After reading the Feuer chapter on “The New Student Left of the Sixties” it became so clear as to the amount of overlap between different socialist and communist movements. As we discussed in our last class at the very end, the reason Leninist intellectuals took power was that they felt that they needed to push the working class peasants in the direction of revolt. The working class simply does not have the means of education or knowledge to even comprehend such a thing or to know they could be the root of change in a society, therefore they need assistance from the intellectuals in order to reach their fullest potential. This is exactly the case of the New Student Left movement. Specifically when Feuer discusses the student movement taking interest in the black movement for civil rights, especially black students. Feuer quotes black Americans as being “lowliest of Americans”, similar to the way Lenin describes the proletariat in the Soviet system. The white intellectual students, disgruntled with their current life status and American society in general, are looking to turn their efforts in order to help those who are “lesser” rise up to their fullest potential.
What I think is interesting that Feuer points out is that the Black community in America was not looking for support from the white intellectual students. They were content with the way American society was being run and were ultimately conservative in their political views (Feuer pg. 396). The Black Student Movement was simply aiming to declare equal rights and to overcome the stereotypes plaguing their community at the time. I can imagine this is exactly the case in Soviet Russia; the intellectuals were looking for an oppressed group to grab onto to push their own agenda vicariously through.