Social Frenzy and the Engineering of Passivity
To Be Well, Be Together: The Psychology of the Stances in the Replies to Ayşen Şahin's Lament, a Guide to Reason Against Fallacies, and a Road Map
Social Frenzy and the Engineering of Passivity: Thirty-Six Replies Beneath a Lament
To Be Well, Be Together: The Psychology of the Stances in the Replies to Ayşen Şahin's Lament, a Guide to Reason Against Fallacies, and a Road Map
A Short Summary First
To be well, one has to be together. Everything this piece says is an unfolding of that sentence.
On the evening of 21 October, the journalist Ayşen Şahin shared a lament on X. She asked what press statements of 50 people and rallies of 1,000 could bring, beyond easing one's conscience, against an authoritarian regime of 25 years, and she ended with "nothing quite sits right with me". We had answered that lament with Organising 2.0: An Idea for a Justified Revolt; there we set out organising models developing around the world and a concrete proposal for press freedom. This piece is its continuation and its complement. There we looked for an answer to "what can we do?"; here we look at "why can we not?"
Thirty-six replies came in under the post. We look not at who wrote, but at what stance they took. And in almost all of these stances we see the same thing: people who are not well. Angry, tired, hurt, hopeless, alone. Some ask, some accuse, some have given up. But all of them are on their own.
This loneliness is not an accident, and it is not a personal failing. It is the product of an engineering of passivity that has gone on for forty-six years: the depoliticisation of 12 September, neoliberal individualisation, debt and precarity, fear produced by exemplary punishments, a social media feed that does not accumulate anger, and the opposition's spectator politics. The common result of these mechanisms is to cut people off from one another. A person cut off from others cannot be well either.
Psychology tells us three things:
- Three things move people to act together: anger at injustice, belief that together they can change something, and a shared identity. In the replies the anger is very high; the belief that they can change something, and the feeling of "we", are absent. Anger that has no path loses its way and turns on its own side. What we call "social frenzy" in this piece is not a clinical diagnosis. It is anger losing its way in this sense.
- Helplessness comes of itself; control is learned. Talk of persuasion does not break fatalism; a small victory won together does. And small victories, too, are won only together.
- Loneliness tires the mind as well. A tired mind reaches for shortcuts, that is, for fallacies: defining a whole people with a single adjective, looking for the problem in people's character, saying "futile", doing nothing if there is no perfect solution. In a separate section of this piece we set out, one by one, the twelve fallacies visible in the replies, place beneath each the replies that carry it, and answer with a Marxist reply.
The piece is in six parts:
- A map of stances: ten stances and how they are distributed.
- The psychology of collective action: anger, efficacy, identity, and six psychological mechanisms.
- Nine stances, nine portraits: a fictional life that could stand behind each stance, what it feels, the class condition that pushed it there, and what would do it good.
- The engineering of passivity: silent words and six mechanisms.
- Fallacies: twelve patterns, the replies beneath them, Marxist replies opposite them.
- A road map: a core in the first thirty days, a committee and a first victory in three months, an assembly in six months, a spine and a campaign in a year, a generation in three years.
The missing component of the nine people in our nine portraits is the same: one another. Being well is not an individual therapy. It is a common practice. A person becomes well only when they see that together they can change something.
The people did not fall asleep; they were left unorganised. What is needed is not to wake them, but to unite them. Because without unity, one does not become well.
Part One: A Lament, Thirty-Six Replies
On Method
These replies come from Ayşen Şahin's circle of followers. Largely urban, educated, oppositional middle layers. They do not represent the whole of Turkish society. But they make a good cross-section for seeing how the opposition thinks from inside itself, what it is angry at, and what it expects.
We read stances, not persons. We attach no reply to its author, and we reproach no one. To criticise a stance is not to belittle the person who carries it. Each of these stances is the product of a life that has been lived; we want to look at the conditions that produced that life. The portraits below are fictional too: they describe not real persons, but lives that could stand behind a stance.
A society's mood is read less from its slogans than from the replies it gives to a lament.
A Map of Stances
| Stance | Replies | Typical phrase | What it tells |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asking the question outwards | 9 | "So what do you propose?" | There is a search, but the subject is sought outside |
| Joining the diagnosis | 7 | "The result is zero." "They're letting off our steam." | A broad agreement that the ritual is exhausted |
| Moral accusation | 5 | "There is no opposition in Parliament", "politics has turned into gossip" | Explanation through character rather than structure |
| Anger at one's own side | 2 | "The left that opens shops", "serves them right" | Anger changing direction |
| Cultural contempt | 1 | "The educated enlightened are 30 percent at most" | Splitting the class along culture |
| Seeing the boycott as the only tool | 3 (+2 that mention it) | "The only thing of value to them is money" | A right intuition, organising as consumers |
| Fatalism | 3 | "Whatever we do, it's futile." "So." | Learned helplessness |
| Waiting for a miracle | 1 | "Until the election… maybe he'll step down" | Handing power over to the calendar |
| Looking for a new subject | 4 | Youth, standing side by side, joy in the street, a long horizon | A seed |
| Defending the author | 1 | "It has to be understood rightly" | A reflex of solidarity |
What is most striking is the distribution of the numbers. There are twenty-one replies that ask, join, or accuse. Four replies propose something; only one of them names a concrete form (a flashmob). Diagnosis is plentiful, the prescription scarce.
