IMPERIALISM AND ITS COLLABORATORS WANT TO ERASE REVOLUTION, SOCIALISM, AND THE ARMED LIBERATION STRUGGLE OF PEOPLES EVEN FROM OUR MINDS.
THEY WILL NEVER SUCCEED!
BECAUSE THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD HAVE SEEN THAT SOCIALISM CAN DEFEAT CAPITALISM.
BECAUSE THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD HAVE LEARNED TO THINK WITH DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM AND HAVE GRASPED IT AS A GUIDE TO ACTION ON THE ROAD TO THEIR OWN LIBERATION!
Abdullah Öcalan stated that he not only dissolved the PKK and burned the weapons, but that they also wanted to erase weapons even from people’s minds.
At the same point of convergence, AKP fascism expressed the same idea in the report of the “process commission” it prepared: “Not only laying down arms physically, but also abandoning them in hearts and minds…”
Imperialism, the collaborator oligarchy, and the Kurdish nationalist movement all strike the same point: To erase armed struggle even from the consciousness of the people!
Why is it so important to erase socialism and armed struggle from people’s minds?
1. Socialism continues to be a source of hope for all peoples by proving that capitalism can be defeated.
2. As long as socialism lives in the minds of the people through a scientific mode of thinking, revolutionary potential will always exist.
And this is a constant danger for imperialism and its collaborators.
From the perspective of imperialism, the effort to erase revolution, revolutionary thought, and socialism from minds is not a simple propaganda activity; it is a class-based and historical necessity.
Because socialism is not merely a change of government; it represents an ideology, a way of thinking and acting. Therefore, for imperialism, the greatest danger is not only socialism coming to power, but its continued existence as something thinkable for the people.
The final verdict of dialectical materialism is clear:
What cannot be erased from thought cannot be erased from history.
That is, revolutions are still a very real and imminent danger for them, and a very concrete, achievable reality — an inevitable future — for the peoples.
To erase revolution, revolutionary struggle, and socialism even from minds is an imperialist program.
Why Is Socialism the Nightmare of All Imperialists?
Why Do They Want to Erase Socialism From Minds — Historically, Politically, Ideologically, Culturally, and Emotionally?
They are trying to erase revolution, revolutionary struggle, and socialism not only from the political arena, but also from consciousness, culture, and emotions.
Because socialism is not merely a way of thinking. Therefore, the war waged against socialism is not a “war of ideas,” but a dialectical conflict between material production relations and the forms of consciousness produced by those relations.
Imperialism’s fear of socialism rests on historical and class necessities.
Let us list them:
1) HISTORICAL REASONS
- According to historical materialism, history is not the history of individuals’ ideas, but of modes of production and class struggles. Hence Marx says: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”Lenin defines imperialism as the highest and final stage of capitalism. In this stage, crises deepen, and socialism emerges as the historical solution to these crises.
- In colonies and semi-colonies, socialism merged with national liberation struggles. This directly threatened the historical interests of imperialist centres. Therefore, imperialism fights not only socialist states, but also the historical memory of socialism.
- Socialism was born from the internal contradictions of the capitalist mode of production—from capitalism’s own womb.
- The October Revolution of 1917, the first proletarian power, materially proved for the first time that:
- The means of production can be socialized.
- The ruled can become the rulers.
- The working class can seize power and establish its own state.
- For imperialism, this was not merely a change of power, but proof that peoples can change the direction of history.
For this reason, imperialism does not only aim to defeat socialism, but to erase it historically from minds.
2) POLITICAL REASONS
- According to Marxism, the state is not a neutral structure standing above society, but an instrument of oppression of the ruling class.
- Socialism:
- Targets the monopoly of the ruling classes over the state and exposes the class character of the bourgeois state.
- Defines the state as a historical apparatus that must wither away.
- Imperialism, on the other hand:
- Controls nation-states through chains of dependency.
- Subordinates political decisions to the needs of capital.
