For Lenin, and the Russian Marxists, the analysis of reality was quite clear. Capitalism was established in Russia, and it was capitalism that explained the expropriation and exploitation of the small peasants and handicraft producers. It is what explained the differentiation of the peasantry into a proletariat and bourgeoisie. Capitalism was not characterised by the very large machine industries but also extended across the so called “people's industry”, and agriculture. The defining characteristic between the former and the latter was only that the more developed nature of the former, its greater efficiency and productivity, facilitated a more civilised exploitation of the workers.
But, having recognised this reality, the Marxists recognised that the response to it was the class struggle of the proletariat, and that class struggle applied to the capital employed in people's industry, and agriculture as much as to large-scale machine industry. Central to that class struggle, as Marx and Engels set out in the Communist Manifesto, is the property question. In other words, the historic mission of capital is to concentrate and centralise the small scattered means of production, and thereby to socialise production itself. On the basis of this socialised production, and cooperative labour, the process of competition leads to an increasing accumulation and further concentration and centralisation of capital. Ultimately, this leads to capital itself, as private property, being negated, as it is itself expropriated by socialised capital, in the form of the joint stock company and cooperative. The social function of the private capitalist comes to an end, and they are reduced to being mere coupon clippers. All that is left is for the “associated producers” to assert their right of democratic control over the socialised capital.
Instead, the Narodniks sought to deny the existence of capitalist relations in “people's industry”, and in the village. They sought to oppose them to the large scale capitalist enterprises, positing the former as bearers of an alternative path of development that avoided capitalism. And, the same applies to today's “anti-imperialists”. They seek to minimise discussion of the capitalist nature of the regime's and movements they associate with thereby giving “a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries” which is what Lenin, in the Draft Theses on The National and Colonial Questions said had to be resisted, and consequently, also, the even more grotesque exploitation of their workers, these regimes inflict. They align with these reactionary, backward forms of capital against the more advanced forms of capital represented by the multinational corporations, which are attacked for representing “imperialism”, as though this imperialism was something other than a more developed form of capitalism itself!
Like the Narodniks, therefore, whatever their intention, these “anti-imperialists” align with reaction against progress. They act as though, in the absence of established socialist societies, in the developed world, there were some other non-capitalist path to development that these economies could pursue. That is essentially the petty-bourgeois ideology that pervades Third Worldism, but can also be found in associated trends such as in the Green Movement, and movements based on the idea that “small is beautiful”. These similar, reactionary, petty-bourgeois ideas are also to be found amongst the “anti-capitalists”. Another expression of it was found amongst the proponents of Brexit.
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