The wrench in being against ML was that it was responsible for the tremendous growth of the USSR and China. Every third world country would love to replicate th

The wrench in being against ML was that it was responsible for the tremendous growth of the USSR and China. Every third world country would love to replicate this. At best, ML would make a country self sufficient enough to withstand geopolitics and economic pressure from first world countries seeking to use their advantage against third world countries. Cuba and North Korea are isolationist in this regard. However, their standard of living is comparably higher than similar third world countries. The issue in countries where "socialism" (arguably indirect democracy state capitalism) took off were that they faced backwards conditions compared to the first world. ML provided the command economy to quickly divert investment for creating the nonexisting infrastructure necessary to be able to achieve more advanced modes of capitalism. This capitalistic step is necessary to build up the conditions for socialism according to a Marxist timeline of development. The Stalin model attempted to reinterpret a state control of capital as a socialism since it was in theory held responsible to the worker masses as opposed to private individual capital holders. Perhaps, the fall of the USSR inro capitalism for better global trade and investment and the fall of Maoism into Dengism were rebukes of the Stalin model in being unable to sustain growth without global trade that first world capitalism benefits from. China however maintains the ML party control over the state and economy in order to maintain control over how capitalists invest and develop their country more for the Chinese benefit rather than the foreign country interest. This is not as free and bottoms up as alternative models of socialism, but from a game theory perspective its hard to compete against a top down system of private capitalists and their democratic representatives without another top down system unless the economic circumstances do rapidly shift (perhaps in a Marxist manner where the economic forces destabilize the upper classes and the lower classes are empowered to grow the economy in a new way)