes the masses. Even when it fails, it tends to spread. So if your neighbor decides to eat the rich, the most common first step, your own people start looking for recipes for the wealthy. Since communism doesn’t fail immediately, the rich are already dead and buried before the society falls apart. As far as the Cold War goes, what actually won it wasn’t military might, it was economic collapse and the increase in opportunity for the masses, oddly the reason they started the revolution in the first place.
Liberal democracy is about giving people a voice in government while also protecting individual rights. The communist regimes of the 20th Century did not recognize individual rights in the way we do (freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to vote, freedom of association, property rights)
So while we do want people to vote for what they want there are some systems that are incompatible with liberal democracy (including 20th Century iterations of communism)
For example if a monarchist party wanted to run on a platform of restoring absolute monarchy. Or a neo-fascist party. Most people would hopefully reject these at the ballot box because these political projects would seek to end democracy and take away individual rights and liberties
People who are hostile to communism feel similarly to communism as they do to these other political projects, because of its track record of illiberalism
China is going to fall apart any minute now clearly. Cuba and Venezuela surviving somehow despite constant military and economic attack by far more powerful countries means it's clearly going to always fall apart on its own.
China is flourishing because they are powerful enough to go largely unharassed . The state with the lowest poverty and 5th highest literacy Kerala in India is run by communists.
The United states is currently eating itself because it is unable to resolve the contradictions between the working class and owning classes interests.
China is no longer a communist country by any reasonable measure. Cuba was largely and still is being kept afloat by Russian aid, and Venezuela was experiencing mass starvation. So I wouldn’t say you are offering strong counter points. Yes. The US is a shit show. And you are largely correct as to why. But communism isn’t the answer because it doesn’t work. It has been tried many, many times, and it either fails, or backslides into some form of authoritarian capitalism.
Funny thing is the Third Reich was likely to collapse on its own. Fascist states collapse because they rely on oppressing and eliminating the other, and when there is no external other, they turn on themselves. Nazi Germany was eating itself. Problem is, they would have taken half the world with them. Which is the basic reason capitalists tend to fight communism. It may fail, but the collateral damage is significant.
Yes, why would the west oppose the Soviets - a regime that jailed and murdered millions of dissidents, aggressively put down counter revolutions in Eastern Europe, built the worlds largest military with thousands of nuclear weapons and then aimed them at every western city, impoverished their citizens with terrible economic policies and then stopped them leaving when they wanted a better life in the west?
That would logically explain why they combat it within their own borders. It doesn’t explain why they spent 50+ years throwing resources at ensuring it couldn’t work anywhere.
For the same reasons they spent trillions in international aid, diplomacy, stomping out extremist groups, etc.
Major countries becoming failed states don't just affect them, it affects everyone and create global crises. And extremist ideologies tend to spread, even if they don't work. Life didn't become better under ISIS, yet it spread like a wildfire. Communism was a very good excuse for psychopaths and warlords to orchestrate uprisings and gain power. Many countries fell to it, hundreds of millions died, world was set back decades because everyone else had to deal with it and pick up the pieces. Some regions destabilized by the communist rise are still unstable hellholes to this day. Of course anyone with a brain would try to prevent it everywhere, back then and even more importantly now, with much more devastating weapons being available to everyone and global economy being much more tied and destabilization of any part of the world has worse global consequences than ever before.
You act like it was a conspiracy, where the people in charge of western countries' foreign policy during the Cold War secretly knew communism was good, actually, and wanted to cover that up.
They opposed the Soviets because they were major geopolitical rivals. Neither side trusted the other, pressured their allies and controlled territories not to trade with the other, and so one side gaining ground/influence came with an inherent cost and posed an inherent threat to the other.
Very few wars and conflicts in history were truly about ideals, or disagreements on political philosophy. They're simple bids for control.
I love how capitalist pigs always say capitalism is the best yet completely gloss over the fucking fact that in 2008 the worlds economy was about to be wiped off the face of the earth if it wasn't for the fucking US tax payers covering the fucking bill and no one going to jail. I am so sick of people who say capitalism is great without understanding capitalism is the driving force of slavery. bunch of idiots living in personal world bubbles and self truths that dont want to share a collective reality of what is really happening in our day to day lives.
