From Boots to Algorithms: The Anatomy of Coups, Epistemological Illusions, and the Construction of the New Human

Beautifying Life and Grasping the Essence of History

These lines were not written merely to produce a dry inventory of the past, or to conduct the speculative exercise of an abstract academism severed from praxis and from the living arteries of life. The mortar of this study was mixed with the longing to make life more beautiful still—with the yearning for a peaceful, democratic, and just world.

The greatest philosophical legacy we are obliged to pass on to our young comrades is humanity's power to take its own destiny into its hands. As Karl Marx indicated in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the overcoming of alienation and the human being's return to their own essence means the genuine reproduction of life and nature on a human plane. Our sole aim here is to free young minds from that fog of passive helplessness created by conspiracy theories, and to carry to them the clear, transformative light of the will to beautify the world and humanity. For the ultimate purpose of philosophy, as crystallized in the famous Eleventh Thesis of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, is not merely to interpret the world in various ways, but to change it.

The Dialectical Relation Between Appearance and Essence

The coup attempt of July 15, 2016—one of the most shattering turning points in Turkey's recent history—remains, despite the time that has passed, hidden behind the thick fog of ruling-class ideologies. As an epistemologist, one must recall that fundamental philosophical threshold Lenin insisted upon in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Our sensory perceptions give us only the outer shell (the appearance) of objective reality; we can reach its essence (its essential laws) only through dialectical reasoning. The thing-in-itself that Kant declared "unknowable" becomes, in dialectical materialism, a "thing-for-us" once it has passed through the filter of historical practice.

• What Is There in Appearance?: In the mass media and in general political discourse, July 15 is presented merely as a "metaphysical war of good and evil between a malevolent clique and a legitimate government." The event is torn from its historical context and reduced to a momentary frenzy, a religious deviation, or an abstract betrayal.

• What Is There in Essence?: When we hold up the lens of historical materialism, an entirely different anatomy emerges. July 15 is the inevitable explosion point of a hegemony crisis within the neoliberal state apparatus, within ruling blocs integrated into global capital, and within the administrative mechanism itself. The practices of communalization that infiltrated the state machinery are an organic and class result of the capitalist state's need to govern the masses through instruments of consent and coercion. In Gramsci's words, "hegemony is armored with coercion"—and when that armor cracks, the state apparatus splits from within.

An Epistemological Compass for Young Comrades

We must protect youth from the two great philosophical traps offered by the ruling system that paralyze consciousness:

1. Liberal Idealism: The approach that presents democracy and human rights as sacred, transcendent concepts floating above classes, while skillfully concealing the economic exploitation and property relations behind them.

2. Crude Materialism and Conspiracy Theorizing: The approach that sees the world as a pessimistic, determinist, and mechanical theater stage run by secret societies and "masterminds" of unknown address; that denies the masses' role as historical constitutive subjects and turns them into passive spectators.

In this study we will refresh that revolutionary and human answer we give to Chernyshevsky's question "What Is to Be Done?" We will show that coups, military juntas, and every form of exceptional government are, in reality, sledgehammers brought down upon the working class's hard-won democratic rights, its organization, and human dignity—and that peace and justice can flourish only when a stick is thrust into the gears of this wheel of exploitation.

Chapter 1: The Historical and Relational Plane: The Anatomy of Military Coups

To understand coups is not to read military interventions, as ruling-class historians do, as chronological "accidents" or "deviations from the path of democracy." With an epistemological approach, we must grasp that coups are historical necessities—structural instruments brought into play at the moments when capital-accumulation crises and class contradictions sharpen most acutely.

Interpreting Hegel's dialectics in the Philosophical Notebooks, Lenin writes: "The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence of dialectics." We must examine the state apparatus with this same dialectical eye. In Louis Althusser's famous distinction, the state is a dual structure: Ideological State Apparatuses (schools, media, family, religion) and Repressive State Apparatuses (army, police, prisons). Coups are the operation by which, at moments when the ideological apparatuses tasked with producing consent jam and can no longer govern the masses, the repressive apparatus (the army) seizes power directly and places the ruling class's interests under protection.

