A Class Analysis of the EngelliWeb 2025 Report

Young Comrades,

The history of social struggles is the history of the continuous transformation of the repressive apparatuses in the hands of the ruling class. The Freedom of Expression Association’s (İFÖD) EngelliWeb 2025: Digital Martial Law Report we hold today is not merely a balance sheet of “human rights and law.” This report is a manifesto of fear of monopoly capitalism in crisis, of the capital-state fused with it as flesh and nail, and of the bureaucratic apparatus that keeps this power standing.

When we read the report with a historical-materialist vision, we see clearly that the more than 1.5 million censored websites are in fact the bourgeoisie’s effort to conceal its own contradictions. Below you will find a critique of the existing system and the digital imagination of our socialist future.

The Illusion of “Public Order” and the State’s Repressive Apparatus

The Fairy Tale of a Classless Society and the Ideological Appropriation of the Concept of the “Public”

Bourgeois philosophy and liberal legal theory describe society on the ground of an imaginary “social contract” concluded by the free wills of equal individuals purged of classes. At the center of this idealist illusion stands an abstract concept: the "Public".

Yet historical materialism shows us clearly that in a society governed by antagonistic (irreconcilable) class contradictions, a neutral “public” representing the common interest of all classes cannot exist. The dispossessed and those who hold the means of production, the exploited and those who appropriate surplus-value, have no common “public interest.” Therefore the determination of “Public Order” that has settled into the language of the bourgeois regime is, in reality, nothing other than the bourgeoisie’s order of domination.

The bourgeois state uses this concept as an ideological smoke bomb:

The Lie of Equalized Interests: The ruling class’s property security and profit flow are presented as if they were the peace and security of all society.
Linguistic Hegemony: While the worker’s strike, the student’s protest, or the journalist’s exposure is charged with “disturbing public order,” the boss’s workplace murder, the plunder of nature, and the looting of public resources are taken under protection as the “natural functioning of the legal order.”

Bourgeois Law as the Watchman of Property

Karl Marx, in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, states that the foundation of the social structure is formed by the relations of production (the base), while institutions such as law and the state are ideological formations (the superstructure) rising upon this foundation. Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin define the state as the necessary consequence of irreconcilable conflict between classes and as a repressive apparatus in the hands of the ruling class.

Law is not a neutral search for justice, but the will of the ruling class in the form of statute. Indeed, the routinization of exceptional measures such as Article 8/A of Law No. 5651 has crystallized this plain truth in the digital universe. The capital-state is pragmatic enough to trample even its own laws the moment its class interest is endangered. Bourgeois law, like a plastic dough, is reshaped according to the rulers’ need of the moment.

Evolution from Traditional Police Force to the Digital Panopticon

Louis Althusser, in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, says that the state operates through two fundamental mechanisms: Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA), based on the power of coercion, and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA), based on persuasion and the production of consent.

In today’s monopoly digital capitalism, the boundary between these two domains has been erased. Digital communication infrastructures have become both the circulation field of ideological apparatuses and a digital panopticon into which repressive apparatuses intervene directly:

Algorithmic Encirclement Taking the Place of the Physical Baton: The police barricade once set up in the street is today erected in the digital sphere through bandwidth throttling applied on the internet backbone. Preventing the spread of a video of an action in the street means erasing the action itself from social memory.
The Severing of Social Connectivity: Bandwidth throttling is a digital blockade. The aim is to atomize social opposition by cutting the communication of the worker in action, the protesting student, the laborer seeking their rights. The ruling class is terrified beyond measure that the oppressed might come together and acquire the character of a “class for itself.”
Infrastructural Encirclement: The targeting of eSIM providers, DNS services, VPN protocols, or technical infrastructures such as Amazon IVS shows that censorship has moved beyond content and toward destroying the very ground of communication.
De-memorization (The Destruction of Public Memory): The blocking of digital archiving tools such as archive.today is an effort to destroy the digital memory of the working class and social movements. A class that loses its memory is severed from its own accumulation and transformed into an object that can be manipulated anew every day.

