Lenin notes that the Narodnik ideology as a petty-bourgeois ideology, based on the interests of the small producers, was “in principle” hostile to liberalism, and yet, precisely because it was a petty-bourgeois ideology, was, in practice, close to liberalism. And, the same is true with today's petty-bourgeois moral socialists. “In principle”, they are hostile to “liberalism” or “neoliberalism”, but their petty-bourgeois ideology means that, in practice, they are close to it. It is only nuanced by what particularly type of liberalism they are close to. Liberalism has come to be equated with democracy, whereas these are two entirely different concepts. Indeed, Hayek quotes Lord Acton to argue that liberty may be better defended by a benevolent despot than by any democracy. Liberalism, really means, as Marx frequently pointed out, in relation to Bentham, freedom to trade, freedom to own property, and freedom to exploit labour. For the small capitalist, any real, even bourgeois democracy is anathema to all these freedoms.
For all of the small capitalists and the movements that represent their interests, the benevolent despot, the clerical regime, the Bonapartist is often seen as the best guarantor of their “liberty”. It is only for the large-scale, socialised capital, and the masses of fictitious capital, that is developed as derivatives from it, that the bourgeois-democratic republic, and the social-democratic state becomes the best form of political regime, and guarantor of its “liberty”.
Stalinism framed everything in terms of the global strategic conflict between it and imperialism, for which read the US. The vehicle for imperialist expansion was the multinational corporation. So, Stalinism framed a world view, in this context, to fit its objectives. The Third World Movement was a product of that world view and global strategy. But, it also frames the world view of Stalinists globally, including within developed economies. So, Stalinism creates the petty-bourgeois ideology of hostility to the large company and multinational. In the same way that it proposes “anti-imperialist” alliances and movements with petty-bourgeois nationalists, in developing economies, so it proposes “anti-monopoly alliances” with the same kind of petty-bourgeois layers in developed economies. It is the basis for the creation of cross-class Popular Fronts.
For many of the larger groups on the Left, in the post-war period, and particularly from the 1960's on, when some of these groups expanded within the ranks of industrial workers and students, they were always in competition with the Stalinists, whose organisations were bigger, had been around for longer, as well as being financed by Russia. So, frequently, when these groups saw that they risked losing some of their periphery or even militants, they tacked towards the Stalinists. The change of position of Left groups, in Britain, in the 1970's, towards the Stalinist position of opposition to the EEC is a case in point.
In the same way that Lenin argues that the petty-bourgeois nature of the Narodniks meant that they were increasingly drawn towards the Liberals, so the petty-bourgeois nature of these Left groups drew them towards the politics of Stalinism, at the same time that the petty-bourgeois nature of Stalinism drew it towards the reactionary politics of the small capitalists, the proponents of the nation state and nationalism.
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