- Revolutionary politics transforms peoples from the ruled into rulers—this is unacceptable for imperialism.
- Imperialism seeks to maintain relations of dependency on a global scale; socialism defends political independence and popular sovereignty.
- Revolutionary politics turns the masses from passive citizens—whose thinking, reflexes, and abilities have been dulled—into a conscious, organized class fighting for its own independence and power.
This is the greatest obstacle to imperialist objectives.
Therefore socialism is not only suppressed, but also portrayed as a “utopia,” a “failure,” or a “dictatorship” in order to strip it of political legitimacy and isolate it from the people. - In the political arena, imperialism:
- Criminalizes socialism and labels it terrorism.
- Declares it illegitimate.
- Attempts to neutralize it through armed and unarmed reformism.
3) IDEOLOGICAL REASONS
- Dialectical materialism views consciousness as the product of material living conditions, and also as a historical force.
- Bourgeois ideology:
- Naturalizes capitalism.
- Declares the system of exploitation “without alternative.”
- Makes exploitation invisible through neo-colonial tricks and reformism.
- Socialist ideology:
- Exposes neo-colonial deception and tears away the veil placed over the people’s eyes.
- Reveals surplus value exploitation.
- Explains the structural nature of inequality.
- Exposes all military, ideological, cultural, political, and economic attacks of the bourgeoisie.
- Dialectical materialism rejects idealism and metaphysics and understands the world as a totality of material relations that can be changed.
- Imperialist ideology attempts to portray capitalism as natural, inevitable, and compatible with human nature.
- Therefore, imperialism does not merely present socialism as “wrong,” but seeks to make even thinking about it “dangerous,” using torture, prisons, massacres, fear, and the implantation of idealism into minds.
4) CULTURAL REASONS
- Culture, as Marx defined it, is part of the superstructure, but plays a central role in reproducing class domination.
- The imperialist culture industry:
- Glorifies individualism.
- Naturalizes competition as a way of existence.
- Attempts to turn consumption into identity, replacing meaning and value.
- Socialism, culturally:
- Defends solidarity,
- Collective labor,
- A shared future,
- And places class consciousness at the center.
- Therefore socialism is:
- Turned into dystopia in bourgeois cinema,
- Presented as taboo in education,
- Caricatured in cinema, literature, media, and schools in order to demoralize the people and revolutionaries.
5) EMOTIONAL REASONS
- No domination is sustained by force alone; emotions are also governed. Emotions are not spontaneous—they are class-based.
- Imperialism produces:
- Fear (hunger, unemployment, precarity, futurelessness),
- Loneliness (individualism),
- Hopelessness (“this system never changes”).
- Socialism:
- Creates hope,
- Organizes hope,
- Produces collective self-confidence and courage,
- Creates belief in collective liberation,
- Keeps alive the feeling that “another world is possible.”
- This is dangerous for the rulers: fearful masses are governed, hopeful masses act.
6) CLASS REASONS
- At the core of all these headings lies class struggle.
- Imperialism represents:
- International bourgeoisie,
- Finance capital,
- Monopolies.
- Socialism represents:
- The historical interests of the working class,
- The liberation of oppressed peoples,
- A classless, exploitation-free society.
- Therefore socialism—the only path to liberation for the peoples—is a great danger for imperialism.
TO SUM IT UP
The effort to erase socialism from minds is, in fact, an admission—on the side of imperialism—of socialism’s historical and political power.
According to dialectical materialism, contradictions cannot be suppressed; they can only be postponed. No form of domination is eternal or indestructible. When relations of production fail to develop the productive forces, they will inevitably change and evolve into the next society. That is to say, revolution is an inevitable reality, and armed struggle is the only option.
The crisis of capitalism is structural; in other words, capitalism means crisis. As the crisis deepens, socialism comes onto the agenda again and again.
Because socialism is not an idea, but the necessary outcome of material conditions of life.