A Class Analysis of the EngelliWeb 2025 Data

EngelliWeb 2025 Datum / Practice	Bourgeois-State Justification	Marxist Analysis and Class Function	Socialist Future Alternative
More Than 1.5 Million Blocked Sites	"Harmful content, threat to public order"	The concealment of the dirty relations behind capital accumulation and of the class reality.	Digital Commons in which information is decommodified, with uncensorable and universal access.
The 19 March Process: Mass Bandwidth Throttling	"Preventing social outrage, state of emergency"	Preventing the organization of class rage spilling into the streets on digital networks; atomizing the opposition.	Decentralized (peer-to-peer), cooperative network infrastructures on which the state cannot throw the switch.
The Instrumentalization of Article 8/A of Law No. 5651	"Protection of national security"	The plasticization of law as a ruling-class cudgel; the treatment of corruption news as a "state secret."	A communication ecosystem under the oversight of direct-democratic councils, in which law withers away.
The Collaboration of Global Platforms (X and others)	"Compliance with local laws, company policy"	The criminal partnership that monopoly technology companies enter into with states for the sake of profitability.	The nationalization of Silicon Valley monopolies; algorithms that are open-source and transparent.
Infrastructure (eSIM, DNS, Amazon IVS) Blocks	"Technical necessities, rooting out"	The desire to destroy not only content but the memory of the oppressed and the ground of independent communication wholesale.	The socialization of the internet backbone, treated as a "means of production."

The Plasticization of Law: On Law No. 5651

Pashukanis and from the Commodity Form to the Legal Form: The Theoretical Basis of Plasticization

One of the deepest myths of bourgeois claims is the fairy tale of the “rule of law” and “equality before the law.” The capitalist system presents law as a rigid, neutral, universal, and unshakable quality in order to protect its own domination. Yet in periods of crisis when the class struggle intensifies, this illusion of “petrified” law melts and gives way to a plastic legal regime shaped in the hands of the rulers.

The Soviet legal theorist Evgeny Pashukanis, in The General Theory of Law and Marxism, seeks the origin of bourgeois law in the relations of commodity exchange. The exchange of commodities on the market as if they were equal requires that individuals also be constructed in the legal sphere as supposedly “free and equal rights-holders.”

Yet at the stage of monopoly capitalism, even this formal equality weighs heavy on the ruling class:

Process-Oriented Flexibility: Laws are no longer permanent rules regulating social life; they have become disposable instruments serving to cover the momentary crises of power and capital groups.
The Annulment of the Norm: Legal norms are stretched, suspended, or redefined within seconds according to the momentary political/economic anxieties of the ruling classes.

From Article 9 to Article 8/A: A Change of Label and the Nullification of Constitutional Court Decisions

The most dramatic link in the 2025 balance sheet of Law No. 5651 is the practice of not implementing Constitutional Court (AYM) decisions. When the AYM, through violation rulings, struck down Article 9—which had been applied on the pretext of personality rights and had turned into mass censorship—bourgeois ideologues hailed this as a victory. Yet historical-materialist analysis told us that the outcome would not be so: the capital-state immediately opens new channels in order to overcome legal obstacles that threaten its very reason for existence.

Legal Element	Formal Bourgeois Claim	Class / Actual Application (the 2025 Reality)
Law No. 5651 Article 9	"Protecting personality rights and private life."	A shield for deleting news of bribery, corruption, and exploitation in power–capital relations.
AYM Annulment Decision	"Constitutional guarantee, the end of rights violations."	Non-recognition of the decision by lower courts; the suspension of the constitutional order.
Law No. 5651 Article 8/A	"A shield of terror, national security, and public order."	The blocking of all corruption news under the cover of "national security" after the AYM annulment.
Unreasoned Template Decisions	"Judicial review and the right to a reasoned decision."	Copy-paste censorship orders by the BTK and Criminal Judgeships of Peace that are not even served.

The censorship mechanism has not disappeared; only its legal packaging has changed. The “personality rights” label has been peeled off and the labels of “national security” and “public order” stuck on in its place. Criminal Judgeships of Peace, shelving the AYM’s Abdullah Kaya and Others decision, have not held retrials and have continued to erase digital memory. For the bourgeois state, even its own constitution is a detail beside capital accumulation.

