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Capitalism indeed seems to consign the masses to work that is drudgery and is intellectually beneath them, but so does socialism.

Every socialist experiment I'm familiar with has almost instantly devolved into a form of a capitalism based on social pull with the bureaucracy rather than financial leverage. The final endpoint of this trajectory seems to be the mafia state -- pure social pull capitalism within criminal-state complex hierarchies.

If there's a solution here, it may not lie within politics as we ordinarily think about it.

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Check out the anarchist socialist experiments like Catalonia during the Spanish civil war. They tended to collapse because of inability to fight external forces, not because of bureaucratic bloat, etc.

Interesting. But I still wonder how they'd fare in the long term. Would they maintain their cooperative state or devolve into mafia statism as most experiments in radical socialism seem to do.

Unlikely because those types of workers' movements are anti-statist by their very nature. For a similar philosophy, see anarcho-syndicalism.

I completely agree that solutions probably don't lie within politics as usual. But, from the perspective libcom would have you adopt, we should go to "liberatarian communism". The real irony here is that libcom is trying to spread this brand of communism by highlighting a tragedy in a country that has seen the fastest rise out of poverty in the history of the world due to, ahem, free market economic reforms.

I think that you are simplifying the perspective of the bloggers here. They have been writing updates on workers struggles and other incidents of civil unrest in China over the last few decades, and I think that, from a libertarian communist perspective, the struggling workers would be seen as the most important agent of social change,the 'rise out of poverty' as you phrased it, in China over this period, rather than the states supposed embrace of free market capitalism (which itself is a complicated issue).

i'm not posting this as an advocation of hoxhaism but the case of albania is an interesting one that most english speaking people don't seem to be familiar with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Socialist_Republic_...

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