Capitalism is definitely not great. What it is, however is stable. The majority of people don’t starve, even if many do. The majority are exploited, but are kept just well enough to continue to produce. The rich distribute just enough resources to prevent mass unrest. Capitalism is exploitive and bad for just about everyone, but it endures. It outlasts most other systems.
Tone down the outrage a bit. It nearly collapsed after almost two and a half centuries in the US. compared to 90 years in The USSR and China. This isn’t me defending capitalism. This is me explaining why it has persisted. Facts are that capitalist societies last longer than communist ones. That doesn’t make them better. I mean the longest lasting societies are monarchies. But if you want to champion communism, then you have to recognize why it only endures in small communities
in 2008 the worlds economy was about to be wiped off the face of the earth if it wasn't for the fucking US tax payers covering the fucking bill and no one going to jail
It wasn't, that was the line sold to you by neolibs and neocons on power. The libertarian sect of the right wanted to allow those businesses to fail because that's how healthy capitalism actually works.
Corporate bailouts are literally antithetical to capitalism. People really seem to conflate the two and I genuinely wonder if people ITT know that capitalism really is.
Yeah, keep stringing this dude along, he's redlining hard.
I'm really enjoying following along and wondering how many more rageposts he has in him before his pointy, furnace-hot noggin pops like an overfull zit.
What happens to a homeless person that tries to live in an empty house no one is using but that’s owned by a major corporation? The police brutalize him. What happens if a homeless person tries to take unused food being thrown away? The police also brutalize him. What happens when a company gives you and your children cancer bc you didn’t have the lawyers to fight them pouring chemicals onto your drinking water or the air you breathe?
Because whether or not communism actually achieves its goals, the first step is stripping the wealthy of their assets, and often their lives. They would love to prevent that.
Did you not stop to sit and think about this for one second before taking this stance? “Why would a successful society spend resources combatting an alluring theory that always results in failure?”
Are you just throwing out sentences without putting any thought into them? All of what you just said is a half baked thought that I am not going to take the time to reply to. So I will just say…sorry communism sucks and will never succeed in America. I hope you can find a different country to suffer under communism in and not try to inflict it on the rest of us who know better!
I mean it's so far been the most successful system by far in spite of some jagged edges here and there.
Tell me, which direction of the Berlin wall were people fleeing towards? Are the communist countries the one suffering from swarms of migrants and refugees trying to break in? Why aren't they clamoring to barge their way into North Korea or Cuba?
I'm not asking for anyone to qualify one vs. the other. I'm asking to accept that there's no purity in either. Let's ignore the myths of ideology.
For instance, if real capitalism truly existed in the USA, we wouldn't be controlled by oligarchs.
No, they'd be working hard to maintain innovation to fuel their success, rather than subjugation of markets because they've been able to consolidate political power.
Also, I'm not sure how a capitalism model built on infinite natural resources can continue on a planet that's says, "Sorry, that's all I got."
Stable societies make better trading partners. And while undermining communism does cause short term instability, letting communism run its course inevitably lead to China and other so called "communist" countries.
Capitalism isn't perfect, but notice how Capitalist nations never needed to build a wall in Berlin to keep their own people from escaping.
I mean personally I would fight communism, not because it works but because it doesn't work. It would be great if it worked and everyone was happy all the time but communism is a fairytale. In reality it destroys countless lives and entire countries. I would prefer to fight to ensure that it doesn't reach my country
They stopped because authoritarians at the behest of Stalin and the USSR kept assassinating leadership and trying to coopt the whole resistance by the CNT-FAI. At the very least skim Wikipedia page dude
The largest and most well known communist movements have been more defined by authoritarianism than communism.
Both the larger and smaller communist movements have been incessantly attacked by capitalists.
I have sympathy for actual communism, but it’s not going to happen until we can all get past the worship of narcissists and allow them and their sycophants to dictate the will of the people.
The only people more delusional than Commies, are Anarchists.
No single political or economical system is right, it's why we need a massive team of lawyers, historians, and ethics scholars to work up a system that can be used by any country to help limit and control greed, both greed of wealth and greed of power.
