The Convergence of Capitalism and Communism

In the eighteenth century, the harnessing of steam power, the rapid invention of labour-saving tools, and other related factors, came together in what historians call the Industrial Revolution, to give birth to the system of mechanized production in the modern factory. In the following century, this system and its theoretical advocacy in the writings of liberal economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, would both be dubbed capitalism by their critics. Those critics, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Robert Owen and Karl Marx, argued that capitalism led to an increasing and unjust gap between the richest and the poorest. They blamed this on the private ownership of the factories and mines and other means of industrial production and proposed that this be replaced with some form of communal ownership. Their models for communal ownership vastly differed from one another, but the general proposal of replacing private with public ownership in a modern, industrialized, economy was given the name socialism. When overtly allied with the forces of revolutionary destruction that had been attacking the Crowns and Churches of Christendom since the Puritan rebellion of the 1640s, as was the case with Marxism, it was called communism.

Many people have the idea that capitalism and communism are polar opposites and the mortal foes of each other. This was the prevailing view during the Cold War in which both the United States and the Soviet Union pointed to their belief that their own system was the best as a motivating factor in the conflict. The fall of the Soviet Union was seen as the ultimate victory for capitalism. So was the fact that the remaining large communist power, Red China, avoided a similar collapse and even thrived in the post-Cold War era, by incorporating elements of the market economy. Others, however, saw all of this in a different light. If China had incorporated elements of capitalism, most of the proposals Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had made in The Communist Manifesto for moving a capitalist society towards communism had long ago been adopted by the Western powers, including the United States. Dr. Tomislav Sunic summed up the alternative interpretation of the end of the Cold War when he wrote “Some European authors observed that communism died in the East because it had already been implemented in the West.” (Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, 2007, p. 34)

There were those who were prescient enough to see that capitalism and communism were heading towards a convergence rather than a conflict even before the Cold War began. In 1941, for example, James Burnham, who had resigned the previous year from the Trostkyite Socialist Workers Party, published a book entitled The Managerial Revolution, in which he maintained that capitalism was not a sustainable, permanent condition, nor was it likely to be replaced by socialism proper, but that it was undergoing a social revolution that would transform it into a managerial society, that is, a society governed by a new class of technocratic “managers.” Burnham further maintained that the same thing was going on around the world. The socialist countries were moving in the same direction as the capitalist countries. The new managerial class would include both corporate executives and state bureaucrats, with the distinction between the two becoming blurry even in nominally capitalist countries. Their cohesion as a class and their power would both be derived from their possession of the technical knowledge pertinent to the management of large corporate entities. George Orwell, who wrote a well-known critique of Burnham’s theory in 1945, also incorporated large elements of it into his dystopic novel 1984. The totalitarian system in the novel was widely interpreted as a depiction of the kind of society that existed in the Soviet Union at the time Orwell was writing, and to an extent this is true, although that better describes Animal Farm. In 1984 the totalitarian society is located in the then future of what was the capitalist world at the time of Orwell’s writing. It was one of three, more-or-less identical, superstates, governed by totalitarian managers. This was the future Burnham predicted, depicted in its most negative light.

Even before Burnham, however, Hilaire Belloc had predicted the convergence of capitalism and what he called collectivism, which was socialism or communism. Belloc, the son of a French father and an English mother, was a well-known writer of poetry, biography, history and social criticism in the first half of the twentieth century. Today he is most often remembered for his collaboration with G. K. Chesterton. Both men were devout, traditionalist, Roman Catholics, Belloc by upbringing and Chesterton by conversion, and together they promoted an alternative to capitalism that was called distributism. The gist of it was that capital property – the means of production – should be privately owned as in capitalism, but spread out among many private owners rather than concentrated in the hands of a few. Like their social criticism in general, the idea drew heavily from the 1891 papal encyclical Rerum Novarum which spoke out for the rights of the working class, while attacking socialism and defending private property.

The most important book Belloc wrote articulating distributism was The Servile State, which was first published in 1912. In this book, he describes capitalism as an unsustainable system that had overthrown the more stable order of Medieval, feudal, Christendom and which was evolving, not into its collectivist rival, but into “the servile state.” The “servile state” would be a new order that would include aspects of both capitalism and collectivism, although in reality it would essentially be a new form of slavery. It would be a system in which the majority of the population would be proletarian wage slaves, providing the labour for the factories of the capitalists when needed, and maintained by the state when not. The only alternative to this future, Belloc argued, was distributism, because collectivism would merely lead to the same future by an alternate path.

