“One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy . . . ‘Libertarians’ . . . had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over...” - Murray Rothbard
Rothbard was a far-right Austrian School economist and the founder of "anarcho"-capitalism.
Ludwig von Mises, libertarian icon and Austrian School economist:
It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.
Even the right-wing libertarian economist Bryan Caplan from the Koch Brother-funded econ department of George Mason University has admitted:
current events do nothing to show that economic calculation was the insuperable difficulty of socialist economies. There is no natural experiment of a socialist economy that suffered solely from its lack of economic calculation. Thus, economic history as well as pure economic theory fails to establish that the economic calculation problem was a severe challenge for socialism.
Computer scientist and Marxist economist Paul Cockshott and his Marxian economist colleague Allin Cottrell are a great resource for the economic calculation debate:
http://paulcockshott.co.uk/publication-archive/Talks/politicaleconomy/Computers%20and%20the%20economic%20calculation%20debate.pdf
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/
https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2017/01/31/real-problems-of-socialism-and-some-answers/
http://biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar/ar/libros/cuba/if/marx/documentos/22/Economic%20planning....pdf
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/calculation_debate.pdf
http://paulcockshott.co.uk/media/OnlineEconomicsPapers/standalonearticle.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVBfIU1_zO-P_R9keEGdDHQ/videos
Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel has done a lot of work exposing neoliberal poverty reduction myths. From his response to Steven Pinker and Bill Gates:
If you have read colonial history, you will know colonizers had immense difficulty getting people to work on their mines and plantations. As it turns out, people tended to prefer their subsistence lifestyles, and wages were not high enough to induce them to leave. Colonizers had to coerce people into the labour market: imposing taxes, enclosing commons and constraining access to food, or just outright forcing people off their land.
The narrative that you and Gates peddle relies on a poverty line of $1.90 per day. You are aware, I’m sure, that this line is arbitrary. Remarkably, it has no empirical grounding in terms of how much money is necessary to satisfy actual human needs.
If $1.90 is inadequate to achieve basic nutrition and sustain normal human activity, then it’s too low – period. It’s time for you and Gates to stop using it. Lifting people above this line doesn’t mean lifting them out of poverty, “extreme” or otherwise.
Remember: $1.90 is the equivalent of what that amount of money could buy in the US in 2011. The economist David Woodward once calculated that to live at this level (in an earlier base year) would be like 35 people trying to survive in Britain “on a single minimum wage, with no benefits of any kind, no gifts, borrowing, scavenging, begging or savings to draw on (since these are all included as ‘income’ in poverty calculations).”
In fact, even the World Bank has repeatedly stated that the line is too low to be used in any but the poorest countries, and should not be used to inform policy. The USDA states that about $6.7/day is necessary for achieving basic nutrition. Peter Edwards argues that people need about $7.40 if they are to achieve normal human life expectancy. The New Economics Foundation concludes that around $8 is necessary to reduce infant mortality by a meaningful margin. Lant Pritchett and Charles Kenny have argued that since the poverty line is based on purchasing power in the US, then it should be linked to the US poverty line – so around $15/day.
Your argument is that neoliberal capitalism is responsible for driving the most substantial gains against poverty. This claim is not supported by evidence. Here’s why: The vast majority of gains against poverty have happened in one region: East Asia. As it happens, the economic success of China and the East Asian tigers – as scholars like Ha-Joon Chang and Robert Wade have pointed out – is due not to the neoliberal markets that you espouse but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation (the same measures that Western nations used to such great effect during their own period of industrial consolidation).
Not so for the rest of the global South. Indeed, these policy options were systematically denied to them, and destroyed where they already existed. From 1980 to 2000, the IMF and World Bank imposed structural adjustment programs that did exactly the opposite: slashing tariffs, subsidies, social spending and capital controls while reversing land reforms and privatizing public assets – all in the face of massive popular resistance. During this period, the number of people in poverty outside China increased by 1.3 billion ($7.40/day line for achieving basic nutrition and normal human life expectancy). In fact, even the proportion of people living in poverty increased, from 62% to 68%. In other words, the imposition of neoliberal capitalism from 1980 to 2000 made the poverty rate worse, not better.
