Myths of totality

In its formative stage, a ‘movement’ always adopts the language of previous struggles. Still unable to define itself in terms of an identity of its own, the new collective actor uses the symbols, the organizational experience, and the forms of action of the movements that preceded it. Tradition can be used to convey new meanings (Burke 1969; Shils 1981; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) and this does not necessary imply that the collective actor is backward oriented, as some authors tend to think (see, for instance, Calhoun 1983). Thus the working-class movement spoke for longtime the language of the French Revolution before turning to socialism (Sewell 1980); in a similar way, the movements that arose in the 1960s drew on scholastic Marxism. While at that time Marxism itself was undergoing radical crisis, the movements' ideologues embarked on the doctrinaire revival of the most inflexible models of the Marxist vulgate. For example, the student movement of 1968 rediscovered Marxist doctrine, as preserved and reworked by the marginal cliques and the small sects that lay outside the mainstream of the Communist parties. The actors in new conflicts and movements resorted to an ironbound interpretation of doctrine and mechanically deduced rules of organization in order to define their identities and mark out their position with respect to their adversaries.