Turkey's Coup Baggage: Class and Structural Ruptures

The history of the Republic of Turkey is the history of capitalistization, of integration into imperialism, and of class struggles. The three great military interventions in this history are not the registration of accidental military ambitions, but of the transformation moments of capital-accumulation models.

Year of Intervention	Visible Pretext	Class Driver Beneath the Surface
1960 (May 27)	"Fraternal strife and dictatorship"	The rise of the industrial bourgeoisie and the need to shift to an import-substitution model
1971 (March 12)	"Anarchy and disorder"	The rising working class and left movement pressing against constitutional limits
1980 (September 12)	"Fraternal bloodshed and instability"	The transition to neoliberalism (January 24 Decisions) and the total crushing of labor

• The 1960 Intervention (Import-Substitution Transformation): At the point where the DP government based on agricultural capital had jammed, this was an intervention that cleared the way for the domestic industrial bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy. Interestingly, the relatively libertarian 1961 Constitution produced by this coup also brought with it the legal ground on which the Turkish left and the organized working class would massify.

• The 1971 Memorandum (First Restoration): The social mobility, union organization, and youth actions that rose in the relative climate provided by the 1961 Constitution were seen by the ruling classes as a source of instability. The words of then Chief of the General Staff Memduh Tağmaç—"Social development has outpaced economic development"—expose the class essence of this intervention in its nakedest form. The aim was to constrain the awakening working class and social opposition.

• The 1980 Coup (Neoliberalism's Bloody Baptism): The most destructive military coup in Turkey's history. The real motor force behind it was the January 24, 1980 Decisions. Turkish capitalism had to pass from the import-substitution model to an export-oriented neoliberal model—that is, to fling its doors wide open to global capital. But this required wage cuts, the closure of unions, and the banning of strikes. This savage prescription, difficult to implement by democratic means, was put into effect by the repressive mechanisms of the September 12 regime. The words of TİSK Chair Halit Narin after the coup—"Until today we cried and they laughed; now it is our turn to laugh"—are the most honest confession of September 12's class character.

The Global Map and the Relational Plane: The Simultaneity of Coups

If we look at the matter only from within our own borders, we miss the universal laws of imperialism. Examining capitalist state crises, Nicos Poulantzas draws attention to the bond between the state's internal "exceptional forms" (fascism, military dictatorship) and the links of the global imperialist chain.

While the 1980 military intervention was unfolding in Turkey, world capitalism was also passing through a structural transformation. Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States had launched the privatization of public resources and the anti-union offensive. This purge, carried out through the ballot box in imperialist centers, was carried out through bloody military coups in peripheral and semi-peripheral countries:

• Greece (1967): The Colonels' Junta, manipulating the rising left wave, seized power in line with NATO interests.

• Chile (September 11, 1973): The socialist Salvador Allende, who had come to power by democratic means, was overthrown in a bloody coup by General Pinochet through the joint plan of imperialist monopolies (especially because of the nationalization of copper mines) and the Chilean bourgeoisie.

• Argentina (1976): The period of military dictatorship known as the "Dirty War" became another scene of savagery in which thousands of leftists, unionists, and students were thrown from helicopters into the ocean, and in which the neoliberal program was dictated.

The Evolution of Hegemony Crises: Postmodern and Digital Interventions

In the epic And Quiet Flows the Don, Mikhail Sholokhov recounts how the deep, traditional illusion of "state guardianship" of the Cossack military caste was smashed to pieces in the red dawn of class struggle. Turkey's military bureaucracy likewise positioned itself as the "eternal guardian of the republic and the state"—yet at every moment of crisis, the repressive apparatuses turned their face toward social opposition and organized sectors.

From the 1990s onward, Turkish capitalism ceased to consist solely of the traditional monopoly bourgeoisie crystallized in TÜSİAD. A new capital group took the stage in Anatolia, growing on cheap labor exploitation and religious-social networks, and eager to open onto foreign markets. When the state apparatus could no longer reproduce the hegemony of these two capital fractions, the army's forms of intervention also changed shape—becoming "postmodern" and "digital."