Since 2000, the most impressive gains against poverty (outside of East Asia) have come from Latin America, according to the World Bank, coinciding with a series of left-wing or social democratic governments that came to power across the continent. Whatever one might say about these governments (I have my own critiques), this doesn’t sit very well with your neoliberal narrative.
As I pointed out in the Guardian piece, only 5% of new income from global growth goes to the poorest 60% of humanity – people living on less than $7.40/day.
Here’s how well it’s working: on our existing trajectory, according to research published in the World Economic Review, it will take more than 100 years to end poverty at $1.90/day, and over 200 years to end it at $7.40/day. Let that sink in. And to get there with the existing system – in other words, without a fairer distribution of income – we will have to grow the global economy to 175 times its present size. Even if such a feat were possible, it would drive climate change and ecological breakdown to the point of reversing any gains against poverty.
Hickel also had a great episode regarding this topic on Citations Needed.
They labeled Bolivia under Morales as a “regime” every year with the exception of 2008, so it’s doubtful that this year’s "regime" label is only referring to the Áñez months.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence
Gotta love how if you don't completely surrender your economic sovereignty to Western imperial core capitalists, you get immediately labeled a "regime".
Israel, a literal apartheid state, is still deemed a democracy, yet Bolivia being smeared as a "regime" is all you need to know about The Economist. They labeled Bolivia under Morales (the country's first and only indigenous president) as a "regime" every year with the exception of 2008, so it's doubtful that this year's regime label is only referring to Áñez.
Lenin on The Economist:
a journal that speaks for the British millionaires
A 2020 Credit Suisse global wealth report estimates that the top 1% of households globally own over 43% of all personal wealth. The top 0.1% owns about 25% of the world's wealth. The bottom half of the global population only owns about 1% of the world's wealth.
A 2020 Oxfam report also revealed:
The world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the planet’s population
My bet is that many of the socdems who are still advocating for a minimum wage around $15 are likely relying on Arindrajit Dube's recent literature review on minimum wage effects which suggests that minimum wages generally do not have harmful employment effects if they're below 60% of the median wage:
In the US, a large body of high-quality research has investigated the impact of minimum wages on employment. Overall, this body of evidence points to a relatively modest overall impact on low wage employment to date. Recent work helped identify how this impact may vary by the level of the minimum wage. Across US states, the best evidence suggests that the employment effects are small up to around 59% of the median wage.
Economist Dean Baker makes the case that the minimum wage would be over $24 an hour today if it had kept pace with productivity growth since 1968.
Some economic context leading up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union: A larger portion of Soviet industrial output was being devoted to the military during the later era of the Cold War which increasingly siphoned away the skilled manpower of Soviet scientists and engineers from other more productive economic sectors. A Western capitalist imposed technological embargo on the Soviet Union also damaged industrial development and innovation.
The Communist Party had developed an overrepresentation of a strata of managers, intelligentsia, and the more skilled technical and professional employees in its membership which gave them disproportionate influence within the Soviet government during a time when Soviet economic growth was slowing down to US levels (after the years of the “stability of the cadres” policy that defined the Brezhnev era) as these strata compared themselves to their American managerial and professional counterparts that had disproportionately benefited from the rise in US national income in the 80s (the smaller income differentials among occupations in the Soviet Union were seen as more tolerable by these strata in previous decades in the Soviet Union as economic growth had been much higher then with all groups seeing their incomes rise at higher growth rates).
There was severe erosion of public economic confidence during the Perestroika reform era from a large rise in inflation that was a consequence of a revenue crisis due to a host of factors that led to excessive reliance on credit from its central bank. The Soviet Union saw significant losses in export revenues from the global oil price collapse from the 1980s oil glut (largely thanks to Saudi Arabia) after structuring its economy into being excessively dependent on the export of oil. Many of Gorbachev’s policies also thoroughly backfired by exacerbating revenue problems with his ban on alcohol that only marginally improved labor productivity while depriving the state of a critical source of revenue in alcohol taxes as well as his promotion of decentralization that allowed for local governments to withhold tax revenues from the central government and Gorbachev’s large reductions in turnover taxes on enterprises under the belief that the managers would make better use of the revenue than the state. The lack of foreign exchange reserves and the ultimate costs of the Soviet-Afghan War and handling the Chernobyl disaster further financially crippled the Soviet Union in its last years. In 2006 Gorbachev wrote "The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl 20 years ago this month, even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union."