On the Word "Frenzy"
The phrase "social frenzy" is generally used in Turkey after sudden explosions of violence. We do not use the word as a clinical diagnosis. To declare a society "mad" is right neither scientifically nor politically. The sense in which we use it is this: anger losing its real object and losing its way.
In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon observes something striking in colonial society: when the accumulated anger of the colonised person cannot turn on its real source, it turns first on their own brother or sister. Anger does not disappear; it changes direction. Gramsci, too, describes the crisis in the Prison Notebooks as follows: the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
In these replies, too, anger loses its way, in words rather than in violence: "the majority cracking sunflower seeds", "the half-educated people", "the left that opens shops", "the people of this country". Those who form these sentences are among those most angry at the government. But because that anger cannot find a path it can travel, it turns on its own side.
Anger does not disappear; if it cannot find its path, it changes direction. Organisation is what opens anger's path.
Part Two: The Psychology of Collective Action
Before going into the stances one by one, let us set a frame for reading them. Social psychology and psychoanalysis give us usable tools for why people do or do not move together. These tools do not take the place of Marxist analysis; they complete it. The alienation Marx describes in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is not only an economic relation. It is also a feeling that is lived: the human being's alienation from their own labour, from its product, from their species, and from other human beings. Psychology helps us draw the inner map of this experience.
Three components: anger, efficacy, identity
In 2008 the social psychologists Martijn van Zomeren, Tom Postmes and Russell Spears published a meta-analysis bringing together more than a hundred studies of collective action. The conclusion they reached is simple but strong: three things move people to act together.
A sense of injustice, and anger: "This is wrong and unacceptable."
A belief in collective efficacy: "Together we can change something."
A shared identity: there is a "we", and I am part of it.
When all three are there, people move. When one is missing, the movement either never starts, or starts and dies away.
Let us read the thirty-six replies with these three components:
| Component | State in the replies | Its sign |
|---|---|---|
| Anger | Very high | Almost every reply is angry |
| Belief in efficacy | Very low | "Futile", "the result is zero", "what have we gained?" |
| Shared identity | Scattered and split | "The people", "they", "you", "the left", "the half-educated", in place of "we" |
The table sums the situation up at a glance: there is anger, but neither a belief in efficacy nor a shared identity carries it. Anger without a belief in efficacy cannot find a place to go. Anger without a shared identity looks for its target inside itself. This is the psychological formula of what we call "social frenzy".
In Marxist language: anger is the spontaneous product of the relation of exploitation and repression. Belief in efficacy and a shared identity are not born spontaneously; they are produced inside organising, through common experience, through victories that are won. Class consciousness is precisely the name of these two: the feeling of "we", and the belief that "we can change it".
Six mechanisms
Reading the replies, we see six psychological mechanisms coming into play again and again.
Learned helplessness, and the learning of control. The experiments Martin Seligman and Steven Maier began in 1967 showed that a living being which cannot change the outcome whatever it does stops trying after a while. But the same researchers' reassessment in 2016, with findings from neuroscience, says something more important: under prolonged pressure, passivity is not in fact learned. It is the default response. What is learned is control. People do not learn helplessness; helplessness comes of itself. What has to be learned is to experience that one can change something. The political meaning of this finding is plain: against fatalism, what is required is not persuasion but experience.
The fundamental attribution error. In 1977 the psychologist Lee Ross showed that, in explaining other people's behaviour, people understate the situation and overstate personality. We say "they were late because they are irresponsible"; we do not think of the traffic, the bus, the fact that they had to drop a child at school. At a social scale this error looks like this: "The people do not come out into the street because they are cowards." The conditions that produce the fear — the risk of losing one's job, debt, detention, the lack of organisation — become invisible.
Displacement, and horizontal hostility. One of the classic defence mechanisms of psychoanalysis: a person who cannot direct a feeling at its real object directs it at a safer object. Like the worker who is angry at the boss and comes home to shout at the family. What Fanon saw in colonial society is the social form of this. The sentences "serves them right" and "the left that opens shops" in the replies are also anger displaced from the government onto its own side.
Diffusion of responsibility. The experiments of John Darley and Bibb Latané in 1968 showed that the more people there are around in an emergency, the lower each one's probability of helping. Everyone thinks someone else will act. The same thing happens in a crowded opposition public: everyone says "someone should do something", and assumes that the "someone" is not themselves. The question "what do you propose?" is one form of this diffusion.
Moral licensing, and "duty". The moral licensing effect that Benoît Monin and Dale Miller described in 2001: when we feel we have done a good thing, we grant ourselves the right to make less effort at the next step. The 2014 research of Kirk Kristofferson and colleagues tested this for public shows of support: people who had given symbolic support to a cause in front of everyone were afterwards less inclined to make a meaningful contribution to that cause. The phrase in the lament, "going through the motions of a duty, counting oneself as having done something and easing one's conscience", is this finding in everyday language. Ritual action can do a dangerous thing: it can satisfy the need to act, and take the place of real action.