Form of Intervention	Political Appearance	Class / Structural Essence
February 28, 1997 (Postmodern)	"Concern over secularism and reaction"	Traditional big capital's move to discipline rising provincial capital
April 27, 2007 (E-Memorandum)	"Election of a secular president"	The old tutelary bureaucracy's final veto against the new ruling bloc defending global integration
July 15, 2016 (Bloody Reckoning)	"Illegal junta coup against the government"	The war among different bureaucratic foci and cliques within the state apparatus to monopolize hegemony

February 28, 1997: The Limits of Class Redistribution

February 28 was a "postmodern" intervention in which army boots did not take to the streets, yet media, judiciary, and bureaucracy were used as instruments of power. In the background lay the fight, within neoliberalism's rent-distribution mechanisms, between traditional capital and rising provincial capital. The intervention aimed to restrict the financial movements of alternative capital groups. Indeed, the 2001 economic crisis and IMF program that followed immediately afterward were the final stage that cut the bill to the people.

April 27, 2007: The Virtual Manifesto of a Dying Tutelage

The "e-memorandum" posted at midnight on the General Staff's website was one of the last steps the military bureaucracy took to preserve its monopoly in the state. In this period the political power had proven itself as the "most loyal implementer" of global finance capital. The old-style bureaucratic clique within the army was losing ground against this new power bloc integrated with global capital. The e-memorandum was an effort to preserve traditional veto power; but the wind was now blowing in the direction of global capital's interests, and this move was doomed to failure.

July 15, 2016: The Bloody Parting of Ways of Those "Fed from the Same Source"

The illegal military junta (FETÖ) that perpetrated July 15 did not descend from the sky. This structure is the direct product of the religious cadre-building practices that the September 12, 1980 coup opened the way for—by the hand of the state—in order to crush the left movement. For years this clique, organized in the bureaucracy, had fattened itself as one of the most determined implementers of neoliberal policies within the state apparatus.

In the process after 2013, an irreconcilable contradiction emerged between these two partner foci over the redistribution of the state apparatus, public resources, and property. July 15 is the war of these two forces for absolute domination over the state apparatus. The suppression of the attempt resulted not in the people's democratic gains, but in the extreme centralization of executive power through the state of emergency (OHAL) and decree-laws (KHK). Just as in past periods of crisis, this process prepared the ground for the construction of a new administrative structure that narrowed labor's channels of rights-claiming, postponed strikes, and restricted democratic rights.

Giorgio Agamben's conceptualization of the "State of Exception" (Stato di eccezione) is crucial at this point. Agamben analyzes the "exceptional situations" in which sovereign power suspends the law in order to preserve its own existence. In Turkey, coups are the most useful pretexts for the ruling classes to suspend law, human rights, and constitutional gains—that is, to "make the state of exception permanent."

Chapter 2: The Apparatuses of Imperialism: The CIA, Secret Services, and the Latin American Laboratory

The greatest epistemological error frequently made in political analysis is to construct intelligence organizations and secret services as almost "transhistorical, omnipotent, transcendental subjects." Examining the concept of reification in History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukács recounts how capitalism transforms human relations into relations among things and presents social institutions as "laws of nature" outside human will. The CIA, MI6, or other counterguerrilla formations are not mythological monsters descending from the sky; they are the capitalist state's most naked, most organized security apparatuses.

The Mathematical Necessity of Imperialism

The law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, formulated by Karl Marx in Volume 3 of Capital, is the mathematical proof of this aggression. The rate of profit of capital (r) is shown by this formula:

r = (s/c+v) = ((s/v)/(c/v)+1)

Where:

• s: Surplus value

• v: Variable capital (the cost of labor power)

• c: Constant capital (machinery, raw materials, etc.)