From the standpoint of historical materialism, what is certain is this: As long as peoples are exploited, socialism will be thought of; and as it is thought of, it will be reborn. As the material conditions of the peoples change, even if the idea of socialism is suppressed, it will inevitably re-emerge.
THE AIM AND METHODS OF IMPERIALISM IN ITS ATTEMPT TO ERASE SOCIALISM FROM MINDS
From the standpoint of imperialism, it is not enough to massacre revolutionaries, imprison them, isolate them, or label them as terrorists. It seeks to erase socialism even from minds, and to prevent it from being mentioned even as a possibility. As Marx put it:
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.”
For this reason, let us explain imperialism’s ideological attacks not in the realm of “independent ideas,” but in terms of the reproduction of material relations of production.
Historical materialism understands history as the movement of modes of production and the class struggles within them. Socialism is the necessary product of the internal contradictions of capitalism.
Marx and Engels state this clearly in the Communist Manifesto:
“The bourgeoisie produces its own grave-diggers.”
This is a historical determination.
The October Revolution of 1917 demonstrated that socialism was not only theoretically possible, but historically realizable. Lenin defined this rupture as follows:
“The chain of capitalism broke at its weakest link.”
This historical experience is an unacceptable fact from the standpoint of imperialism, because it proved that capitalism is a historically finite mode of production. Therefore, imperialism wages war not only against socialist practice, but also against its historical memory.
According to Marxist state theory, the state is, in Engels’ definition,
“A power which has arisen from society but places itself above it, and increasingly alienates itself from it.”
Socialism exposes the class character of this apparatus and explains the fact that the state is a structure destined to wither away historically.
Imperialism, on the other hand, binds states through:
- mechanisms of indebtedness,
- military alliances,
- dependence on the neoliberal (neo-colonial) legal system.
As Lenin emphasized in his analysis of imperialism,
“Imperialism is the division of the world among a handful of great powers.”
This unjust system of division perceives the mass subjectification of revolutionary politics as a direct threat. For this reason, socialism is criminalized in the political sphere, marginalized, and rendered ineffective through reformist discourse.
HOW DOES IMPERIALISM PRESENT ITS SYSTEM IN THE EYES OF THE PEOPLE?
“There is no alternative.”
“The market is freedom.”
“Success is a matter of individual talent.”
Socialism dismantles this ideological structure; it identifies surplus value exploitation, commodification, and alienation, and turns them upside down. For this reason, imperialist ideology does not merely criticize socialism; it tries to present it as unthinkable and impossible to implement in real life.
CULTURE IS ONE OF THE MAIN AREAS IN WHICH CLASS DOMINATION IS REPRODUCED IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY
In the period of the Third Imperialist Crisis, culture:
- glorifies competition and individual advancement through TV series,
- equates success with consumption through the internet and the fallacies of “personal development,”
- suppresses—indeed eradicates—collective thinking within the education system.
For this reason, socialism is either equated with dictatorship in the cultural sphere, or presented as an outdated idea belonging to the dustbin of history.
IMPERIALISM CONTROLS NOT ONLY THOUGHTS, BUT ALSO EMOTIONS. CURRENT PROPAGANDA EXAMPLES:
- Presenting precarious labor as “flexibility,”
- Portraying poverty as “personal failure,”
- Framing solidarity as “dependency.”
Whereas socialism creates collective hope, class consciousness, historical self-confidence among the people, and produces love for the people and the homeland. For this reason, while the ruling ideology views socialism as a nightmare, it presents it to the people as a “dangerous dream.”
IMPERIALISM REPRESENTS THE INTERESTS OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOURGEOISIE; SOCIALISM REPRESENTS THE HISTORICAL INTERESTS OF THE WORKING CLASS AND THE OPPRESSED. THIS CONTRADICTION IS IRRECONCILABLE.
WHY DOES IMPERIALISM WANT TO ERASE REVOLUTIONS, ARMED STRUGGLE, AND SOCIALISM FROM PEOPLE’S MINDS?