Escape from freedom. In Escape from Freedom (1941), Erich Fromm writes that the modern human being, cut loose from traditional bonds, escapes the loneliness and powerlessness they live in three ways: taking refuge in authority, destructiveness, and automaton conformity. These three ways appear in our replies too. The stance that waits for a plan carries the desire to take refuge in authority, "serves them right" carries destructiveness, and saying "futile" and surrendering to the flow carries automaton conformity. Fromm's solution was "positive freedom": the human being forming a spontaneous and active bond with others. In our language: organising.
| Mechanism | How it looks in the replies | Its antidote |
|---|---|---|
| Learned helplessness | "Futile", "in vain" | An experience of control: a small victory |
| Fundamental attribution error | "The people are cowards", "half-educated" | Seeing the situation: counting the conditions |
| Displacement | "Serves them right", "the left that opens shops" | Giving anger its real object |
| Diffusion of responsibility | "What do you propose?" | The unit of "me and five people" |
| Moral licensing | "Duty", "they're letting off our steam" | Tying the ritual to a next step |
| Escape from freedom | Waiting for a leader, destructiveness, surrender | Positive freedom: an active bond, organisation |
Part Three: Nine Stances, Nine Portraits
The portraits below are fictional. None of them describes a real person; each represents one of the thousands of lives that could stand behind a stance. The occupation, age and gender in the portraits are accidental: anyone can carry the same stance. The aim is not to shut people into categories, but to look from inside a stance.
The one who asks: "So what do you propose?"
Portrait. Selin is thirty-four and works in the finance unit of a logistics company. She boards the company shuttle at eight in the morning and gets home at seven in the evening. On 19 March she went to Saraçhane for two evenings; on the third evening she could not go, because she had a meeting the next day. She joined the boycott too; for a month she did not shop from certain brands. Then the boycott died down, and nobody said anything. Now, at every arrest, she reads an angry post on her phone, likes it, sometimes writes a reply. When she read the lament, what passed through her was this: "You're right, but what are we going to do? Let someone tell me, and I'll do it."
Psychological depth. Selin's question is sincere. She is not passive; on the contrary, she is ready to do something. But what she is ready for is a task: let someone tell her what to do, and she will do it. This is a soft form of the diffusion of responsibility, and of what Fromm called "taking refuge in authority". Uncertainty tires a person; what psychologists call the "need for cognitive closure" produces a search for a plan that will remove the uncertainty at once. Selin is looking for a plan, because the lack of a plan is wearing her out.
Class ground. In Selin's life, deciding is not something that belongs to her. At the workplace, tasks come from above; she carries them out. In politics she expects the same pattern: the leader presents a plan, she carries it out. It is not realistic to expect a person who has no democracy at the workplace to become, spontaneously, a democratic subject in politics. The capitalist division of labour separates the work of managing from the work of carrying out; this separation shapes a person's political selfhood too.
What would do her good? Not a plan, a table. In place of a leader who tells Selin "do this", five people who say "come, let us decide together". Seeing that deciding is itself an experience, and that what she will feel the first time she answers her own question will be much stronger than carrying out a plan. First step: sitting one evening with two workmates who take the same shuttle, and talking about "what can we do?"
The one who diagnoses: "The result is zero, they're letting off our steam"
Portrait. Mehmet is fifty-two, a retired high-school teacher. In the late 1990s he was a union member; in the 2000s he went to the Republic rallies, in the 2010s to Gezi, in the 2020s to almost every opposition rally. He cannot count how many. Each time he went with hope and came back tired. When he read the lament, it was as if he had found his own sentence: "Yes, they're letting off our steam." But on Saturday he will go again. He knows that if he does not go he will feel worse.
Psychological depth. Mehmet is living a cognitive contradiction: the dissonance Leon Festinger described in 1957. He does not believe in the rally, but he goes. He can resolve this contradiction in two ways: either he stops going (he says "futile" and passes into fatalism), or he gives his going a new meaning ("duty"). For now he chooses the second. But this meaning does not satisfy him; it only protects him from guilt. The phrase "they're letting off our steam" says this too: the rally has become not the means by which anger presses on the system, but the means by which the system discharges anger safely. Mehmet has noticed this. And because he has noticed, he suffers.
Class ground. Mehmet's generation is among the last that still remember an organised society. He knows the years when he was a union member; he knows what it means to take a decision in a meeting, to tie an action to a next step. He senses that this is what is missing in today's rallies. But he is retired; there is no workplace, no union, no organisation he belongs to. He has the knowledge. He does not have the structure.
What would do him good? Passing his knowledge on to a structure. The greatest treasure of Mehmet's generation is experience: how a meeting is held, how a decision is taken, how an action is planned. In a neighbourhood committee, in a solidarity network, in a working group that young people have set up, this experience is very valuable. First step: not going to the rally alone; going with three people from the neighbourhood, and on the way back sitting in a tea house and talking about "what next?"
The one who accuses morally: "There is no opposition in Parliament"
Portrait. Kemal is forty-five, a project engineer at a construction company. He follows politics in detail; every night he watches the news programmes and reads the statements of all the opposition parties. He is angry at all of them: the MPs in Parliament are "content with their lives", the opposition "takes politics for gossip", the parties do their work "just so friends can see them at the market". The reply he wrote under the lament is part of this anger too.
Psychological depth. An important part of Kemal's criticisms is justified. But the form of the explanation carries the fundamental attribution error: he sees people's character as the cause of the problem (comfort, incompetence, hypocrisy), and does not see the structure. This approach also provides a kind of relief: the guilty party is known, and it is not me. As the person who defines the problem, Kemal keeps himself outside the problem. The commentator's position saves one from the burden of being an actor.