In contrast to the reform process in China that sought to preserve the dictatorship of the proletariat and the rule of the Communist Party (after installing ideological discipline in the CPC with the Four Cardinal Principles) to more carefully ease the transition with dual pricing systems towards the development of more of a long-term NEP-style transition phase predicated on bringing in foreign investment and forced-technology transfers, Gorbachev naïvely wanted to quickly remake the Soviet Union as a social democracy. Gorbachev's establishment of the Glasnost policies ultimately further empowered Boris Yeltsin’s kleptocratic anticommunist faction (that had grown increasingly larger throughout the years of ideological decay and corruption in the Soviet government after Stalin’s death) at the same time as he was attempting to execute the Perestroika reforms. All of these factors contributed to a significantly more chaotic reform process with older economic mechanisms of planning often being dismantled faster than new economic mechanisms could be put in their place as traditional supply-demand relationships broke down and further contributed to shortages.
Despite being under siege from Western imperialism, 20th century socialist projects still generally achieved superior results in measures of physical quality of life compared to capitalist countries when adjusting for levels of economic development:
In 30 of 36 comparisons between countries at similar levels of economic development, socialist countries showed more favorable PQL outcomes ( p < .05 by two-tailed t-test). This work with the World Bank's raw data included cross-tabulations, analysis of variance, and regression techniques, which all confirmed the same conclusions. The data indicated that the socialist countries generally have achieved better PQL outcomes than the capitalist countries at equivalent levels of economic development.
It ultimately depends on how broadly we define socialism, but we could either describe China as a far from perfect socialist project that is currently still in the state capitalist stage of development in the Leninist sense or even a unique form of early-stage market socialism carefully building towards a later higher stage of socialism (this of course assumes that you subscribe to the idea that socialism can coexist with commodity production and the law of value which left-coms who reject even the USSR as state capitalist also would definitely reject).
China's economic model is very similar to what the Soviet Union was under the NEP (New Economic Policy) that Lenin championed as a necessary strategic retreat from the previous economic strategy of War Communism (which had practically everything nationalized and centrally planned). Lenin argued that the NEP and state capitalism were required to attract foreign investment and build the productive forces necessary for socialist development. According to Lenin:
For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly.
Under this economic model of the NEP, the commanding heights of the economy (heavy industry, natural resources, and banking) remained under public ownership with a large private sector allowed to exist outside of those strategic industries along with the establishment of a new small class of capitalists called "NEPmen" that were excluded from any real political power. The NEP was eventually ended by the Soviet leadership under Stalin as he argued that state capitalism under the NEP despite its achievements in helping to rebuild the Soviet economy after the civil war would still not allow for the rapid industrialization that was believed necessary at the time to defend the USSR against Western imperialist aggression.
Deng argued that China had become economically isolated in a capitalist-dominated world (the Sino-Soviet Split exacerbated this situation) and was still deeply scarred with the poverty and economic backwardness from China's era of semi-feudalism and consequently lacked the productive forces, technology, and know-how to immediately jump into becoming a successful fully centrally planned economy of 100% social ownership like many in Mao's faction of the CPC wanted.
So, Deng Xiaoping advocated for an transitory economic model of a "socialist market economy" that he developed from studying the Soviet NEP that would still place China within what Chinese communists had called the "primary stage of socialism" where certain aspects like markets and limited forms of private ownership outside of major strategic sectors of the economy that comprise the commanding heights of the means of production would be allowed like private ownership of less important light industry and consumer goods/services under Communist Party supervision with a strong emphasis on joint ventures with foreign Western companies that would require critical technology transfers from foreign capitalists to the Chinese public if they wanted access to the Chinese market:
However, by allowing foreign capitalist companies to employ Chinese labor, this does of course come with the negative consequences of more exploitation of certain workers during the "primary stage of socialism" but is still seen by enough of the CPC as a necessary evil for a middle income developing country to acquire foreign capital and technology that they contend are necessary to avoid becoming economically isolated by capitalist encirclement while also building productive forces. Made in China 2025 is the current government initiative that has utilized past technology transfers and Chinese industrial policies in a campaign to position China as a global powerhouse in high-tech industry. Nevertheless, the reform and opening up era still had a lot of harmful excesses from the market reforms in hindsight like the partial privatization of healthcare that the current government under Xi is trying to fix with the Healthy China 2020 and the Healthy China 2030 initiatives (Universal healthcare is claimed to have been just recently achieved by the government, but still is not free at point of use despite better coverage and affordability). The staff and workers' representative congresses also lost power during the 90s under Zemin, but have been re-strengthened under both Hu Jintao and more recently under Xi. There was also an explosion of corruption and inequality due to the market reforms that the CPC didn't handle or prepare for particularly well until more recently with the anti-corruption campaign of Xi's administration and the recently revised tax code that lowered the tax burden on the working class while increasing taxes on the wealthy and enforcing taxes on global income that disproportionately affects wealthy Chinese. Excessive inequality will undermine China's dual circulation strategy.