Let us list the reasons point by point:
• Reason: Socialism is not merely a political program.
Because: Socialism is a scientific way of thinking that explains and transforms the world. As long as it exists in the mind, it remains a potential force for action.
• Reason: The idea of revolution precedes the actual revolution.
Because: As Marx emphasized, material force becomes a historical subject only when united with consciousness. Without destroying consciousness, revolutionary potential cannot be destroyed.
• Reason: Socialism teaches that capitalism will inevitably come to a historical end.
Because: A mind that knows capitalism is temporary does not see exploitation as fate. This knowledge dissolves legitimacy.
• Reason: Socialism produces class consciousness.
Because: Class consciousness links individual problems to collective relations of exploitation. At this point, mechanisms of consent collapse.
• Reason: Socialism produces hope instead of fear.
Because: A fearful individual is governed; a hopeful one moves into collective action. Hope is dangerous for imperialism.
• Reason: Socialism produces an alternative morality.
Because: The values of solidarity and equality invalidate market morality and the ideology of competition.
• Reason: Socialism creates historical memory.
Because: Past revolutionary experiences provide examples and courage for future struggles. They create the confidence that “we did it once, we can do it again.”
• Reason: Socialism threatens cultural hegemony.
Because: It produces a collective perspective in art, literature, and science; by dismantling bourgeois culture and art, it elevates the people’s tastes and consciousness.
• Reason: Socialism merges with national independence.
Because: Imperialist dependency relations can only be broken through a perspective of class liberation.
• Reason: Socialism raises the self-respect of the oppressed.
Because: When the oppressed see themselves as subjects who make history, they do not submit.
• Reason: Socialism teaches even through defeat.
Because: Even defeated revolutions, even those that experience reversals, produce experience, lessons, and consciousness. Imperialism wants to erase this knowledge and awareness from the people.
• Reason: They want to make socialism forgotten.
Because: Those who remember do not obey; they organize and move to seize what is rightfully theirs.
• Reason: They suffocate collective consciousness.
Because: Collective consciousness organizes.
• Reason: They ridicule hope.
Because: A hopeful people cannot be stopped.
• Reason: They declare socialism “the past.”
Because: They know that the new, the future, will emerge from it.
• Reason: Socialism is made invisible in every sphere, including the digital realm.
Because: Algorithms have become ideological apparatuses of monopolies.
- Search engines delete revolutionary content.
- Social media rewards individual success.
- Collective struggle is labelled “extremism.”
- It is isolated from the people.
- Data capitalism targets consciousness, because consciousness today is shaped through the economy of attention and emotion.
- Speed is the enemy of depth.
- Reaction replaces thinking.
For this reason, in the digital age, socialism is not only banned—it is smothered.
SMEAR CAMPAIGNS AGAINST SOCIALISM
Claim: Socialism is against human nature.
Response: What is against nature and science is the exploitation of human beings by other human beings. There is no fixed “human nature,” only historical conditions—and socialist revolutions are products of those conditions.
Claim: Socialism was tried and failed.
Response: Socialism was not defeated. There were countries that rotted from within and returned to capitalism due to individualism, separation from the people, bureaucratization, and nationalism. The USSR was destroyed by revisionists. What was defeated was not socialism, but revisionism.
Claim: The market is freedom.
Response: The “freedom” to starve or be unemployed is not freedom.
Claim: The individual is everything; socialism is against the individual.
Response: The power of the individual emerges within organized structures and through the limitless possibilities opened by revolution. Socialism develops ability and consciousness. Socialists are not against the individual; they are against individualism.
IN CONCLUSION
Historical Verdict:
The aim of imperialism is to make revolution unthinkable for the peoples.
But historical materialism teaches this:
As long as material contradictions persist, the consciousness capable of grasping them will be reborn.
Therefore socialism:
- Returns even when suppressed.
- Is learned even when distorted.
- Is remembered again even when forgotten.
Because socialism is the absolute future.