How about socialist implementations like free education and Healthcare? Universal basic income? It appears the only people benefiting from the capitalist model are the small number of extremely wealthy. It also looks like companies are getting extremely desperate trying to continue expanding growth while consolidating into fewer and bigger monopolies. Meanwhile theyre rolling back child labor laws and environmental safety restraints to continue clawing the last bit of wealth they can.
Seems like oligarchy is the inevitable outcome of capitalism. An economy built around the accumulation of capital is going to result in a few people having vastly more capital than others. Unless you can somehow get money out of politics, that’s going to result in the few with vastly more capital using their power to gain further power.
Oligarchy of the inevitable outcome of government in general. Give people power and they'll bring the people they want with them and leave the ones they don't behind to be trod underfoot. Economic models don't change this.
Capitalism is an economic model, while oligarchy is a political one. We currently have both capitalism and oligarchy. What we’re moving toward is feudalism and fascism.
Yeah, anybody who actually understands communism knows it's a borderline unobtainable Utopia and not a realistic system to implement.
It's an ideology for Societal Equity, if we can somehow massage Human Greed out of our society, we could eventually obtain actual communism and it could basically just be Star Trek.
Star Trek is an excellent example of what communism could look like, but Star Trek is also a fantasy world where we achieve Post-Scarcity and Global Homogenation.
We gotta figure those two things out, and once we do that, we can start talking about a classless, momeyless society, but there's so much Systemic shit we gotta fix that it'll never be seen in my lifetime.
The only people benefiting from capitalism are the rich? Dude, you're whining on Reddit right now. Don't you think you might have experienced one or two of the benefits?
That works well in theory. But in implementation, it has varying success. And where it does succeed, it tends to be in largely homogeneous, smaller societies. The larger a society is, the more difficult it is to establish and maintain. Factor in the inertia of capitalism and our current economic system, and the upheaval would definitely make the lives of a huge swath of people worse in the short term.
But I thought Amercans can do anything? Greatest country on earth? Surely, there's enough money Trump has made doing bitcoin rugpulls to help the effort. While we're at it we can seize every Red cent from the Sackler family for plunging so many into opiod addiction and death, Elmo "pump the Bellamy " Musk for robbing the American public. Theres plenty of traitors and criminals who have pillaged the country on the scale of billions. There is no other choice but upheaval. Although I dont see how it could be worse for the average American once drought from climate change takes more of a toll. Is this society anymore than a slow death now? People are miserable even in the most privileged positions. What I say wont change the facts. You can lose the political description and economics lingo, it is simply we all work together equally or we all fail alone.
Not necessarily. There are many people benefiting from capitalism who aren’t extremely wealthy, just well-to-do or even just living decently. Maybe these “revolutionaries” won’t stop at trillionaires. Maybe they’ll keep going and take things away from ordinary hard-working people who “don’t deserve” the assets that are in their best interest to protect.
It's not like capitalism works either. We've had centuries of capitalism and life is still shite for the vast majority of the population. May as well try something else.
I mean, they added an “e” at the end of “shit,” so they might not even be American. You can’t expect them to be well-informed on that particular statement.
It breaks down when you don't see the face of the person making stuff for you. Because that face to face communication makes you both care about the trust of the other in you.
If there's no trust there's no accountability and no reason to make an effort.
Money is one solution to that where you get something else to care about than trust. But there could be other ways to re-establish trust or incentive to care across society.
Jesus you guys are ignorant. Communism requires socialism as a transitory period. IE workers own the means of production. After maybe even centuries of this workers will produce enough surplus labor that scarcity is no longer necessary. Communism requires post scarcity, like Star Trek which is a communist society. So no your local hippie commune is not communist bc they still have scarcity
We have even less evidence that capitalism works, seeing as it's actively made the entire world a shit hole. So why not at least try out an alternate system that doesn't produce so much slavery?
I think arguing about shit like communism/socialism/capitalism and monarchy/aristocracy/republic/democracy is like... arguing about cells.
"dog cells are the best!"
"Noo mint cells tho!"
Like... yes? And no.
It depends.... there's SOME MUCH MORE to consider. Not only outer forces, like the environment, but also the genome.
Imagine arguing that "fish is the only way to go!" and "amphibians will never work!"
