Elias Jabbour

Elias Marco Khalil Jabbour (born 1975, São Paulo) is a Brazilian geographer, political economist, and communist militant. He is an associate professor at the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ), a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), and Brazil's foremost academic specialist on Chinese socialism and state planning. He is known for developing two interrelated theoretical categories — the metamode of production and the New Project Economy — as frameworks for understanding China's socialist political economy, and for a series of books on the subject spanning two decades.^[1] He currently serves as president of the Instituto Pereira Passos (IPP), Rio de Janeiro's municipal urban research and public policy planning institute.^[2]

Translator's note: The Portuguese term projetamento has no established equivalent in English. In the existing English-language literature by the author, different renderings have been used, including "New Design Economy" and "New Projectment Economy." In this article, "New Project Economy" is adopted as a conceptual translation, intended to convey the central idea of an economy structured around state-led projects and planning.

Early life and political formation

Jabbour was born in 1975 in the eastern periphery of São Paulo. His father was a Lebanese immigrant and his mother a working-class woman from the state of Paraíba in Brazil's Northeast. He lost his father at the age of eleven, after which his mother, Maria da Luz, raised the family alone. He joined the União da Juventude Socialista (UJS), the youth wing of the PCdoB, as a teenager, and entered the party in 1991, a membership he has maintained without interruption.^[2]

Education

Jabbour holds a bachelor's degree in Geography from the Universidade de São Paulo (USP, 1997), a master's degree in Human Geography from USP (2005), and a doctorate in Human Geography from USP (2010).^[3] His doctoral dissertation was titled China: A Economia Política do socialismo e a formação sócio-espacial de um projeto nacional (China: The Political Economy of Socialism and the Socio-Spatial Formation of a National Project). Despite his formal training as a geographer, he has taught and published primarily in political economy and development economics throughout his career.

Academic career

Jabbour is an associate professor in the Faculty of Economic Sciences at UERJ, where he teaches in the postgraduate programs in Economic Sciences (PPGCE) and International Relations (PPGRI).^[3] His research lines are Political Economy, International Political Economy, Theory and Policy of Economic Planning, and National Development Strategies. He has dedicated approximately 25 years of research to Chinese socialism and state planning.^[1]

Between 2023 and 2025, he served as senior consultant and Director of Research at the New Development Bank (NDB, also known as the BRICS Bank) in Shanghai, appointed by NDB president Dilma Rousseff.^[2] During this period he conducted extensive fieldwork in China, visiting factories and enterprises across the country, research that informed his 2026 book.^[4]

Theoretical contributions

Jabbour's theoretical work centres on two interrelated categories developed over the course of his research, aimed at providing Marxist analytical tools adequate to explaining the Chinese experience without reducing it to either Western capitalism or Soviet-style central planning.

Metamode of production

The concept of metamode of production (metamodo de produção), developed with Italian economist Alberto Gabriele and first systematically presented in China: O Socialismo do Século XXI (2021), designates the international capitalist economic order — structured around the law of value and the free circulation of commodities — as the inescapable external structural constraint within which any contemporary socialist formation must operate.^[5] For Jabbour and Gabriele, no socialist country today can simply abolish the market, because the global order imposes its logic as a structural limit on domestic planning choices. The concept reframes the classic debate between plan and market: rather than a free choice, socialist market policies are understood as a necessary adaptation to objective constraints.

Operating within these constraints, Jabbour and Boer argue that China represents the first historical example of a new class of socialist-oriented socio-economic formations — one qualitatively distinct from prior socialist experiences, including the Soviet model, which operated under different historical conditions and without the market-planning combination that defines the contemporary Chinese model.^[6] In this formation, multiple modes of production coexist, with the dominant state sector capable of generating productive chain effects across the entire economy, including the private sector. The state does not suppress the market but governs it through the dominance of public ownership and the Communist Party's political direction.^[7]

New Project Economy

The New Project Economy (nova economia do projetamento) is a theory of the specific mode of economic organisation that Jabbour argues is emerging in China. The concept derives from Brazilian Marxist economist Ignácio Rangel's Elementos de economia de projetamento (1959), in which Rangel described the fusion of monetary economy, Keynesianism, and Soviet planning as a new mode of production arising from the post-war reconstruction period. Jabbour argues that this concept, abandoned with the financialisation of capitalism and the collapse of the Soviet Union, re-emerges in China in a qualitatively superior form — hence new Project Economy.^[8]

Jabbour first published this theory in 2020 and has since developed it through articles, presentations in China, and two consecutive special issues of the journal Princípios (nos. 171 and 172, 2025), organised by Jabbour, which brought together empirical and theoretical studies on the concept.^[9]

The New Project Economy is characterised by three features that distinguish it from Rangel's original formulation. First, it involves the fusion of micro and macroeconomics through large-scale public projects: the state coordinates investments of continental scale in which supply and demand structures across entire productive chains are equalised over time — a coordination Jabbour considers structurally impossible under capitalism. Second, it operates through the conscious introduction of contradictions into the economy: the state deliberately introduces technological targets or productive objectives as contradictions that society must resolve, generating developmental dynamism rather than passive equilibrium. Third, it relies on an informational planning apparatus composed of Big Data, artificial intelligence, and 5G infrastructure, enabling planning that is both compatible with the market and oriented towards long-term social utilities.^[8]

Together, the metamode of production and the New Project Economy form what Jabbour, in collaboration with Gabriele and later with Australian philosopher Roland Boer, calls a new framework for a political economy of contemporary socialism — one that treats Marxism not as a set of fixed prescriptions but, in his words, as "the science of political power" to be reconstructed in light of living historical experience.^[4]

Published works

Jabbour has published a series of books on Chinese political economy:^[1]

• China: desenvolvimento e socialismo de mercado (China: Development and Market Socialism). 2006.
• China: infra-estruturas e crescimento econômico (China: Infrastructure and Economic Growth). Anita Garibaldi, 2006.
• China hoje: projeto nacional, desenvolvimento e socialismo de mercado (China Today: National Project, Development and Market Socialism). Anita Garibaldi/EDUEPB, 2012.
• China: socialismo e desenvolvimento – sete décadas depois (China: Socialism and Development — Seven Decades Later). Anita Garibaldi, 2019.
• China: O Socialismo do Século XXI (China: The Socialism of the Twenty-First Century). Boitempo, 2021. Co-authored with Alberto Gabriele. Published in English as Socialist Economic Development in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2022).^[5][10]
• Poder e Socialismo: governança, classes, ciência e projetamento na China (Power and Socialism: Governance, Classes, Science and Project Economy in China). Boitempo, 2026. Co-authored with Roland Boer. Foreword by José Paulo Netto.^[6]

Special Book Award of China

In October 2022, Jabbour received the Special Book Award of China for China: O Socialismo do Século XXI, China's top literary prize awarded to foreign authors who contribute to international understanding of the country. It was the first time the prize had been awarded to a work of political economy rather than a translation.^[11] Jabbour described the award as "a prize for Brazilian Marxism," noting that the book applied the analytical framework of Ignácio Rangel to the Chinese reality.^[11]

Political activity

Jabbour has been a member of the PCdoB since 1991 and serves on the party's Central Committee.^[2] In 2025 he was a leading figure in the party's national campaign O Futuro Tem Partido (The Future Has a Party), travelling across Brazil to lead debates on the role of the state, multipolarity, national sovereignty, economic planning, and socialism.