• s/v: The rate of exploitation

• c/v: The organic composition of capital

As the organic composition of capital (c/v) rises with technological development, the rate of profit (r) tends to fall. To prevent this fall, capitalist states must raise the rate of exploitation (s/v), suppress wages (v), and seize cheap sources of raw materials. The mission of the CIA and related secret services in military coups is precisely to forcibly manipulate the variables in this formula in favor of global finance capital. When Salvador Allende nationalized the copper mines in Chile, he struck a direct blow at monopoly capitalism's profit rates; the Pinochet coup was designed to hand those mines back to imperialism.

Latin America: Neoliberalism's Bloody Laboratory

Throughout the Cold War, Latin America was turned into a vast laboratory in which the neoliberal "free market" dogma was forcibly tested on peoples.

Country and Year	Overthrown Government / Leader	CIA Operation and Class/Economic Essence
Guatemala (1954)	Jacobo Árbenz (Democratic Government)	Operation PBSUCCESS. Blocking land reform and protecting United Fruit Company interests.
Chile (1973)	Salvador Allende (Socialist Power)	Project FUBELT. Savage privatizations and the "Shock Doctrine" with Milton Friedman's "Chicago Boys."
Argentina (1976)	Isabel Perón (Populist Government)	Operation Condor. The "Dirty War" in which the left, unionists, and students were physically liquidated.

The method applied in Chile is what Naomi Klein conceptualized as the "Shock Doctrine." In a moment of social disaster, war, or military coup, the masses' bewilderment and trauma are exploited to legislate overnight the savage privatizations, social-rights seizures, and deregulations they would never accept in normal times. In Chile, physical methods of repression and the economic shock program operated simultaneously.

The same mechanism was organized in Europe and Turkey under NATO as Gladio (in Turkey: Counterguerrilla / Mobilization Inspection Board). Under the mask of fighting communism, these structures carried out assassinations, massacres (for example the May 1, 1977 Taksim Massacre, and the Maraş and Çorum massacres), and provocations to break the organized power of the working class.

In the novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, Chingiz Aitmatov tells us the legend of the Mankurt. The Mankurt is the human being who, with wet camel hide dried by the sun on their head, loses memory, roots, and identity, and becomes the loyal slave and executioner of the master who made them so. Imperialism's secret-service apparatuses and psychological warfare departments apply precisely this "Mankurtization" operation to societies: society's revolutionary past, class consciousness, and culture of collective solidarity are erased by repression, fear, and media manipulation; in their place are produced apolitical masses who consent to their own exploitation. Walter Benjamin says in the Theses on the Philosophy of History: "Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins."

Chapter 3: An Epistemological Question: "Mastermind," or the Structural Laws of Capitalism?

One of the greatest mental obstacles before young generations today is conspiracy theories—fused with the disinformation wave of the internet age—that reduce everything to a theater play directed from a single center.

Fredric Jameson examines conspiracy theories in the context of late capitalism's cultural logic and delivers a striking diagnosis: Conspiracy theory is the poor/helpless person's attempt at "cognitive mapping." The relational network of global capitalism is so complex, multidimensional, and alienating that an ordinary individual struggles to locate their place within this vast system. To escape the anxiety this complexity creates, the mind converts the abstract and systemic (capitalist relations of production) into a concrete and personalized enemy (for example a "mastermind" or secret societies). This is, in essence, a modern, secularized version of objective idealism: yesterday it was "God's Will" that governed everything; today it is the "Mastermind."

Objective Laws: Lenin and the Rational Savagery of Finance Capital

We do not need the assumption of a "mastermind" to understand imperialism. Imperialism is the inevitable result of objective economic laws—monopolization, the interpenetration of industrial and bank capital to form finance capital, and the export of capital.

Conspiracy-Theory Discourse ("Mastermind")	Historical-Materialist Reality
A secret table runs the world.	The laws of capital accumulation and the drive to raise profit rates run the world.
Wars and coups are the arbitrary decisions of a few bad people.	Wars and coups are crises of the partition of markets and raw-material zones.
The solution: "national and local" leaders standing up to this mastermind.	The solution: the liquidation of capitalist relations of production and working-class power.