Belloc’s book enjoyed a resurgence in popularity among post-World War II conservatives who saw in it a prediction of the welfare state that had been put in place to combat the Depression just prior to the war. This was not a wrong interpretation of the book, since many of the specifics Belloc gave of what he expected the servile state to look like do indeed match up with the programs of the welfare state. It might have been premature to declare the predictions of the book to be fulfilled already back then, however, when we consider what we are facing in 2020. Remember that Belloc saw the “servile state” as the destination of both capitalism and collectivism (socialism/communism) and as a form of societal servitude similar to slavery which sounds very much like what we call “totalitarianism” today.

Earlier this year, almost every government in the world, imposed measures upon their populations which mimicked the conditions that had existed in the Soviet Union when it was at its worst. They shut down the Churches, they closed all businesses that they deemed to be “non-essential”, forbade people to meet in groups larger than ten, five, or even in some jurisdictions, two, and imposed all sorts of other restrictions as well. They justified all of this by saying that it was necessary to fight the spread of a new virus and the harsh respiratory disease that it can produce. This justification was always nonsense. This writer was among those who recognized this right from the beginning. We knew all along that this virus is asymptomatic among a large number of those who contract it, that most of those who do experience symptoms experience mild to moderate flu like symptoms and require no hospitalization, and that the harsh form of pneumonia that it can produce is fatal mostly among people who are both very old and have multiple complicating health problems. What the situation called for, was a special effort to protect those most at risk, not an insanely draconian effort to protect everyone by imposing a universal quarantine. The governments that went to that extreme, did so on the recommendations of the World Health Organization that was itself passing on recommendations coming from the last communist superpower, which is the country where the pandemic originated, Red China. Based on recommendations that came ultimately from Red China, we recreated the totalitarian conditions of the Soviet Union. We began policing people more strictly over absurd statutes about how far apart they must be than over actual, mala in se, crimes. We treated our basic freedoms of assembly, association and religion as if they meant nothing in the face of disease and were merely privileges that belong to the state to bestow and withhold as it sees best.

What did the capitalist corporations do while all this was going on?

They jumped on board the totalitarian train, that’s what they did. Instead of telling the governments to shove their restrictions up their backsides and sending their high-payed corporate lawyers to challenge the constitutionality of these regulations in court, they complied with every rule and restriction, knowing that these would harm small businesses far more than it would them, and became active propagandists for the “new normal.” They encouraged the transition to a cashless market, long the favourite of totalitarians of every stripe. They stuck messages telling us to “stay home” on billboards and in their commercials. Companies whose business pertains to the flow of information, such as corporate media and the big tech companies, suppressed dissent to the lockdown and the spread of information that would support that dissent.
The capitalists supported the imposition of communism!

We are now in the midst of the second wave of communism, this year, and true to form, the second wave is proving to be worse than the first. There was almost universal outrage over what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis. The anti-white, anti-cop, hate group, Black Lives Matter and the blackshirt thugs of Antifa took advantage of that fact to turn the incident into the casus belli for a race war. It began with the usual race riots of the sort that have been going on in the United States since the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. A protest in Minneapolis turned into a spree of vandalism, arson, looting, and violence, and the same sort of thing began happening in other cities around the United States, and then spread into Canada, the United Kingdom and Europe.

Then they kicked it up a notch. Politicians, civil servants, police officers, and every white person in sight, were expected to genuflect before the leaders of Black Lives Matter. Everybody in the public spotlight, especially those in offices of civil authority, in was expected to acknowledge that their country was guilty, both in the past and now, of “systemic racism” against blacks. “Systemic racism” is a concept of Critical Race Theory, itself an expression of Cultural Marxism. There was the demand to “defund” or “abolish” the police. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote: “Attacks on the police is an old communist tactic to eliminate law enforcement. The Bolsheviks successfully unleashed widespread attacks on the police leading up to the October Revolution.”


Then came the vandalism of statues and monuments – some of individuals who had owned slaves in the past, others of people who just happened to be prominent white historical figures, and even some ridiculously absurd cases people like Mahatma Gandhi – and the demand that all such monuments be removed and that streets and buildings named after these people be renamed. This attempt at erasing history, brings to mind the French Revolution, which similarly attempted to restart history afresh with “Year One.” The French Revolution, which itself took as its model Cromwell’s earlier rebellion in England, became the model for all subsequent communist revolutions. In Cambodia in 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over and declared it to be “Year Zero.” Read the history of the French Revolution and the Khmer Rouge while you are still able to do so. The former led to the “Reign of Terror” and the latter to the “Killing Fields.” This is not a pattern any sane group wishes to imitate.