Class ground. Kemal's job is to solve problems technically. When there is a snag on a building site, he finds which subcontractor, which engineer, made the mistake. He looks at politics with the same eye: who made the mistake? But politics is not a building site. On a site, the problem can be solved by changing the person who made the mistake; in politics, even if the persons change, the structure goes on producing the same kind of people. Kemal's engineering mind hits a limit here: social problems are born not of persons, but of relations.
What would do him good? Turning his criticism into an analysis, and his analysis into a proposal. Asking, in place of "there is no opposition in Parliament", "why is there none, which conditions produce this, and what can we do to change these conditions?" And looking at his own workplace: in a construction company, in a sector where subcontracted workers are killed in workplace murders, there is a place where the engineer too can organise. First step: going to a meeting of his own professional organisation (a chamber, a union).
The one angry at their own side: "Serves them right"
Portrait. Hasan is sixty-one. In his youth he was in a left organisation; on 12 September he was detained, and then he stayed away from politics for many years. In the 2000s he hoped again, joined a few left parties, and left. He watched the splits, the changes of name, the statements accusing one another. Now he writes: "there is no one as self-seeking, cowardly and fawning on power as the people of this country; the left most of all; serves them right." Beneath his anger there is a deep grief.
Psychological depth. Hasan's anger is a displacement. His real anger is at the state that detained him forty-six years ago, at the defeat that broke his life apart. But that anger was never able to turn into a reckoning. That is why it now turns on those nearest him, on his own side. There is a grief inside this too: grief for a lost world, for hope, for youth. When grief cannot be mourned, it turns into anger. The sentence "serves them right" looks like contempt, but it is in fact the voice of a wound. What Freud called "the narcissism of small differences" is at work here too: we are angriest at those who most resemble us, because our expectation of them is high.
Class ground. Hasan's generation was the direct target of 12 September. Their organisations were broken up, their friends went to prison, died, or left the country. A large part of that generation was never able to reckon, collectively, with its own defeat. This lack of a reckoning turned into individual pains, and individual pains into anger directed at one's own side. The fragmentation of the left is not only an ideological problem; it is also the broken memory of a generation that could not mourn.
What would do him good? His anger being taken seriously, and his grief being named. Reproaching Hasan drives him further off. One has to be able to say to him: "you are right to be hurt, but the source of this hurt is not you, and it is not us; the source is 12 September and a defeat that was never reckoned with." The defeat-memory of Hasan's generation is one of the most valuable lessons for younger generations. First step: listening to a story like Hasan's, recording it, sharing it with the young. Talking about the defeat is the first condition of not living it again.
The one who looks down: "Enlightened, educated people are 30 percent at most"
Portrait. Ayla is forty-eight, a specialist doctor at a public hospital. Her children go to a private school. She wants all children to live in an enlightened country; she is sincere. But when she looks around her, she thinks the people who want this are a minority: "Enlightened, educated people are 30 percent at most. The rest are half-educated, thinking of today, people whose worry is to leave their child some illicit little house."
Psychological depth. Ayla's schema is a strategy of protecting social identity. The least painful way of explaining defeat is to look for the cause of the defeat outside one's own group: we know what is right, they do not. This is an explanation that protects the value of one's own group, but makes it impossible to form a bond with another group. The fundamental attribution error is here too: the behaviour of the person "whose worry is to leave a house to their child" is read as a flaw of character ("being half-educated"), and not as a rational strategy followed in order to protect one's family in a world without security.
Class ground. Ayla works for a wage. She does on-call shifts at a public hospital, she is exposed to violence, she is supervised by a performance system, her salary stays below inflation. In this respect she shares the same class condition as the patient's relative she calls "half-educated": both are wage labourers. What separates them is not class, but education, cultural capital and way of life. The old and chronic illness of the oppositional middle class in Turkey is to turn this cultural difference into a political abyss. And this offers the government's "elites and the nation" discourse a new piece of evidence every day.
What would do her good? Seeing the common condition at her own workplace. In Ayla's hospital, the nurse, the cleaner, the security guard, the secretary and the doctor work under the same management, with the same budget cuts, with the same risk of violence. The common struggle of health workers is the most natural way for Ayla to stand side by side with the people she calls "half-educated". First step: going to a meeting of the health workers' union at the hospital, and sitting at the same table there as the cleaner.
The boycotter: "The only thing of value to them is money"
Portrait. Derya is twenty-nine, a mother of two, and works part-time in a shop. She joined the boycott in the spring of 2025 with her whole heart. She did not shop from the brands on the list, she told the women in the neighbourhood, she shared it in WhatsApp groups. She saw that ministers were sent out shopping the next day, that celebrities who supported the boycott were dropped from their series, and she thought "it's working". Then the boycott died down. Nobody said "continue". The shopkeepers in the neighbourhood said "you're sinking us too". Now she says "if only we had not given up".
Psychological depth. We can say that Derya has the strongest intuition among the replies. She experienced the belief in collective efficacy in the boycott: the government's reaction showed her that she could change something. In the terms of Seligman and Maier's 2016 finding, she learned control for a moment. But then that control was taken from her hands: because the boycott was not organised, it could not be sustained. This experience is more painful than never winning at all. A victory left half-finished is the shortest road to fatalism. Derya is exactly on that threshold now.