The plans of secret services, assassinations, or coup scenarios are not produced arbitrarily at these mysterious tables. They are the rational, planned, and professional implementers, within the state apparatus, of finance capital's urgent needs of the period. There is no "mastermind"—there is capital's common intelligence and class interests.

In the magnificent epilogue of War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy deals a deadly blow to bourgeois historiography and to the myth of "genius heroes who make history." Analyzing Napoleon's Russian campaign, Tolstoy asks: Did Napoleon drag millions of people eastward, or did the historical movement of millions of people carry Napoleon to that summit?

"In a historical event, the so-called great men are nothing but labels giving the event a name; like the child who thinks he creates the wave that goes before the ship, they are those who affect the event the least." — Leo Tolstoy

The "mastermind" discourse is not only a philosophical error; it is also a reactionary ideological apparatus that ruling classes use to paralyze the working class. It creates passivity in the masses, conceals the real enemy (capital's domination and property relations), and, with the lie that "against the mastermind we are all in the same boat," reserves the working class behind its own ruling class. Our epistemological task is to show our young comrades a world cleansed of mystical monsters. The enemy is not a mystical ghost; it is the concrete, class-based, and organized capitalist system that exploits our labor in the factory, the shipyard, and the office—and that, in moments of crisis, ensures the continuity of the wheel of exploitation.

Chapter 4: The Dialectics of Freedom and Necessity: Class-Based Opposition to Coups

To grasp why we must stand against coups under all conditions, we must first cleanse our minds of the bourgeois-liberal world's fetishism of "freedom" and "democracy." For liberalism, freedom is a negative, abstract, and hollowed-out concept.

Marxist epistemology, by contrast, begins with that magnificent principle that runs from Spinoza to Hegel and that Friedrich Engels brought to its clearest scientific formula in Anti-Dühring: "Freedom is the recognition of necessity."

The Dialectical Unity of Freedom and Necessity

The human being cannot become free by ignoring the objective laws of nature or society (necessity). Someone who leaps from a cliff ignoring the law of gravity is not free—only deluded; whereas the human who grasps the laws of aerodynamics and designs tools accordingly has become free in the true sense. The same dialectical law holds for class struggles:

• Necessity: Capitalist relations of production and the exploitation they generate are an objective necessity. The working class collides every day with this wall of objective necessity—the fact that its labor is usurped.

• Freedom: The class's grasping of this objective situation—that is, its passage from being a "class in itself" to becoming a "class for itself" by becoming conscious of its historical mission. Real freedom is the will to grasp these objective laws of exploitation and to abolish them through revolutionary praxis.

Bourgeois Democracy Is Not a Paradise; It Is a Battlefield.

Freedom of expression, the right to organize, union freedoms, and the right to strike are not a gift from the ruling classes to the working class. These rights are positional fields that the exploited have torn, tooth and nail, from objective necessities throughout history. The wider these positions, the more easily the working class grasps the laws of exploitation, organizes, and draws a clear path toward freedom.

Historical Examples: Rights Are Not Granted; They Are Torn Away Through Struggle

Historical materialism shows us that democracy did not descend from the sky as an abstract "idea," but is the dialectical product of concrete class conflicts.

• The Chartist Movement in England (1838–1848): In the most savage period of the Industrial Revolution, the English working class united around the "People's Charter" for the liberation of the franchise from property restrictions. The bourgeoisie tried to block this demand with repression, yet the workers' determined resistance opened the way for modern universal suffrage and freedom of organization.

• The Paris Commune (1871): The Commune that Karl Marx defined in The Civil War in France as "the political form at last discovered"—the first workers' state based on direct democracy, transcending the limits of the bourgeois state machinery. Rules such as the recallability of elected officials at any moment proved that democracy can be "the rule of the people" only with a class content.

