The radicalism of tradition: community strength or venerable disguise and borrowed language?

An equation has often been made, especially but not exclusively by Marxists,between radicalism and the rational understanding of objective interests. I argue that, on the contrary, commitments to traditional cultural values and immediate communal relations are crucial to many radical movements, (a)because these commitments provide populations with the extent of internal social organization necessary to concerted, radical collective action, and (b) because the largely defensive goals of these movements must be radically incompatible with the introduction of modern capitalist-dominated social formations. Reformism is the characteristic stance of the modern working class, for both social and cultural reasons.