Class ground. Derya works in a shop; that is, she is both a consumer and a sales worker. In the boycott she tried to organise as a consumer. But the consumer is scattered: every purchase is a choice made alone, in one's own home, with one's own budget. Among them there is no meeting, no decision-making body, no bond of solidarity. The boycott also struck without distinguishing capital, and it hit the small shopkeepers too. At Derya's own workplace there is another power: when the sales workers in the shop come together, they can affect the running of a chain much more directly than consumers can.
What would do her good? Seeing the boycott experience not as something lost, but as a lesson. She had learned control; now what is needed is a structure that will make that control sustainable. First step: turning the WhatsApp group she set up with the women in the neighbourhood into a solidarity group; meeting face to face once a week, deciding the next action together, choosing a target that includes the shopkeepers instead of clashing with them. And talking, at her own workplace, with her workmates in the shop.
The boycott asked the right question: where can we hurt them? But it answered with the wrong unit. The basket is scattered; the counter stands side by side.
The fatalist: "Whatever we do, it's futile"
Portrait. Emre is twenty-six, a university graduate, and has been working as a courier for two years because he could not find a job. Twelve hours a day on the motorbike. The app scores him, punishes him, cuts his pay. He has never spoken face to face with a boss. He voted in the elections; the result did not change. His friends went abroad. When he read the lament, he wrote a single word: "Futile."
Psychological depth. Emre's fatalism is not irrational; it is a rational conclusion drawn from experience. According to Seligman and Maier's new finding, under prolonged pressure passivity is the default response; what is learned is control. Emre has never experienced control in his life. An algorithm runs his job; whatever he does, his score falls arbitrarily. It is the same in politics: he voted, it did not change. His fatalism is not a flaw of character. It is the psychological summary of a life without control. It is also close to what Fromm called "automaton conformity": Emre has not surrendered, but he has no experience that resistance has a meaning either.
Class ground. Emre is the most typical worker of platform capitalism. An unseen boss, an algorithm that supervises constantly, a form of work isolated from workmates. The purest form of what Marx called alienation: he does not see the product of his labour, he does not control the labour process, he does not know his workmates. But at the same time he meets hundreds of couriers in the streets, at the traffic lights, in front of restaurants. He is not alone; he is made to feel alone.
What would do him good? An experience of control. A couriers' association, or a solidarity group, objecting collectively to an unjust penalty, and winning. Emre seeing, for the first time in his life, that he has changed something. First step: setting up a messaging group with the couriers he meets while waiting in front of the same restaurant; recording unjust penalties and unpaid wages together. The association of the data labellers in Kenya, and the couriers' struggle in Spain, both started like this.
The one waiting for a miracle: "Until the election… maybe he'll step down"
Portrait. Nuran is sixty-seven, a retired civil servant. At every election she is a polling-station officer, and she goes to every rally. She tells her grandchildren "there's not long left, they'll go". Sometimes she imagines that something will happen: an illness, a scandal, a sudden collapse. "At the moment we least expect, they will collapse like a sandcastle."
Psychological depth. Nuran's hope is real, and it is valuable. But this hope has a form: the subject of change is not the people; it is the calendar, chance, biology. This is a political form of what psychologists call an "external locus of control": what determines events is not my actions, but outside forces. This expectation relieves a person, because it takes the burden off their shoulders. But for that very reason it makes a person passive: if change is going to come of itself, there is no need to organise.
Class ground. Nuran's generation worked in a period when the state provided an order and a continuity. The security of a civil-service post, the predictability of retirement. She believes that change, too, will come from inside the working of this order, by election, through the institutions. 2026 showed how fragile this belief is: the planks of the road to the ballot box can be pulled up by court rulings, by trustees, by access bans.
What would do her good? Keeping her hope, but adding a subject to it. Nuran's work as a polling-station officer is an experience of organisation: a polling-station board, a distribution of tasks, a responsibility. It is possible to carry this experience outside election day. First step: meeting, outside the election as well, the people she met while serving at the polling station; setting up a solidarity network in the neighbourhood, a meeting of old and young, a reading group. If the sandcastle is going to collapse, organising the waves that will bring it down.
The one who seeks: youth, the body, joy, a long horizon
Portrait. Deniz is twenty-one, a university student. On 19 March 2025 she was beside the barricade in front of her university. She remembers that night as the most alive night of her life: thousands of young people, slogans, a common energy. Then there were detentions, investigations to suspend people from school were opened, and some of her friends grew afraid and pulled back. But Deniz is still looking for something. The person who wrote "we have to learn to enjoy ourselves in the street", the person who wrote "talking face to face, standing side by side", and the person who wrote "peoples find what is right by doing what is wrong" are all speaking from a place close to her.
Psychological depth. Deniz lived what Émile Durkheim called "collective effervescence": an energy a community produces when it comes together, an energy that surpasses the individual. This experience revived all three components in her at once: anger, a shared identity ("we, the young"), and, for a short moment, efficacy too ("the barricade came down"). But effervescence does not last. As Durkheim also wrote, if the community does not keep renewing this energy with rituals and institutions, the energy disperses. The youth of 19 March dispersed too, because it could not turn into a lasting structure. Deniz's search is a search to find that effervescence again, and this time to sustain it.