Where are the corporate capitalists in this?

Again we find them, and again, especially the corporate media and the big tech companies, siding with the anti-white, race warriors. The corporate media has been telling everybody that the riots are just “peaceful protests” and that Black Lives Matter are just activists. They are also, of course, the ones who deliberately created the entire false narrative about institutional racism in the police force through their dishonest handling of the facts. Big tech has been suppressing dissent to this narrative, even more than it suppressed dissent to the COVID-19 narrative.

Capitalism and communism have converged into one, with the traits of the latter being the dominant ones.

Hilaire Belloc would not have been surprised.

The Tory and Socialism

Whereas the neoconservative, a species of liberal, embraces market capitalism in its liberal formulation and on a global scale, the Tory, the classical conservative who upholds royal and ecclesiastical authority as established by prescription with a calling to work together for the common good, accepts business and commerce in their market setting as human goods, but insists that these, like human freedom in general, are made possible by the context of the social and civil order, especially in a cultural atmosphere informed by the classical and Christian tradition. The Tory recognizes what Dr. Thomas Fleming calls “the one essential insight of free-market economics” which is “that human beings are more efficient at providing for their own needs than any set of other people could possibly be, no matter how enlightened.” (1) He also recognizes that liberalism has a tendency to make an idol out of the market, thus making for man a master out of what is properly his servant, and that when men begin to serve the market rather than the other way around – when they make decisions, for example, based upon what is “good for the market” – that the market then begins to undermine and erode, the social, civil, moral, and cultural, context that it requires in order to be a force for human good.


In the nineteenth century a rival to liberal capitalism arose in the form of socialism and the rivalry between the two systems soon came to so dominate the field of economics that one could hardly express an economic thought except in terms of either capitalism or socialism. If the Tory’s attitude towards market capitalism is one of a heavily qualified acceptance, his attitude towards socialism is that of a lightly qualified rejection.


Socialism was born in response to the changes wrought and economic conditions brought about by the Industrial Revolution. While some might see this as suggesting an affinity between the socialist and the Tory, who sees industrialism as being at best a mixed-blessing, there is far greater affinity between the socialist and the liberal. The Tory wistfully weighs what we have gained through industrialism against what we have lost, whereas the socialist, a progressive like the liberal, looks only forward to an industrialism organized according to his ideals rather than those of the liberal.


The ideal that historically defined socialism, was that of the communal or societal, collective ownership of productive property – farms, mines, factories, etc. Early forms of socialism envisioned this on a small scale, in the communes proposed by Robert Owen, and the workers-association ownership of factories advocated by the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels envisioned it on a much larger scale, that of the national society and eventually the world.


This was not the first time this ideal had been raised. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates and his interlocutors engage in the thought experiment of devising an ideal city and collective ownership is proposed for the governors and guardians of the city. Closer in time to the actual rise of socialism, Thomas More depicted a fictional island society that practiced communal ownership and other absurdities, to which he gave the name Utopia, meaning "no place".


It is an ideal upon which history has passed severe judgement. Communal ownership has been tried on numerous occasions. The only times it has worked have been when practiced by a small community, such as a Hutterite colony, within a larger society in which private ownership is the norm. Otherwise it has generally been practiced for a short time then abandoned when the experiment proved a failure, as was the case with the Puritan colony at Plymouth Rock in the 1620s. When attempted on the scale of a large national society, the results have been universally disastrous, as the record of Communism in the twentieth century bears out.


The Tory accepts history’s judgement on the results of the socialist ideal but looks deeper and weighs its assumptions as well. The obvious assumption underlying the ideal of communal ownership, is that private ownership by individuals or families is unjust. This was explicitly stated by the early socialists, most notably by Proudhon who famously declared “Property is theft!” The condemnation of private ownership is, of course, the very basis of Marxism, which quickly beat out its rivals to become the most influential of socialist theories. Marx taught that private ownership generates misery, by dividing men into unequal classes of “haves” and “have nots”, the former of which oppress the latter who must sell their labour to live.