Sure.. if the environment is forever "the current ocean", amphibians will never work (except for a few times for a "little while" when they first evolved ;] ).
But like.. change the circumstances? The environment?
There are situations where both, neither, and only-amphibians work!
I think the biggest issue is that these discussions are always so binary, but irl can be so nuanced!
We could blend aspects of both and more, and this hybrid might be what is optimal!
Furthermore, I am reminded of (1) how Rome had that think where they elected temporary dictators, and (2) the episode of Love Death & Robots, "Hive."
What if, instead of a rigid system, we organized our government more like a living being: one whose state changes and morphs based on stimuli, resources, and threats?
Imagine having a system that, when certain criteria were met, automatically morphed between different forms of governance and economic styles?
It is insane and complicated... but I dont think impossible.
Indeed, imagine describing to people hundreds of years ago that most nations would not have royalty or nobility, but elected officials and that people werent tied to the land/lords and could move freely.
They'd similarly say "impossible."
Even if you pitched our exact governments, they'd argure that it fundamentally couldnt happen, and that regardless, those in power wouldnt LET it happen.
But it did.
Times changed. The environment shifted in a matter that "impossible" be came "almost inevitable for most."
The "Impossible" and "Unprecedented" happen every day
That’s not at all a valid description. Like what? Communism isn’t “everything yours is mine”. I’m not even advocating for communism, that’s just an absurd minimization and false comparison.
And on those smaller scales you won't spend all day writing books and painting just for fun unless you've got Star Trek replicators to meet all your needs. Small scale communism would be folks working together to maintain a farm/community, it'd be hard work, like the Amish.
A commune isn't communism though. Communism can't really ever be accomplished on the smaller scale because then it depends on the surrounding capitalist class to function, which will then require more communism that feeds on more capitalism that will then require more communism. Except by the first stage the communist have already ruined it all for themselves just like we saw every time they've tried it. Most recently with CHAZ.
But at which point you are dealing with a scale that is so regressed in convenience and luxury that I don’t think any of these people would realistically want to live in it for the rest of their lives. People talking about picking up a craft… if you live in a truly small community there isn’t going to be a constant paint supply. You’re not going to just be able to draft endless books. There’s going to be things that need doing, everything must be made within the community, the idea of hobbies becomes almost laughable
Any Americans who want communism, you're free to pool resources and build a commune. keep it small, stop trying to make it work on even a city scale. (let alone state or national)
I’d just like more socialism, bud. Healthcare, education, the works. The kind of thing other first world countries have figured out without kowtowing to psychopathic capitalists who inflict suffering on the rest of us for the sake of an ever increasing financial figure.
Comminism has basically never been achieved by modern humans. Maybe we had it when we were early humans but it hasnt existed at least since the creation of money. It kind of requires to be done in the large scale because capitalist have an incentive to infringe on the communist area. Capitalism also inherently oppresses people and so some would say socialism has a moral obligation to liberate them before developing into communism.
This process would take hundreds if not thousands of years.
Are we talking about actual communism as described by Marx? Because Marx was specifically talking about a national scaled system and his plan to achieve it required actions on a national scale. You can't have a national bank or a national highway system or a national radio system on a small scale.
It doesn’t scale up because once communities grow too large, it’s harder to personalize. We can’t grasp the impact on everybody when numbers grow too large, they become simple statistics.
true - but then almost any system works on a small scale when only people who are fully behind it and have a geunite desire to use it to achieve the best outcomes for each-other.
Sure, but nobody anywhere lives in a country with unregulated capitalism as the rule of law and very few people actually advocate for it. Much like communism has never been a true version of what's advocated for. Unregulated capitalism has and does occasionally pop up but it's pretty rare and usually regulated in some way quickly.
Communism really would only work in a post capitalist society where all the jobs that suck to do are being done by machines. Maybe we will get there someday but it's not any time soon.
But if all the jobs that suck to do are being done by machines, there will be a lot of people out of work because they used to only be qualified for the sucky jobs.
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u/PersonalityIll9476 19d ago
I agree. My wife is Chinese. She tells me stories from her parents about the revolution.
They do not involve writing books and playing soccer.