Class ground. Deniz's generation is the generation of a future without security. A diploma is not a guarantee of a job, the rent cannot be paid, owning a home is a dream. This generation does not trust the political patterns of earlier generations either: the sentence "the old kind of politics is finished" is the expression of this mistrust. It is also the generation that uses digital tools best, and is most open to horizontal relations. It is this generation that set up the spokesperson-less plenums in Serbia, that ran the neighbourhood committees in Sudan, that founded the association of AI workers in Kenya.
What would do her good? Turning effervescence into a structure. A student assembly on campus, a working group, a solidarity network. And stepping outside her own generation: when Mehmet's experience, Hasan's memory of defeat, Nuran's polling-station organisation and Deniz's energy come together, they become a force. First step: setting up a group on campus that meets once a week with five friends; reading together how the plenums in Serbia work.
Enthusiasm is a spark; organisation is a hearth. A hearth without a spark does not catch; a spark without a hearth goes out.
Nine Portraits Side by Side
| Portrait | Stance | Dominant mechanism | Missing component | First step |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Selin | Asks | Diffusion of responsibility, refuge in authority | The experience of being a subject | A table of five |
| Mehmet | Diagnoses | Cognitive dissonance, moral licensing | A structure | Passing his experience on to a committee |
| Kemal | Accuses morally | Fundamental attribution error, the commentator's position | Taking part oneself | Going to his own professional organisation |
| Hasan | Angry at his own side | Displacement, unmourned grief | A reckoning | Passing the memory of defeat on to the young |
| Ayla | Looks down | Protection of social identity, attribution error | A shared class identity | Sitting at a common table at the workplace |
| Derya | Boycotts | An experience of control left half-finished | A structure that can last | Turning the WhatsApp group into a solidarity group |
| Emre | Fatalist | Lack of control, alienation | An experience of control | A common record and objection with other couriers |
| Nuran | Waits for a miracle | External locus of control | A subject | Carrying the polling-station network outside the election |
| Deniz | Seeks | The dispersal of collective effervescence | Continuity | A weekly group on campus |
These nine people look far from one another. But all of them are wage labourers or retired labourers, all of them live under the same government, all of them carry the same anger. What separates them is not class; it is stance, generation, culture and loneliness. And the component all of them lack is in fact the same: one another.
Part Four: The Engineering of Passivity
The Absence of Data: Silent Words
First let us look at what is not in the replies. In none of the thirty-six replies do the following words appear: union, workplace, strike, work stoppage, worker, labourer, collective agreement, wage.
The words that are used are these: the people, the nation, the citizen, the opposition, the politician, the party, Parliament, the election, the boycott, the rally, the street.
The difference between these two lists is a class map. People describe themselves as voter, spectator and consumer; not as producer. Yet, like everyone in our nine portraits, the great majority of those who wrote these replies also work for a wage, or have worked. But when they think about politics, the workplace does not come to mind.
This is not an accident. The longest-running success of 12 September was to erase the language of class from public life. In place of the word "worker" came "employee", "personnel", "human resources"; in place of the word "class" came "segment", "citizen", "nation". Forty-six years later, this erasure seems to have succeeded even in the opposition public's own language. As of July 2026, only 13.8 percent of 17.6 million registered workers are union members. The silence in the replies is this figure in language.
The absence of data is also data. When a society forgets the words with which to name its own power, it forgets how to use that power too.
The Engineering: Six Mechanisms
"Social engineering" can suggest a conspiracy: people sitting in a centre and making a plan to passivise society. We do not think that way. But we say this: passivity is not a nature, it is a product. The sum of mechanisms built in different periods, by different actors, but serving the same class interest, that is, capital's control over labour. In Gramsci's language: domination is established not only by force, but also by consent. When consent cannot be produced, passivity serves as well. The ideal for power is not to be supported, but to be impossible to oppose.
Depoliticisation: the legacy of 12 September. The coup took organised society as its target: it shut down DİSK, it broke up the unions, the associations, the student organisations, it founded YÖK, it restricted the right to strike. A generation was taught the lesson "don't get mixed up in politics". As we told in the 12 September Dossier, this law and this fear have lived for forty-six years without a reckoning. Hasan's portrait is one face of this legacy.
Individualisation: the neoliberal subject. From the 1980s on, individual solutions were put in place of collective securities: the market in place of the public service, private insurance in place of social security, the career plan in place of the union. Everyone became the "entrepreneur" of their own life. Success is an individual virtue, failure an individual fault. In this world the answer to "what shall we do?" is individual too: work harder, leave the country, save your own child. The person Ayla looks down on, "thinking of leaving a house to their child", is exactly the product of this world.
Debt and precarity: livelihood as discipline. Credit-card debt, rent, instalments and insecure work lock people, every month, onto the next payment. Someone thinking about the end of the month cannot think about a generational horizon. The fear of losing one's job multiplies the cost of joining an action. Debt is one of the most effective tools for providing discipline without using the stick: it turns people into individuals who supervise themselves. This is also why Selin could not go to Saraçhane on the third evening.
Exemplary punishment: the economy of fear. Power does not punish everyone; it is enough to punish a few people visibly, and heavily. A journalist is arrested for a story they did not write. A writer is detained for saying "statements are not enough, a united struggle in the street is necessary". Celebrities who supported the boycott are dropped from their series. The message reaches thousands of people: the next one could be you. The economy of fear is built on an individual calculation: "What happens if I take the risk on my own?" The answer is always "you lose". What breaks the fear is not speeches about courage. It is the sharing of the risk.
