Crimestop

Left-wing anti-intellectualism is terrifying, mainly because it's a form of self-hatred. You get it from people who have a university or even a post-graduate education themselves, but are kind of ashamed of it. They've rejected the Marxist/Luxembourgeois idea of "bringing workers and science together" - instead, they agree with the reactionaries and fascists that resentment, prejudice, gut feelings, "positive thinking" and being motivated by "boomer memes" is how you build a political community. They see the impact of atomisation, alienation, the downgrading of education and the continuous shitting in the meme pool of the media classes over decades, and they think: this is a good thing. People who see the world like this this are better, nobler, than all the "Professional Middle Classes" with their facts and logic. It's been a while since I read Perdido Street Station but it makes me think of Lin's people (is that the right character? the cockroach-head lady?) who thought that sentience was a kind of sin.

The Left-wing anti-intellectual populists want the same kind of public as Trump or Brexit has - there's our Red-Brown convergence again - which is in fact the kind of thing that George Orwell was satirising more than 70 years ago.

"A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, CRIMESTOP. CRIMESTOP means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body." - Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Electoral contests are increasingly won by "boomer memes", winning a struggle of disinformation, and appealing to people's worst instincts. The anti-intellectual Left think they can use the tools of Trumpism/Brexit to seize control over the state and thence establish social justice in a top-down manner. (They look at all the histories of how social democracy winning control of the capitalist state has been a Pyrrhic victory at best, and they think - that won't happen to us, because we're real socialists, not sellouts!) This has nothing to do with the Marxist tradition of the working class self-organizing and seizing power, which requires the widest possible solidarity combined the widest possible spread of scientific/rational habits of thought among the class. The Conservative Left view that socialism can be built using the same tools - leadership cultism, appeals to prejudice, nationalism, sneering anti-intellectualism - that brought the populist Right to power is not only wrong, it is dangerous, and the Left in the tradition of Marx, Luxemburg, and the best of the anarchist tradition - the Internationalist, Do-It-Yourself, No-Gods-No-Masters Left - has to draw a line of freakin' blood against it.