Month: October 2022

I found our discussion of the Old Left to be very thought provoking from last week’s class discussion. We were able to distinguish the difference between the Old Left and the Contemporary Left’s agendas and perspectives on social issues. We determined that the modern contemporary left prioritizes social rights issues such as LGBTQ and black rights, whereas the Old Left more so consisted of students who were concerned about classroom politics. It was interesting to unravel this generalizable youth phenomenon that took place around the sixties. We specifically talked about the importance of the Berkeley student movement and the irony in their “free speech” campaign. They claimed that they were advocating for free speech when they did not actually believe in free speech, they only thought their side could talk and they wanted to shut down any other opposing sides from expressing their views. I personally think that a movement cannot be successful without tolerating the constructive criticism of other perspectives. It is an ineffective and totalitarian agenda to try to shut down other groups’ freedom of speech. Furthermore, I think it is important to look at the generational conflicts that emerged during the formation and perpetuation of the Old Left. The view of these young leftists, which is still inherent to young generations today, was that they were on a mission and they knew more than their parents did. Their agenda was also fueled by a sense of anger and limited freedom they felt were constricted by the older generations.

For the reading that focuses on the student movements in the sixties, I immediately saw continuing themes from the last readings. The phrase agents of social or agent of transformation was brought up when the author was talking about C. Wright Mills, since he was relying on the intellectuals to be those agents of social change. (389) other phrases that I found in this reading were ‘makers of history” which I believe that was one of the principles of Marxism 

The concept of anti-Americanism is continued in this chapter, which we also talked a lot about in the previous class, that essentially anti Americanism is communism (Soviet Union) and anyone who favors that mentality. Intellectuals gravitate towards communism due to the alienation of their own society, that they feel they dont have a place in. 

In the reading, it says that the black student movement was a generational revolt. I had never thought of it in that way, but as I was asking myself why that was the case, later in the reading it said that the educated minority now had the means to “fight back” unlike the previous generation, who did not. 

In the section about martyrdom, that part at the end that says “there was the students alienation from the world..”(399) that connected intellectuals to the black led student movements (intellectuals are students)

The student movement in the U.S. as it reemerged in 1960 is the first topic covered in this reading. It was an effort to bring about a fundamental shift in American culture, student activists held protests around the state and tried out different lifestyles during the student movement. It had not yet seen the strategic importance of the civil rights movement’s fusion with its own generational fight. It was marked by all the generational mission, generational conflict, and student elitist characteristics that originated on the University of California campus in its search for a strategic issue. Numerous instances of student movements that addressed current global issues were provided throughout the reading, including the Mississipi Project, the Negro-Student Movement, and the Civil Rights Struggle. Feuer’s key argument about students and their movements is in regards to the students and their movements is that the movements were always a source of intellectual ferment on the campuses and had a sense of the drama of ideas. They exposed the typical college student and lecturer to current issues and global realities. They served as a pipeline for adolescence’s highest idealistic ambitions. They also served as a pipeline for generational revolt feelings at the same time. As a result, they tended to hold doctrines that were extremist, rejecting the liberal principles of the elders, and opting for destructive political tactics. Between 1905 and 1940, there was hardly a single accomplishment that the student movements could take credit for. The student civil rights movement and the older generation’s leadership frequently clashed. The student movements are said to have served as a noteworthy incubator for political initiative and action. But much too frequently, they exhausted their participants. The activist had a degree of excitement that he could not sustain for very long. According to him, student movements have always been filled with sentiment and ideology that sees them as the elegant creators of history.

The divide between the Old and New Left is another subject this reading touches on. The New Left was a large political movement that primarily existed in the 1960s and 1970s. It was made up of activists from the West who fought for a variety of social causes, including changes in drug laws, environmental protection, feminism, LGBT rights, and civil and political rights. The Old Left, on the other hand, is less concerned with social concerns including abortion, drug use, feminism, LGBT rights, gender norms, immigration, and the elimination of the death penalty. Feuer made the point of how the student civil rights movement came repeatedly into conflict with the leadership of the older generation, in this case the students being the new left and the older generation being the old left. The New Left differed in one basic respect from the Old; more elitist, disenchanted with the working class, looking elsewhere to satisfy its needs for a populist identification, it was prepared, if need be, to look finally to the intellectuals themselves. It also rose predominantly out of an “affluent society” and moreover out of a relatively stable system; it therefore tended, when it was thought critically, to do so in moralistic rather than economic terms. The New Left also was an indicator of the pattern.

Questions:

1. Is there anything that the young intelligentsia could have done to avoid the clash with the older generation? What could the intellectuals have done better to avoid the clash with the older generation?

2. Can the Old left be described as the current right?

What stood out to me the most from our conversation in last week’s class was the bizarre self identification associated with the intellectual class. It surprised me that they see themselves as a subset of the working class. When I think of someone who is an intellectual I immediately associate them with the bourgeoisie. I think this misconception comes from the fact that typically intellectuals are extremely well educated and to me having access to higher levels of education is a sign of privilege. Also intellectuals often hold powerful positions in society and determine how society should be governed. This further made me think that they are associated within some subset of the bourgeoisie. In reality they consider themselves to be subset members of the proletariat class. This could be because of their view that workers are the agents of political change. It interested me that some intellectuals have opposing views on what to do with workers. Some think that they should directly involve themselves and even encourage a revolution from the working class. These intellectuals think that workers are so diluted by bourgeoisie capitalist power that they can’t help themselves without a vanguard to show them the way. They want to go along and push the process ahead. Some intellectuals go as far as having the desire to fight on the battlefield alongside their worker allies. Other intellectuals isolate themselves and think that only the workers are the ones capable of creating change. Some even think that intellectuals themselves are a part of the problem in society and society should be run by workers. This relates to our discussion of utopia and how intellectuals have different views on how we can achieve a utopian society through the working class.

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.

In the Paul Hollander reading something I found interesting was the relationship between the intellectuals and their affinity for Joseph Stalin. In the reading Hollander stated two general propositions that explain the durable attraction of communist dictators. The first was the profound ignorance of the personalities, policies, and intentions of these dictators and the second was a remarkable capacity for projection and wishful thinking on the part of many intellectuals (of all human beings) for attributing qualities they highly value to individuals they were disposed to admire. Throughout the reading it seemed like all of the intellectuals who had something to say about Stalin talked about how well they were treated when the met him and raved about his character while ignoring what he was actually doing as the leader of the Soviet Union which lines up with the first proposition that Hollander stated about the profound ignorance of the personalities, policies, and intentions of dictators. This made more sense when we talked about in class how french intellectuals became communists because of their feeling of emptiness in their vocation of intellectuals because a good amount of the intellectuals who commented on Stalin in the reading were french intellectuals. This also poses the question of, do these french intellectuals that advocated for Stalin believe that he could make utopia possible in this world because we learned in class that communist believe utopia is possible in this world. Also, now that Stalin is no longer alive, do they still believe that they can achieve utopia without him?