The Opium of the Intellectuals

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?

In Hollander’s Intellectuals, the chapter begins with countless numbers of praises towards Stalin. Yet, given our current understanding of him and the Soviet Union under his rule, Stalin was a person “foreign to the very experience of love, without pity or mercy” and had an insatiable thirst for power. The praises all come from intellectuals, both western and within the Soviet Union, during Stalin’s time. 

Hollander claims that the two general reasoning behind western intellectuals’ worshiping of Stalin and other dictators are: 

1. Western intellectuals tend to have a “profound ignorance of the personalities, policies, and intentions” of them (p.120).
2. Western intellectuals had both the tendency and capacity to project qualities that they themselves value to others that they “were disposed to admire” (p.120).

While Hollander claims that these intellectuals admired cruel dictators like Stalin because of their ignorance of the dictator’s actual personality, I feel that there could be another huge reason behind this, giving the intellectuals the benefit of the doubt on their intellectual abilities. A possible explanation is that the dictators were able to control the flow of information out of the country. In an age without the internet, the only way that these western intellectuals could know about the reality under the ruling of the dictator was through other people’s reports or visiting the dictator’s nation. In both scenarios, they could be presented with false information, but they would have no way of verifying this information. Even when one visited the USSR, he or she would not ever see the whole reality. From my understanding, this really shows how powerful it is to have control over the media. Even in the modern day, with fact checks, we see so many people believing “fake news.” But, ultimately, philosophically speaking, how does one really know if what he knows is true? This again gets to an idea that came up during my conversation with Prof. Riley – under the Marxist view, the concept of truth is seen as a tool that the ruling class use to suppress and exploit the proletariats. Then, maybe psychologically, since one can never be sure of the truth, or a truth, one is inclined to believe in what one wishes to be the truth. This reasoning is present in Hollander’s chapter, and also we can see this is today’s social media – echo chambers, as some call them.

As for Duranty, I feel that he is quite hypocritical: he seemed to really “believed in the cause,” but he personally lived in Russia as a privileged individual. This is quite ironic to see that so many – the vast majority of people – are still being ripped off by the ruling class, under the name “socialism”; the goal to fully achieve socialism was to free every man so that we can all live under better conditions, yet in these actual implementations of socialism in USSR, femine and aristocracy showed that the Soviet socialism is no better than capitalism.

In reflection to the intellectuals praises of Stalin, I feel it is probably very hard to really know what really prompted these intellectuals to, whether intentionally or not, ignore the reality that they may or may not have seen. In Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, one conclusion is that people behave quite differently while in crowds. The moment one defines them as part of a popular group, they could act very differently than when they are alone. I suspect that this is also part of human nature: a revolutionary feature that might benefit the survival of humans as a species by enabling us to have this special “group” mindset. And, thus, when people are really in situations similar to that of the USSR under Stalin, they might be doing things they don’t expect themselves to do.

Furthermore, the admiration of Stalin by western intellectuals may also be influenced by their own political beliefs and ideologies. Many of these intellectuals were likely sympathetic to the Marxist ideology, and thus saw Stalin as a leader who was implementing their ideals on a national level. This may have led them to overlook or dismiss reports of human rights abuses and other atrocities committed by Stalin’s regime, and to view Stalin as a hero and leader of the Marxist cause.

Additionally, it is worth considering the role of propaganda and manipulation in shaping the perceptions of western intellectuals towards Stalin. Stalin’s regime was highly skilled at using propaganda and censorship to control the flow of information within the country and to the outside world. This allowed the regime to present a highly sanitized and idealized version of life in the Soviet Union, and to suppress any information that did not align with this narrative. As a result, western intellectuals who visited the Soviet Union or relied on reports from the regime were likely to be presented with a distorted view of reality.

In conclusion, the admiration of Stalin by western intellectuals may be driven by a combination of factors, including ignorance of his true nature, idealization of communist ideology, and the effects of propaganda and manipulation. These factors may have led these intellectuals to overlook or dismiss reports of human rights abuses and other atrocities committed by Stalin’s regime, and to view him as a hero and leader of the Marxist cause. But among these factors, the most important one might be that these intellectuals themselves are willing to believe that Communism will succeed.

Last night’s class session deepened my understanding of the piece by Judt and Hollander. During our discussion I got clarification on the intellectuals’ self-abnegation with the working class. The intellectuals wanted to align themselves with the working class, as then they could be less critical. The intellectuals idealizing the working class comes from a basic understanding of human relationships. As human beings we like to find individuals or groups that we can associate ourselves with because they have all the right values and good qualities. This can be likened to hero worship which is seen in athletes, entertainers, and for this course politics. 

When we mentioned hero worship for athletes, this caught my attention. Oftentimes we put athletes on this pedestal and want to be them and expect them to perform at the highest level at all times, and fail to recognize that they are also human. Recently, athletes have been advocating for their mental health and some have taken a step back from competing. These athletes are then criticized by the media, and sometimes portrayed as a failure. I think that with hero worship of athletes, we forget that they can struggle and cannot be perfect all the time. 

In the piece that I introduced last night by Hollander, a reason as to why intellectuals were fascinated with Stalin was because of hero worship although slightly different context from professional athletes’ “flaws”. They refused to recognize the human suffering or the planned famines. By ignoring Stalin’s mistreatment of citizens, these intellectuals were able to view Stalin as a leader who ignited social and political change as well as industrialized an underdeveloped country. 

Although some intellectuals thought Stalin provided a power revolution, others believed that they were barriers to the working class overthrowing the bourgeoisie. I thought that this was interesting that intellectuals wanted to align with the working class, yet could by definition be considered elite. These individuals were getting paid by the wealthy to have a profession of discovering the “truth” in their respective field. I find this situation to be ironic, much like Communism being considered a quasi-religion.

At the end of class we started to discuss how Communism could be considered to be a quasi-religion. A reason that many of the intellectuals idealized Stalin and Communism was because they felt empty in their own class. This is similar to how many religious individuals turn to God because they are able to believe in power higher than them and the religious community brings them fulfilling relations. These intellectuals who idealized Communism always had a response to any criticisms. There was always a justification to support the idea. I thought that this was an interesting perspective of Communism. I believe that not many other courses at Bucknell that talk about Communism would refer to it in this way. I think this is part of my appeal to this course because intellectuals and other topics of the class are discussed in a new manner that changes my perspective.