The second fundamental feature of Narodism was the idea of Russian exceptionalism. The Narodniks continued to praise Marx and Engels analysis, and profess their adherence to it, whilst simultaneously ignoring it and claiming that it did not apply to Russia. They could not show why it did not apply to Russia by using Marx's scientific method to demonstrate that material conditions in Russia were different, and so could only make this argument by utilising the idealist and subjectivist sociological methods that preceded it. Similarly, today, the petty-bourgeois socialists and moralists continue to praise Marx and Engels, whilst totally rejecting their method.
In the case of the social-democrats that is not surprising, and for most of them even the feint praise for Marx is of the damning kind. But, most of those who claim to be Marxist are no such thing. The reasons for that were alluded to earlier. The Stalinists are nothing but social-democrats, whose Marxist verbiage is used as cover for their grotesque perversion. And, many of the Trotskyists are, in fact, simply petty-bourgeois moralists whose idealist and subjectivist positions derive from the Third Camp of the Petty-bourgeoisie, as Trotsky described it. As for the rest of the Trotskyist sects their petty-bourgeois socialism derives from years of competing for recruits with the Stalinists and other Left Social Democrats, as well as focusing their recruitment drive and activity within the wholly petty-bourgeois social milieu of student politics.
“The Narodniks bowed and scraped to the authors of this analysis and—calmly continued to remain romanticists of the same sort as these authors had all their lives contended against. Again, this doctrine of Russia’s exceptionalism, which is shared by all the Narodniks, far from having anything in common with the “heritage,” runs directly counter to it. The “sixties,” on the contrary, desired to Europeanise Russia, believed that she should adopt the general European culture, were concerned to have the institutions of this culture transferred to our anything but exceptional soil. Any doctrine that teaches that Russia is exceptional is completely at variance with the spirit and the tradition of the sixties.” (p 518)
And, its not just that today's petty-bourgeois socialists adopt this position, in terms of their “anti-imperialism”, Its seen in their “anti-capitalism”, the hostility to monopoly and the most developed forms of capital. It takes the form of seeking higher taxation of the largest corporations, reaching for windfall taxes on them as the solution to every new situation, and so on, which must hold back their more rapid development, accompanied by reactionary demands to support and subsidise smaller capitals with special measures, the most comprehensive form of which is welfarism, which enables these small, backward capitals to pay low wages, fail to provide education and training, and so on. All of that takes the place of a revolutionary perspective of seeking the most rapid development of large-scale socialised capital, and for the workers to collectively struggle for control over it.
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