How should we think about common prosperity and challenges in the context of financialization?

Abstract

China is actively promoting common prosperity to address the contradiction of unbalanced and inadequate development. Financialization has become the backdrop for common prosperity. How understanding the changing connotations of common prosperity and the factors influencing it in this context becomes the subject of this paper. We argue that the imbalance between income from assets and labor and the new forms of value generation are the reasons why common prosperity is difficult to achieve. To justify this conclusion, this paper examines financialization from the critical perspective of the Marxist political economy, cites the financialization case in China and discusses the real and ideological challenges facing common prosperity. The paper analyzes the nature of a new form of fetishism, financialization fetishism, and introduces the concept of narrative value, thus exposing the distortion of people’s value ideology by financialization fetishism and the obscuring and erosion of labor value by the mystification of narrative value.