A Special Derivative of the Judicial Apparatus: Criminal Judgeships of Peace

Criminal Judgeships of Peace are a closed-circuit “class guillotine” embedded within the bourgeois judicial system. This vertical and impermeable structure, in which appeals against decisions are made to yet another Criminal Judgeship of Peace, has liquidated even the bourgeois law’s own internal oversight mechanisms. Template decisions and the closed-circuit document flow established with the BTK prove that law has been reduced to a bureaucratic technical operation. The aim is not to dispense justice, but to eliminate at lightning speed, in digital space, reputation crises that might be directed at capital.

The Accomplices of the Capital-State: Technology Monopolies and Algorithmic Domination

Digital Enclosure and Data Exploitation: The Political Economy of Platform Capitalism

The greatest fairy tale of liberal ideologues is that the internet is a “stateless, classless free Marketplace in which everyone has an equal right to speak.” Yet whichever class owns the means of production also determines that era’s dominant ideas and channels of communication. Today the means of communication (fiber-optic cables, data centers, satellites) are the private property of a few global monopolies (Big Tech: X, Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft). This picture is the digital extension of the monopoly capitalism Lenin described.

Just as the “Enclosure Acts” in England historically fenced off common fields and dispossessed the peasantry, so the global technology monopolies have fenced off the open spaces of the internet and established their own closed digital feudalities:

Data Production as Social Labor: Every interaction on digital platforms is a collective social labor produced by users. Technology monopolies seize this data without paying any equivalent.
Data Rent and Surplus-Value: The seized data is processed and used for advertising targeting and artificial intelligence models. The profit obtained is the conversion of social knowledge, by means of private property, into surplus-value and platform rent.
Digital Alienation: Technology, which is humanity’s collective accumulation, returns against users as an apparatus of surveillance and domination.

The Criminal Partnership of the Bourgeois State and Technology Monopolies

The liberal illusion claims that there is a continuous “struggle for freedom” between global technology companies and national bourgeois states. The EngelliWeb 2025 Report demolishes this lie. We see how giants such as X, Meta, or Google quietly implement access-blocking and content-removal decisions coming from the BTK. This situation is not a “surrender,” but the class criminal partnership of capital and the state.

Actor	Apparent Discourse / Ideology	Class Motivation	Function in Digital Martial Law
The Capital-State (BTK / Judiciary)	"Public order, national security, and the protection of the citizen."	To suppress class contradictions, to conceal corruption and exploitation.	Issues censorship decisions (5651 8/A), throttles bandwidth, threatens infrastructure.
Technology Monopolies (X, Meta, etc.)	"Global community principles, freedom of expression, compliance with local laws."	Not to lose advertising markets, to protect the profit margin.	Implements decisions without objection, renders opposition accounts invisible through shadowbans.
Techno-Elites / Bosses	"Connecting the world, innovation, and free enterprise."	To appropriate data rent on a global scale, to sustain capital accumulation.	Codes algorithms in favor of profit and the ruling class; automates censorship.

The Algorithm Is a Class Apparatus: Invisible Censorship

Algorithms are not neutral mathematical formulas; they are codified class interests:

Algorithmic Invisibility (Shadowbanning): Even if the account of a revolutionary organization, a trade union, or a journalist is not shut down, access rates are zeroed out through the algorithm. Without a court decision, a “digital execution” is carried out through capital’s codes.
The Promotion of Consumption and Degeneration: Algorithms are designed to foreground content that promotes rage, individual consumption, and that dulls class consciousness. Calls for class struggle and organization are suppressed by a “low engagement” algorithm.
Opacity: Users cannot learn why they have been restricted. The algorithm is an inquisition court hidden behind the armor of “trade secret.”

Our Imagination of the Future: Digital Commons, Free Networks, and Genuine Freedom

Yet for a Marxist, exposure is only the alphabet of the struggle. That compass which Karl Marx stated in the 11th thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach is always in our minds: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

The Abolition of the Liberal Illusion of “Freedom” and Genuine Freedom

Bourgeois ideology reduces freedom to consumer choices in the marketplace. In their world, freedom is choosing on which digital platform one will be exploited. The freedom we defend, by contrast, is an act of class emancipation.