The feed: anger that does not accumulate. Social media shares anger out, but it does not accumulate it. Every day a new scandal, a new arrest, a new wave of anger; the previous wave disappears under the next. The algorithm brings forward the content that brings the most interaction; and what brings the most interaction is usually anger and hopelessness. People get angry every day, share, grow tired, but nothing accumulates. The moral licensing effect works here too: sharing a post satisfies the need to act, and takes the place of real action. The feed is not an organisation; it is an illusion standing in for the organisation.
Spectator politics: the opposition's own share. The last mechanism is the opposition itself. For years, opposition politics was organised as a show: the leader speaks from the top of the bus, the crowd listens, the cameras film, the crowd disperses. The people's role is to be there and to applaud. Deciding, organising, sustaining are the work of the leader and the party apparatus. That the question "what do you propose?" was asked nine times is the direct result of this training.
Power made people passive through fear, the opposition through spectacle. The sum of the two is a society that has forgotten its own strength.
Two Stories Side by Side
| The common story | A class reading |
|---|---|
| The people fell asleep | The people were left unorganised |
| The people are cowards | The risk was loaded onto the individual, and not shared |
| The people are ignorant, "half-educated" | They are following individual strategies against precarity |
| The opposition is incompetent | The opposition built spectator politics |
| The boycott did not work | It hit the limit of organising as consumers |
| Whatever we do, it's futile | An experience of control was never lived |
| Let us wait for the election | The security of the ballot box lies outside the ballot box |
| The people of this country are like this | The people of this country were made like this, and can be made otherwise |
What Is Being Covered Over?
The story "the people fell asleep" covers three things over. Class: it is not asked whose organising was prevented, and who is organised; the organisations of capital, the employers' confederations, the chambers of commerce have no problem of organising at all. Responsibility: the person who says "the people are cowards" is saved from the question "did we build an organisation that would share the people's fear?" Possibility: if passivity is a nature, it cannot be changed. But if passivity was produced, activity can be produced too. Engineering does not run in one direction only.
Part Five: Fallacies: The Shortcuts of a Tired Mind, and Marxist Replies
How Should This Section Be Read?
A fallacy is a piece of reasoning that looks right but leads to a wrong conclusion. It is born, most of the time, not of bad faith but of tiredness. When we are angry, alone or hopeless, our mind reaches for shortcuts: it reduces a complex problem to a single cause, a single culprit, a single adjective. These shortcuts relieve us for a moment, but they take us to the wrong place.
In this section we set out, one by one, the twelve fallacy patterns we identified in the replies to Ayşen Şahin's post. For each fallacy there are four things:
- What it is: the general definition of the fallacy, and why it misleads.
- In the replies: the replies that carry that fallacy, as they were written, and unnamed. They are translated here.
- The Marxist reply: the reasoning we propose in place of the fallacy.
- The question to ask: the question we can ask ourselves the next time we are about to take the same shortcut.
Our purpose in quoting the replies here is not to expose anyone. Everyone who wrote these sentences shows that any one of us could form one of these sentences one day. To show the fallacy is not to belittle the person who formed it; it is an invitation to walk together a longer but truer path. For the general frame, see our texts Revolutionary Discussion Ethics and Guide to Purging Fallacies and Criticizing as Comrades, Advancing Together.
One more note: not all of the replies are fallacies. A reply that asks "So what do you propose? I ask in earnest. Because an idea opens an idea" is a door opened onto debate. A reply that says "There is no single method. Europe did not get here easily… Peoples find what is right by doing what is wrong" is one of the healthiest stances against the feeling of being trapped. And the reply that says "the only thing that got under the government's skin was the boycott" carries, as we will see below, a right intuition. The fallacies section is there to make visible the shortcuts that stand beside these healthy voices.
Essentialist Generalisation: "The people of this country are like that"
What it is. Defining millions of people with a single adjective, and counting that adjective as an unchanging "essence". The combination of a hasty generalisation and essentialism. Classes, generations, regions, experiences are reduced to a single character; and it is assumed, besides, that this character will never change. It misleads, because it makes invisible the conditions that produce human behaviour, and rejects the possibility of change from the start.
In the replies:
"There is no one as self-seeking, cowardly and fawning on power as the people of this country. The left most of all. Serves them right."
"The problem is less the politicians than a broad majority that now and then waves a flag from the window, sings the İzmir March, and cracks sunflower seeds in front of the television or the keyboard."
The Marxist reply. There is no such thing as a fixed human nature. As Marx wrote in the Theses on Feuerbach (1845), the human essence is the ensemble of social relations. Fear, self-seeking or submission is not a society's "character"; it is the product of the relations in that society. The same "cowardly" people stopped the factories on 15–16 June 1970, carried out the Spring Actions in 1989, came out into the parks in 2013, and tore down a barricade in 2025. When the conditions change, the behaviour changes too. The "majority cracking sunflower seeds" did not choose to crack seeds; they were not offered a structure they could join, in which they could get a result, and in which they could share their fear.
The question to ask: "Why are these people behaving like this? Which conditions push them to it? What happens if those conditions change?"
