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INTRODUCTION 59

internal contradictions of bourgeois societies and the still contradictory character
of the ‘modernization’ solution. It locates resistance to change (which is
assumed, one-sidedly, to be good) in archaic residues and survivals, not in
contradictions and necessary popular struggles central to capitalist relations
themselves. At worst, allied to a New Left elitism, it points to the need for an
alternative intelligentsia, which may secure ‘the second bourgeois revolution’ or
technocratic revolution from above. This would be to reproduce the politics of
radical liberalism as well as its analyses. At best, acceptance of the analysis tends
to reduce socialist ambitions; like all good ‘social democrats’, we become mere
‘modernizers’.
Against this it is important to assert the need for a politics that is both popular
and socialist. This implies the need for analysis which takes popular movements
and a ‘lived’ popular culture as central sets of concerns. These popular
conceptions are the ground of socialist political practice; it is essential to
understand how they are formed. This is not a return to the simple populism of
the 1950s and 1960s; it is necessary to analyse the position of different
constituents of the popular—the working class, women, blacks, those relatively
removed from capitalist relations— and not to fuse all in ‘the people’. But for
these tasks the substantive accounts we have been discussing and the theories
informing them do seem positively disabling.