• The 1961 Constitution in Turkey: Right-liberal historiography presents the 1961 Constitution as a "luxury garment" bestowed from above by the army upon the people. Yet the union rights, the right to strike, and the social guarantees in that constitution are the result of the historical necessity created by the worker awakening that accumulated through the 1950s, by the actions of university youth, and by mass class movements such as the 1961 Saraçhane Rally.

The Coup: A Move to Prevent the Recognition of Necessity

Whatever pretext extraordinary forms of government arrive under, the coup mechanism physically destroys those democratic positions where class struggle is waged. By shutting down the press organs and unions through which the working class reaches its own class consciousness, it paralyzes consciousness and organization; it draws a curtain of "national unity" before the masses and prevents the wheel of exploitation (objective necessity) from being seen.

In the novel What Is to Be Done?, Nikolai Chernyshevsky discusses the relation of human will to objective conditions. The characters in the novel become free not by doing whatever they please, but by doing what objective reason and social necessity require. We must present Alexander Herzen's magnificent warning to our young comrades like a manifesto:

"Historical development is not as smooth as the pavements of Nevsky Prospect; it passes entirely through fields, swamps, dusty roads, and precipices."

Our opposition to coups springs not from admiration for bourgeois democracy, but from seeing that limited democratic space as a school of struggle on the road to a real and classless world. Only in that space can we grasp necessity, and only in that space can we walk toward the dawn of freedom.

Chapter 5: Organizational Consciousness and Democratic Instruments of Governance in the Modern World

The greatest world of illusion before our young comrades today is the technological landscape of the digital age—appearing "libertarian" on the surface, yet atomizing in essence. Smartphones, social media networks, and protests reduced to the act of "clicking" at first glance seem to distribute a vast democratic power to the masses. Yet as an epistemologist we must decode the ideological trap behind this appearance: Virtual networks cannot replace class bonds. Social media algorithms are designed not to unite the masses in a common class consciousness, but to polarize them in echo chambers and to render exploitation invisible.

1. Class Praxis Against Digital Fetishism

In What Is to Be Done?, Lenin shaped the revolutionary organization not merely as a "unity of action," but above all around a press organ (Iskra) that was a "collective propagandist, collective agitator, and collective organizer." Our task today is to reproduce this logic of the "collective organizer" with modern technology. Digital platforms can be only the logistical and theoretical carrier of physical organization—not its alternative. A WhatsApp group or a Discord server cannot replace workplace committees.

In his work Tektology (Universal Organizational Science), Alexander Bogdanov argued that all physical, biological, and social phenomena in the universe can be explained by the laws of "organization." Let us recall the people Andrey Platonov depicts in the novel Chevengur—those makeshift, pure, yet magnificent efforts to found a commune; while fighting nature and hunger they were in fact trying to "organize life." With today's technology, the fragmented and precarized modern proletariat can realize structural transformations only when it converts these new technological tools, with class consciousness, into an "apparatus of organization."

2. New Proletariat, Old Consciousness: Committees Against Algorithms

Today's working class is not composed solely of blue-collar workers sweating under factory chimneys. Motorcycle couriers under the whip of algorithms, software developers writing code in plazas, call-center workers—these are the new subjects of the modern proletariat. Against this atomization we must update and present the old "Soviet" (Council/Assembly) model:

Old Factory Committee Model	Today's Digital/Modern Counterpart
Assemblies and local coordination soviets were founded on the physical factory floor.	Hybrid (physical+digital) assemblies must be built at warehouse, logistics, and plaza nodes.
Class newspaper distribution and face-to-face propaganda were essential.	Regional courier/worker networks, encrypted communication channels, and joint solidarity cooperatives must be organized.

The Cybersyn Project (Proyecto Synco), attempted in Chile between 1971 and 1973 under the socialist Salvador Allende, is the most exciting example of early cyber-socialism. Linking all factories across Chile by communication lines to a room at the presidential center, this system aimed to plan the economy not with bureaucratic sluggishness but with real-time data, according to the people's needs, and in a democratic form.

