Today’s Convergence of Political Systems

In the 1960s and 1970s, a fashionable idea, at least among the Western intelligentsia, was the convergence between socialism (read: communism) and capitalism. Even less obvious than today was the true distinction between, on one side, a regime of individual and private choice and, on the other side, a system of collective and political choice. Most people believed instead that the main line of fracture was between capitalism (i.e., the Right and the United States) and communism (i.e., the Left and the Soviet Union). Few saw that the convergence going on was about the supremacy of collective choices (whether of the Left or the Right) swallowing up the (classical liberal) philosophy of individual choices.

At that time (in illo tempore), a whole literature developed on the convergence of capitalism and communism. In Gregory Grossman’s Economic Systems (Prentice Hall, 1967), I just reread what I then underlined (pp. 112-113):

In the past, these kinds of planning and steering were instituted too rigidly in the East and perhaps too loosely in the West; some future convergence on this plane is not at all unlikely. (The already-mentioned considerable similarity between French and Yugoslav planning may be a case in point; they are, so to say, on the frontiers of capitalism and socialism, respectively.) …

While the Soviet-style East moves towards less rigid economic control by central authorities, and while the West is searching for more effective forms of social control, both sides are beginning to look forward seriously to the problems of higher productivity.

(In the roaring sixties, many believed that people could be totally free if the state were absolutely powerful, an idea recently rediscovered by a couple of economists who went on to win a Nobel prize.)

Forward to the present, the convergence has been progressing much faster, albeit not less stealthily. America has joined the race with a vengeance. A column of Greg Ip in the Wall Street Journal makes the point in different terms (“The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics,” August 11, 2025); the whole piece is worth reading, but a couple of quotes will give its flavor:

A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s. Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China. …

This isn’t socialism, in which the state owns the means of production. It is more like state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.

Of course, even from a narrow economic viewpoint, the pursued primacy of collective choices remains as much an illusion as it was more than half a century ago. Greg Ip notes:

Chinese state capitalism isn’t the success story it seems. Barry Naughton of the University of California, San Diego has documented how China’s rapid growth since 1979 has come from market sources, not the state.