In the West there will be some people who turn up their noses at this point: development, growth, industrialization, urbanization, an economic miracle of unprecedented magnitude and duration unprecedented in history. How vulgar!

This snobbery from the privileged seems to deem irrelevant the fact that hundreds of millions of people have escaped a fate that condemned them to malnutrition, hunger and even starvation. Those who might think that the development of productive forces is only a matter of economic prosperity and consumerism would do well to reread (or read) the pages of the Communist Manifesto that highlight the idiocy of rural life in misery — not only material but cultural, with narrow and impassable boundaries.