The level that artificial intelligence, big data, and instantaneous data flow have reached today makes this democratic planning and direct digital democracy (a system of recallable delegates) more feasible than ever.

Technology Serves the Class Struggle, and the Construction of the Human of the Future

Freeing technological development from bourgeois fetishism and placing it in the service of class struggle is not merely a technical relocation; at the philosophical level it means the human being's reclaiming of their own essence and beginning, from today, to build tomorrow's free world. In the sixth of the Theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx creates a magnificent epistemological rupture in defining human essence: "The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations."

This means that if we transform social relations so as to cleanse them of exploitation and competition, we can also change the human essence and build the equal and just human of the future.

From the Liberal Illusion of "Human Rights" to Real Human Emancipation

Liberal epistemology constructs the human as an abstract subject floating free of property relations. Marx decoded this illusion in On the Jewish Question. The winning of political rights alone (voting, abstract equality) does not truly free the human being. A worker's "right to travel" exists on paper, yet for a laborer with no money in their wallet this right is nothing but an empty promise.

A genuine defense of human rights is to free these rights from abstract legal molds and to furnish them with material guarantees. In the world of the future, a human right means that housing, healthy food, quality education, and above all creative labor are unlimited and free rights for everyone. This is the vision of concrete human rights based on the sovereignty of labor.

Technology, "Free Time," and the Epistemology of the New Human

In the Grundrisse, examining the dialectical contradiction of mechanization and science under capitalism, Marx uses the concept of General Intellect. Under capitalism, technology is used to increase exploitation. Yet when technology is freed from the limits of property relations, it opens the greatest door of emancipation before humanity: Free Time. Real wealth is not accumulated money; it is the free time in which the human being can realize their potential—devote it to art, philosophy, and science.

Let us recall Vera Pavlovna's "Fourth Dream" in Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? The crystal palace depicted in that dream is a vision of a future in which technology and collective labor free the human from drudgery. Artificial intelligence and automation have brought us closer to this dream than ever before. The human of the future will complete necessary social tasks in minimal time and, in the remaining time, develop themselves in many directions—becoming a creative part of the association of free producers.

From Today to Tomorrow: How Is the Human of the Future Organized from Today?

In Platonov's novel Chevengur, those poor but believing people trying to found communism in the middle of the steppe show that a communal life is not merely an economic plan, but that deep, warm, and uncalculated relation of solidarity that human establishes with human. To build that equal and just human of the future, we cannot wait for a dawn yet to come; we must organize it from today, in the very heart of struggle.

Prefigurative Politics and Comradeship Relations

We must already live, in today's fields of struggle, in our associations and assemblies, the human relations of the future we wish to build. Against the viruses of "individualism" and "competition" that neoliberalism imposes on us, we must organize from today the relation of comradeship. Comradeship is the present embryo of tomorrow's human—who is not selfish, who is sharing, who represents collective intelligence.

• Mental Transformation: We must teach our young comrades not to rise by stepping on one another, but to stand up together hand in hand.

• Practices of Collective Production: We must use technology not for personal consumption and artificial needs, but to build collective production, alternative education cooperatives, and solidarity networks.

• Knowledge Communes: Against the monopolistic system that commercializes knowledge, we must from today spread digital people's libraries and open-source production spaces where knowledge is shared free of charge and where there are no copyright walls.

In The State and Revolution, describing that final stage in which the state apparatus withers away, Lenin speaks of a level at which people will, by habit and without any repressive apparatus, observe the basic rules of social life. That level is the moment when human no longer exploits human, when the struggle over property has ended, when the real history of humanity begins.

We wrote these lines for our young comrades who will be the writers of that history. We will equip those democratic positions we tear from under extraordinary forms of government with the light of science and collective intelligence. Our aim is to create that magnificent dawn of free humanity—where human does not exploit human, where wars have ended, where we are at peace with nature, and where we chart our own destiny. The human of the future is not a distant utopia; it is a pulse that has already begun to beat in every young heart that raises its voice against exploitation today, that takes a comrade's hand, and that believes a just world is possible.