Marx, in the third volume of Capital, summarizes humanity’s historical leap thus: "the passage from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom." The true Realm of Freedom begins where basic human needs are collectively secured, and where the human being realizes their creative potential and communication without any class/state repression.

Dimension of Freedom	Bourgeois-Capitalist Wishful Thinking	Socialist Future / Digital Commons
Definition	Market liberty, property right, consumption choice.	Humanity’s liberation from alienation, collective self-management.
Digital Counterpart	Downloading whichever app you like, donating your data to companies.	Collective ownership of the means of communication, uncensorable networks.
Legal Framework	Trade secret, state secret, and a restrictive copyright regime.	Transparent data, fully open-source code.
Infrastructure Power	Silicon Valley monopolies and state bureaucracies akin to the BTK.	Workers’, software developers’, and users’ councils.

Digital Commons: The Socialization of the Means of Communication

Intercontinental fiber-optic cables, vast data centers, and satellite networks are means of production. In a socialist society the first historical step is to change the property relations of these means of production:

The Liquidation of Private Property: Telecommunications giants and data centers will be nationalized and transferred to social ownership. Information and communication will cease to be a commodity bought and sold; they will be declared a universal human right and a “social common.”
The Abolition of the Profit-Oriented Copyright Regime: The patent and intellectual-property fences woven around information will be smashed; humanity’s common accumulation will be transformed into open data pools for everyone.

Free Networks: Decentralized and Uncensorable Network Technologies

The existing internet architecture has been built on a centralized logic by which the bourgeois state can throw the switch with a single button. To liberate communication is to change this technical architecture:

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Infrastructures: Distributed networks (mesh networks) will be built that are not dependent on company servers, in which every user connected to the network is themselves a node. Where there is no single center, there will also remain no target on which censorship can be applied.
Unshuttable Data Storage: Communication and data storage will be held encrypted and fragmented on globally distributed networks. No court will be able to erase digital archives or the memory of social movements.
Free Hardware: Hardware for accessing the internet will cease to be a target of planned obsolescence; it will be transformed into a modular, open-source basic public service provided to everyone.

Algorithmic Democracy and Council Management

Under the power of the proletariat, algorithms will evolve into technical instruments of direct democracy and central planning:

Open-Source Code Obligation: All software affecting society’s life will be open-source and held open to society’s oversight.
Digital Workers’ and Users’ Councils: IT laborers and platform users will unite under the roof of Digital Management Councils; the management of platforms will be conducted from the base to the top by these councils.
Planned Data Use: Data will be processed not to manipulate people, but to identify society’s real needs (housing, food, health, transport), to plan production, and to reduce working hours radically.

Freedom Is a Victory of the Future!

Young Comrades,

Those hundreds of thousands of blocked sites, bandwidth throttlings, and digital martial-law decisions in the EngelliWeb reports show not the strength of the capital order, but its helplessness and fear in the face of its own rottenness. The ruling class fears the transmission of truth, because truth is the spark that will ignite class consciousness.

Freedom is not a privilege bestowed by the bourgeoisie or a hollow word written into laws. Freedom is labor breaking its chains, the human being becoming the subject of their own history, and the destruction of all instruments of exploitation.

The free digital world we dream of is neither a Silicon Valley polluted by the data plunder of monopoly billionaires, nor an authoritarian censorship chamber in which the state bureaucracy holds the switch.

Our future is;

one in which information is the common property of all humanity,
in which communication flows freely without passing through any filter,
in which algorithms work not to dull the human being, but to liberate human labor,
and a classless, uncensorable, communist world in which human does not exploit human!

We will wrest the technological infrastructure from the hands of capital. With our own hands we will build free networks managed not by those who administer the switches, but by those who carry out production. The future is the work of young comrades who do not bow to bans, who wage the militancy of truth, and who will tear freedom away through a class war!

Long Live Our Digital Commons!

Long Live the Free, Uncensorable, and Classless Future!