The "socialist market economy" that the CPC established retained public ownership over the commanding heights of the economy (the state has an effective monopoly over banking, finance, heavy industry, energy, mining, transportation, metals, telecommunications, natural resources, land, and public utilities) while also having many local or provincial state-owned enterprises in many other industries including the auto industry, pharmaceuticals, and IT as well as many cooperatives especially in agriculture. Central state-owned enterprises were consolidated to be much fewer in number but also significantly larger in size and total assets while also becoming more efficient, comprising nearly 2/3 of the top 500 companies in China. The Chinese government also has varying degrees of minority ownership in many private enterprises in China. The size of the Chinese private sector can be inflated at times by having cooperatives and mixed enterprises of mostly government ownership with little private ownership be included as part of the private sector.
Just as the Soviet NEPmen were excluded from political power under the NEP, the national bourgeoisie in China are also excluded from real political power with no capitalist membership in the Central Committee of the CPC. Lists of the wealthiest people in China are often called the "kill pigs list" as about 17% of these capitalists according to one study end up in court, jailed, and some being even executed with about 14 billionaires being executed in China within just 8 years.
The CPC also implemented a form of workplace democracy through staff and workers’ representative congresses that allow worker participation in management decisions and these institutions exist within all state-owned enterprises and even parts of the private sector (the staff and workers’ representative congresses in the state sector have more power though). The CPC can control its private sector through active management via quick direct interventions or more passively managing its private sector through its Communist Party committees within China's private enterprises, joint ventures, and foreign enterprises that influence management decisions to be more aligned with Communist Party goals. 5-Year Plans also still exist with directive economic planning being retained for certain strategic publicly-owned sectors of the economy while indicative planning has replaced directive planning elsewhere.
Regardless of whether we label China in its current economic state as socialism, market socialism, or state capitalism, it's a massive mistake for any leftist to disavow China as simply "capitalist" as it dismisses how fundamentally different China's economy is from capitalist economies and strengthens the fallacious capitalist poverty reduction narratives of neoliberals like Steven Pinker whose arguments rests almost entirely upon China's progress on poverty reduction (global poverty reduction without China's poverty reduction numbers has largely stagnated throughout the capitalist world). It also ignores the important lesson that socialist projects are sometimes going to be forced into making strategic retreats due to capitalist encirclement and imperialism as we've seen with the Soviet Union under the NEP, China, Vietnam (Vietnam has a nearly identical economic model as China as it faced similar material conditions and was forced to restructure economically to have access to international capitalist markets), and even Cuba to a lesser extent. And holy shit my response was too late and way too long.
Chief neoliberal economist Larry Summers who was the director of Obama's National Economic Council and economic advisor to the Biden campaign tried his best to discredit and diminish these findings. Here is the response to Summers by economists Lawrence Michel and Josh Bivens from EPI noting how Larry's arguments still fail to overturn their findings on the productivity-pay gap.
Paul Cockshott has a nice youtube channel for presenting a deeper analysis of Marxist economic theory than many of Wolff's Democracy at Work videos and expounds more on the labor theory of value, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and the "transformation problem."
If you're interested in a very in-depth comparative theory analysis, I'd recommend Wolff and Resnick's Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian. Also agree with WhatAnOddUsername's suggestion to try to familiarize yourself with mainstream economics as well. Khan Academy's free courses appear to be far more tolerable than what I had to endure in my introductory micro and macro classes from my Koch brother-funded undergraduate econ program.
