I disagree. Freedoms are essential for economic growth just like an economic growth is essential for more freedoms.
Poor people are generally more interested in freebies and handouts than freedoms, and free people prefers opportunities to excercise their freedoms for economic gains.
That is why economic sanctions are tyrants’ best gifts. They are frozing economic development in targeted nations, reducing demand for freedoms, and also allowing tyrants to blame external powers for their own mismanagement, uniting their populations behind said tyrants.
They can outlaw labor unions, they can pollute the air as much as they want, they can steal patents from the West, they can basically do whatever they want, without a free and informed people to stop them.
They don’t really have Marxism anymore. They have the best (for them) of both systems: totalitarianism cum capitalism.