There is a simpler paradigm than that which you offered: greed for the power to control while they advance their agenda: to use government to control the means of production, by any means, whether democratic (by virtue of mass media and control of education), by fiat (the courts), or by a police state (once they get control). First and Third world leftists differ not at all in that regard.
First world leftists simply find using government to control the market a convenient way to assure a predictable return on investment. It keeps those nasty competitors in check. First world leftists, while disavowing violence by any means, somehow manage to starve their populations by by "incompetent central planning," foment wars in the third world, or foist environmental policies (such as banning DDT), all resulting in millions of deaths. Don't think for a minute that it's by accident. It's been done repeatedly since the starvation of the kulaks by Lenin.
Note the progress of communism by democratic means, "for the little people" and then kill them later. Win that first election and then assure that there will never be another.
To try to "understand" leftists by any logic other than "whatever is good for me" is a gruesome mistake.
First world leftists simply find using government to control the market a convenient way to assure a predictable return on investment. It keeps those nasty competitors in check. First world leftists, while disavowing violence by any means, somehow manage to starve their populations by by "incompetent central planning," foment wars in the third world, or foist environmental policies (such as banning DDT), all resulting in millions of deaths. Don't think for a minute that it's by accident. It's been done repeatedly since the starvation of the kulaks by Lenin.
I continue to see 180 degrees of difference between the two, if not in the size of government they advocate, then in other aspects of their philosophy.
No First World Leftist regime, however doctrinaire, can bring itself to have a large military establishment or to endorse or encourage patriotism. Third World Leftists have no such hatred for their country/culture and no pacifism. However naked the power of the First World Leftist regime, it is never going to tell its citizens to feel proud but rather seeks to fill them with guilt.
I simply do not classify ideological movements by the amount of government they advocate. There are Leftists who are anarchists (even as they admire Castro) and authoritarians on the Right. In fact, both Left and Right are a spectrum running from total to no government, yet each is bound by something else. Left anarchists love Left totalitarians and hate Right anarchists, and Right anarchists (to whom John Ashcroft was a "jack-booted thug") sing the praises of Pinochet, Franco, Salazar, and Papadopoulos while bitterly opposing Left anarchists. Clearly the "size of government" theory of the political spectrum simply is not adequate.
Again, recall the "Indo-fascism" thread. While militant Inca nationalists and self-hating American and Canadian Leftists may share a belief in a large redistributive government, do you really think the Incan nationalists are flagellating themselves about the "crimes" of their ancestors or clamoring for the disarming of their people, or even calling for the abandonment of the ancestral religion in favor of Marxian atheism?
BTW, I've been following links from the Yockey article I referenced earlier and this stuff just keeps getting weirder and weirder. This notion of organic nationality or race being the be-all and end-all of the universe (aside from being a form of materialist/scientific, specifically biochemical and genetic, determinism) is simply so similar to the Leftist cult of "indigenousness" and the idea of "the West" as alien violater of sacred soil that it isn't even funny! Sheesh!
Somewhere on the Net I read about a bizarre little group whose motto was "Mao and Hitler united in struggle." As time passes, this may become more and more of a reality . . . and perhaps even explicitly so.
Are American Leftists inflaming the American people with a sense of fanatical nationalism? Are they appealing to traditional notions of American ethno-cultural identity by appealing to an alien enemy (a "foreign devil") who must be crushed? Are they advocating a huge military establishment or even that Americans arm themselves and fight their oppressors?
Leftism of the Third World type is a form of self-assertion. First World Leftism is a form of self-hatred. If the ideology of the two is actually identical (over and above "big government" and "wealth redistribution"), then why doesn't the American Left use the same militant nationalism and patriotism as its ideological justification in America that it does in the Andes? Even certain lilly-white, historically chr*stian European groups (the Celts and Basques) embrace a Third World style, militant, nationalist, ultra-patriotic Leftism. It's obviously much easier to come to power this way, flattering your constituency instead of continually slapping them around and telling them how evil they are. Why doesn't the Left do that here? Shoot, even Canadian Leftism has a dose of patriotic nationalism in it.
I believe that America, like the Jews, is hated as an "unnatural," "inorganic," or "rootless" nation. The whole Guevara/Yockey ideological spectrum is based on the claims of indigenousness and mystical connection to the soil. Maybe the "international American" is the stranger and the alien among a planet of "natives," as the Jews are treated as being?
PS: I do admit it is interesting to contemplate how early on Russian nationalism began to play an important role in Communism. The original Bolsheviks could hardly celebrate a country and culture they were trying to remake, yet Russian national interests became the absolute backbone of Communist ideology, and Russian Communists even came to defend pre-Communist Czarist imperialism in order to stake a Russian claim on its former imperial territories.