Some economic context leading up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union: A larger portion of Soviet industrial output was being devoted to defense during the later era of the Cold War which increasingly siphoned away the skilled manpower of Soviet scientists and engineers from other more productive economic sectors. A Western capitalist imposed technological embargo on the Soviet Union also damaged industrial development and innovation.
The Communist Party had developed an overrepresentation of a strata of managers, intelligentsia, and the more skilled technical and professional employees in its membership which gave them disproportionate influence within the Soviet government during a time when Soviet economic growth was slowing down to US levels (after the years of the “stability of the cadres” policy that defined the Brezhnev era) as these strata compared themselves to their American managerial and professional counterparts that had disproportionately benefited from the rise in US national income in the 80s (the smaller income differentials among occupations in the Soviet Union were seen as more tolerable by these strata in previous decades in the Soviet Union as economic growth had been much higher then with all groups seeing their incomes rise at higher growth rates).
The Soviet Union saw large losses in revenue from the global oil price collapse from the 1980s oil glut that severely reduced Soviet oil export revenues as well as Gorbachev’s economic policies backfiring with his ban on alcohol that only marginally improved labor productivity while depriving the state of a critical source of revenue in alcohol taxes, promotion of decentralization allowed for local governments to withhold tax revenues from central government, and Gorbachev's large reductions in turnover taxes on enterprises under the belief that the managers would make better use of the revenue than the state further contributed to the Soviet revenue crisis that led to further reliance on credit from the central bank that precipitated a large rise in inflation and a consequent erosion of public economic confidence during the Perestroika reform era.
In contrast to Deng’s reform process in China that (after installing ideological discipline in the CPC with the Four Cardinal Principles) had preserved the dictatorship of the proletariat to more carefully ease the transition with dual pricing systems towards the development of more of a NEP-style transition phase of a socialist market economy predicated on developing productive forces and to facilitate bringing in foreign investment and technology transfers, Gorbachev naïvely wanted to quickly remake the Soviet Union as a liberal social democracy by misguidedly establishing Glasnost that further empowered Boris Yeltsin’s neoliberal corrupt anticommunist faction (that had grown increasingly larger throughout the years of ideological decay and corruption in the Soviet government after Stalin’s death) at the same time as he was attempting to execute the Perestroika reforms that contributed to a more chaotic reform process with older economic mechanisms of planning often being dismantled faster than new economic mechanisms could be put in their place as traditional supply-demand relationships broke down and further contributed to shortages.
Khrushchev calling for an end to the dictatorship of the proletariat at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union certainly did not help either. The fact that he was even allowed to get away with that revealed that significant ideological decay was already present within the party far before Gorbachev became General Secretary. His denouncement of Stalin also arguably contributed to the corrosion of a Soviet identity which helped precipitate the rise of nationalism throughout the Soviet Republics that played a role in the Soviet Union's dissolution. People can also say what they want about Deng (his foreign policy was absolute garbage in true Sino-Soviet split fashion and his "One country, two systems" policy was arguably too lenient), but he did famously call out Gorbachev as an idiot for continuing to dissolve what was left of the DotP via Glasnost and Deng did defend Mao's legacy despite acknowledging what he perceived to be some of his mistakes later in life. Deng Xiaoping also established ideological discipline within the party with the Four Cardinal Principles that are not up for debate within the CPC:
I’m aware of Wu being well respected among many economists in China which are very unlikely to be very well represented in this rising hardline “Maoist” (unlikely “Maoist” in the MLM sense) faction in the party that Jinglian has spoken about. Yet still critics have noted that Wu’s influence on the government has been increasingly waning. They have noted to how he was no longer being invited to weekly economics seminars held for prominent leaders and how his name was conspicuously left off the government’s honors list of top 100 outstanding contributors to the country’s transformational economic reforms. CPC media even allowed the publishing of rumors that essentially accused him of being a spy for America which he later denounced as “dirty tricks” by his critics within the party. Despite being a clearly biased source and the alleged loss of influence, Wu still remains more privy to the inner politics and infighting within the CPC than many other analysts that we may hear of in the West.