The Tory has no sympathy with this perspective. Injustice and misery, he says, are not due to private ownership of property, nor can they be eliminated through communal ownership, for the same reason – they are part of the human condition - and while we obviously have a duty to ameliorate that condition to the best of our limited ability, such amelioration is to be sought through the traditional institutions of the social and civil order. The Tory is inclined to explain this in terms of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin (2) – that man presently lives in exile from Paradise which he cannot regain through his own efforts, an exile in which sin and its consequences are always present – whether he accepts the doctrine literally or only figuratively.


This was the basis of Canadian Tory Stephen Leacock’s arguments against socialism. Leacock, while mostly remembered as a humourist, was a trained economist who taught political economy at McGill University for almost four decades. A stern critic of the liberal doctrine of laissez-faire, in his “The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice”, (3) he rejected socialism as an acceptable alternative, declaring that “the attempt to establish it would hurl us over the abyss” and that “the frying pan is at least better than the fire.” He explains this judgement by the fact that socialism would require managers and workers alike to be angels rather than humans as they are, for placing complete control over the distribution of consumption goods in the hands of government managers can only lead to corruption on a much larger scale than already exists, and divorcing the workers’ share of that distribution from the concept of an exchange for labour can lead only to idleness, a problem which in turn can only be solved by force, leading to the conclusion that “socialism, in other words, is slavery.”


The Tory, in affirming that private ownership is not an injustice but a good that is essential to the social and civil order, accepts the wisdom of the ages represented in the classical and Christian traditions. At the same time Plato was speculating about collective ownership in The Republic, Aristophanes was demonstrating the absurdity of the idea in his play The Assemblywomen. In the Christian tradition, the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament contain two that protect property (4), and the Book of Acts, even in its description of the voluntary communal ownership of the early days of the Church in Jerusalem, places an affirmation of the rights of private ownership in the mouth of St. Peter as he condemns Ananias and Sapphira. (5)


Socialists and their sympathizers like to accuse businessmen of greed and to say that capitalism is driven by greed. Greed, in Christian moral theology, is Avarice, one of the Seven Deadly Sins. There is nothing inherently avaricious about business, or the market economy that facilitates it, however. The appetite for material acquisition is not itself Avarice, any more than the appetite for sex is Lust, or the appetite for food is Gluttony. These appetites are natural to mankind and humanity could not get along without them. They become their respective vices when taken to excess. The most that can be said against the market economy is that it contains no internal brakes on the appetite for acquisition to prevent it from becoming Avarice. These must be supplied by the cultural and moral traditions that the Tory sees as providing the necessary context for the market.


Lust, Gluttony, and Avarice are the three least of the Seven Deadly Sins, in the traditional ranking that we find in Dante’s Inferno and Purgatario. Far higher in that ranking is Invidia, or Envy, which is second only to Superbia, or Pride, with which it is associated. This is the sin of looking at those who have what you have not, and hating them for it, wishing to take it from them and ruin them, whether it benefits you or not. Envy is the very heart and soul and life-blood of socialism.


Even this, however, does not fully capture the Tory’s indictment of socialism, for it is not just that it embodies the second worst of the cardinal vices while accusing its rival of a lesser vice, and not entirely justly at that. In socialism, Envy hides its face behind the mask of Charity, the greatest of the Christian virtues, albeit in the debased contemporary sense of the word. Fortunately the mask frequently slips, and Envy can be recognized for what it is in the hate-filled rhetoric the socialist directs against business and businessmen.


This, then, is why the Tory must reject and condemn socialism, qualifying his rejection only by making it clear that we must not make the mistake of throwing out true charity and compassion, merely because socialism hides its envious face behind masks made in their image.



(1) Thomas Fleming, The Morality of Everyday Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), pp. 18-19. Fleming observes that this insight is not new with Adam Smith, but was noticed by Aristotle in ancient times.

(2) Anthony Burgess, in the second volume of his memoirs, explains that his being a “kind of Jacobite Tory, like John Dryden and Samuel Johnson” was due to the fact that “socialism was positivist and denied original sin.” You’ve Had Your Time: Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess, (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1990), p. 140.

(3) Stephen Leacock, “The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice”, which can be found, among other places, in Alan Bowker, ed., The Social Criticism of Stephen Leacock, (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1973), pp. 71-145.

(4) Three if we go by the Roman Catholic way of numbering the commandments.

(5) Acts 5:4.