A little Richard D. Wolff goes a LONG ways

I get a laugh from Marxians (excuse me, not "Marxist") like Richard D. Wolff who "can't be bothered" to mention The Cultural Revolution or Great Leap Forward when discussing China's putative-to-him inexorable rise to economic power.

 No, seriously. You won't find either phrase in that paean to The Modern Inner Kingdom.

Since he's a Marxist, such things are of course "inexorable" per the pseudoscience of the prescriptive side of Marxism. And, yes, it's pseudoscience, and not (just) as pejorative, but as properly defined. AFAIK, Wolff does not claim to be a neo-Marxist/Marxian, and certainly doesn't claim to be an Open Marxist, so the following is relevant to his inexorability. (Sidebar: Beyond the feuds between Trots and Tankies, or Stalin and Mao, how far does one get to stray from orthodox Uncle Karl and still include "Marx" somewhere in a self-description?)

Hegelian dialectic is crappy philosophy and is literally pseudoscience when made part of a theory of science, whether social science or hard science. Substituting "materialism" for "idealism" doesn't make it any less pseudoscientific. The thesis-antithesis-synthesis idea simply cannot be measured, whether its a thesis-antithesis-synthesis of philosophically idealist Big Things, or a non-metaphysical materialist thesis-antithesis-synthesis of events and happenings. Certainly not in the way intended, but arguably in a trite and quasi-tautological way. (I could claim that gene-swapping by bacteria is thesis-antithesis-synthesis.)

I've written in much more depth about this before. 

I had more, about deromanticizing Communism, on the 100th anniversary of the November Revolution.

And, before I forgot, I'll note that Wolff either can't be bothered, or forgot, to mention things like "Xinjiang" and "Uyghurs" as well.