Despite being more neoclassical-oriented, the characterization of Justin Yifu Lin as a “neoliberal” seems a bit inappropriate due to his advocacy of a more active government role in economic development which is contrary to neoliberal ideology. Michael Hudson and David Harvey have also acknowledged how neoclassical economics has become popular in Chinese economics departments; however, the CPC's recent closure of the Unirule Institute of Economics that had been founded to promote economic liberalization since the early 1990s and was comprised of liberal Chinese economists have analysts noting that this was another indication of economic liberal ideals becoming increasingly less welcome. It's also worth noting though that the incorporation of a neoclassical economic analysis does not wholly preclude socialist ideology as the socialist economist Oskar Lange had developed a socialist economic model based on neoclassical economics through the Lange Model. The power struggle between the factions of the CPC will continue, but it appears that a more left-leaning anti-liberal faction is at the very least gaining more ground under Xi. Western imperialism and capitalist encirclement will continue also to present a major obstacle to socialist development in China though as it has for every other socialist country.
There were a number of articles by bourgeois media outlets back in 2018 and 2019 that were bemoaning this ongoing process of the CPC co-opting China's private sector via party cells.
According to a South China Morning Post article in 2018:
China’s large privately owned firms are becoming more like state-owned enterprises, as many in recent years have implanted in their businesses cells of the Communist Party, the Communism Youth League and even discipline inspection committees. The party’s organisation department found that 68 per cent of China’s non-state enterprises had set up party cells by the end of 2016, and that 70 per cent of foreign-funded firms in China had also done so. The ratio is even higher now given the party promotion that has taken place over the past two years.
And according to a The Diplomat article in 2018:
The impact of adding a Party cell goes far beyond an increase in the cost of doing business. It also impacts the corporate structure and management decisions as they grow more opaque with the blurring of lines between the state’s role and private ownership. In so doing, this policy threatens to reverse China’s four decades old reform agenda of opening up to private enterprise as an engine of growth. In fact, entrepreneurs feel very insecure about their ownership and control over their businesses and companies. For instance, Alibaba’s Jack Ma once said that if the government wants to take over Alipay (value at $150 billion), he will gift it to the state without complaint. Tech startups are increasingly encouraged to sell shares to government bodies so that government-designated representatives can sit on the board to participate in management and operating decisions.
Another The Diplomat article in 2019:
Chinese experts who advocate for the Party Committee system argue that it benefits production, long-term planning, and the fight against corruption inside Chinese companies. But the Party Committee has an explicit role even within foreign companies, where its nature has raised debates especially among the community of investors involved in joint ventures (JVs) with state-owned enterprises. Even if Chinese Company Law regulates the establishment of Party units in foreign invested enterprises (both JVs and fully owned) without requiring governance roles for their members, recent trends in officials’ attitude — which are oriented toward the demand for more power — indicate accelerating interference. That suggests that these positions are not merely symbolic, but rather an eventual source of political pressure around the boardroom.
While Huawei is not structured perfectly as a traditional worker cooperative where workers have more direct influence over management, the employees still hold indirect influence on management decisions through being able to vote for the Representatives' Commission which appoints Huawei Holding Board of Directors and Board of Supervisors.
That's interesting because that sentiment contrasts pretty strongly with the assessment from Chinese economist Wu Jinglian (who represented more of the right-leaning market reform wing of the party and was even derisively referred to as "Market Wu") about the future of the party about a decade ago as he was complaining about “old-style Maoists” gaining significant influence in the government since 2004. He claimed that this left-wing faction is pressing for a return to central planning and was placing blame for the corruption and economic inequality in China on the market reforms Wu helped lead.
We even saw Jack Ma surprisingly speak favorably of an eventual return towards more of a planned economic model predicated on ongoing technological development:
Over the past 100 years, we have come to believe that the market economy is the best system, but in my opinion, there will be a significant change in the next three decades, and the planned economy will become increasingly big. Why? Because with access to all kinds of data, we may be able to find the invisible hand of the market.
The planned economy I am talking about is not the same as the one used by the Soviet Union or at the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China. The biggest difference between the market economy and planned economy is that the former has the invisible hand of market forces. In the era of big data, the abilities of human beings in obtaining and processing data are greater than you can imagine.
With the help of artificial intelligence or multiple intelligence, our perception of the world will be elevated to a new level. As such, big data will make the market smarter and make it possible to plan and predict market forces so as to allow us to finally achieve a planned economy.
Despite being under siege from Western imperialism, 20th century socialist projects still generally achieved superior results in measures of physical quality of life compared to capitalist countries when adjusting for levels of economic development: