Tea at Trianon: Communism Never Cared about Your Factory

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, November 3, 2026

Communism Never Cared about Your Factory

From The Elegant Ruin:

In textbooks, and in the minds of the credentialed semi-literates who populate our universities, the difference between capitalism and communism comes down to a mode of production, that is, to who owns the means of production, private hands on one side and the state on the other. This schoolroom definition is so comfortable that even the enemies of communism repeat it without noticing that they are reciting the adversary's catechism, which is precisely what Gramsci would have called, with the smile of a man who won without firing a shot, hegemony.
The trouble is that total state ownership of the economy has never existed and never will, because it is an economic impossibility pure and simple. Ludwig von Mises demonstrated as much back in 1920, and the communists, after a few feeble kicks, never managed to refute him. That is exactly why, in every communist regime in history, a considerable slice of the economy remained in private hands. At first it lived in a clandestinity tolerated by governments that knew everything would collapse without it, and later it came out into the open under the name of perestroika or whatever euphemism the moment required.
Now, if real communism lives so comfortably alongside private capital, then the much-advertised collective ownership of the means of production was never more than a carrot dangling before the donkey, a hypnotic pretext for marching the faithful toward a paradise postponed unto the ages of ages. Broadly speaking, what these regimes always did was give up on the economy, which is untamable by nature, and concentrate on whatever could be controlled with little effort, namely parties, the press, schools, religion and cultural institutions. Master half a dozen channels and you master the whole of society without ever having to fix the price of bread. (Read more.)