Personalisation: Looking for the problem in character rather than structure
What it is. Explaining a social problem by the moral faults of individual persons. The political form of the error called, in psychology, the "fundamental attribution error": understating the situation while explaining behaviour, overstating personality. It misleads, because it gives the impression that the problem will be solved when the persons are changed; whereas the same structure goes on producing the same kind of persons.
In the replies:
"Right now there is no opposition in Parliament, and no MP who intends to oppose. First we have to accept that. They are all content with their lives: a few actions meant to let the people's steam off, one or two statements, and criticism posted on X... job done!"
"Yeni Parti is playing at 'just so friends can see us at the market'; they're stuck. In a relatively calm period they miss doing bureaucratic work between the parliamentary benches and the party building."
"The opposition spent its last breath chasing a contractor who swerved from the right lane into the left."
The Marxist reply. Part of the observations in these replies is justified: the ineffectiveness in Parliament, party bureaucracy, the wrong choice of candidates are real problems. But the form of the explanation is wrong. An MP being "comfortable" is the result of there being no organised base that elects them, supervises them and calls them to account. Where there is a mass trade-union movement, an organised popular base, the MP cannot be comfortable either. The party doing its work "bureaucratically" is also the result of the party raising its own base as spectators. The problem is not people's character; it is the absence of an organised force that would supervise them. And building that force is the work of us who accuse the MPs.
The question to ask: "If this person changed, would the problem be solved? If it would not, where is the problem? And what is my share in the solution of that problem?"
Cultural Elitism: "The half-educated people"
What it is. Separating people by level of education, cultural preferences or way of life, and tying political attitude to this separation. Defining one's own group as "enlightened" and declaring the other group the cause of the defeat. It misleads, because it makes invisible the real line that divides society, that is, the relation of property and labour, and sets people who have a common interest against one another.
In the replies:
"In this country, the educated, enlightened person who wants not only their own children but all children to live in an enlightened Turkey is 30 percent at most; the half-educated, thinking not of tomorrow but of today, and if they think of tomorrow, only of leaving their own children some illicit, tumbledown house…"
The Marxist reply. The "educated" doctor and the "half-educated" relative of a patient live the same pressure on wages, the same rent crisis, the same precarity. Both are wage labourers. What separates them is not class, but cultural capital. Turning this separation into a political abyss is the old and chronic illness of the oppositional middle class in Turkey, and it offers the government's "elites and the nation" discourse a new piece of evidence every day. The person thinking of "leaving their child an illicit house" has to be reread too: someone who, in a world where the state gives no security, sees property as the only way to protect their family. This is not "being half-educated". It is an individual strategy against precarity. As long as we cannot put a collective security in place of that individual strategy, people will go on clinging to individual securities. Gramsci's concept of the "organic intellectual" shows the way here: the intellectual's work is not to stand above the people, but to stand inside the people, turning their experience into thought.
An opposition that looks down on the people is power's best instrument of propaganda.
The question to ask: "Do I depend on the same employer, the same landlord, the same bank as this person? If so, what is the real difference between us?"
False Dilemma: "A rally, or nothing"
What it is. Artificially reducing the options to two: "either this, or none of it." When in reality there are many options, only the two extremes are offered. It misleads, because every criticism directed at the first option is read as a defence of the second, that is, of doing nothing.
In the replies:
"What is your advice? Draw up a plan of action and recommend it. No rally, you criticise; there is a rally, you criticise. Go on, tell us the right way."
"If you think the street has grown old, what do you think should be done, what is your solution?"
The Marxist reply. The repertoire of action is not squeezed between the rally and silence. A short walkout at the workplace, a rolling strike, a slowdown, a publication blackout, a mass resignation, a solidarity network, a cooperative, following a trial, a neighbourhood assembly, cross-border fraternity. In our piece Organising 2.0 we told of these with examples from around the world, from Serbia to Florence, from Sudan to Kenya. Ayşen Şahin's lament was directed not at the rally, but at the rally being the only tool, and at its not being tied to a next step. What is criticised is not the street. It is the street being cut off from a timetable, from an organisation, from a demand.
The question to ask: "Are there really only two options, or am I the one who sees only two?"
Shifting the Burden: "Whoever criticises should first offer a solution"
What it is. Tying the truth of a diagnosis to whether the person who made the diagnosis offers a ready solution. A form of shifting the burden of proof; and most of the time it combines with an attack on the person ("you criticise everything anyway"). It misleads, because saying that a problem exists and knowing the solution of that problem are separate things. This pattern can also be used as a way of silencing criticism.
In the replies:
"This isn't something to write on a platform full of people who constantly criticise something and never offer a solution, but what do you actually want, sister, say it plain so we know. What would really satisfy you, that's what I'm asking. Nobody in this country can get you to like anything; I wonder if that's the real problem?"
"Everyone says what is being done is not enough, but nobody says concretely what should be done. The only thing said is the boycott. What else??"
"We listen to everyone on the mistakes that have been made (and most of these are justified reproaches), but we cannot get a realistic proposal for a solution from anyone."
The Marxist reply. Two separate things have to be distinguished. First, the demand for a solution is legitimate: people are looking for a path, and it is their right to ask for this path. Most of these replies come from a sincere search. Second, the truth of the diagnosis does not depend on the solution being ready. When a doctor diagnoses the illness, the diagnosis can be right even if they do not know the treatment at once. When Marx wrote Capital, he wrote not a detailed plan of a socialist society but a critique of the working of capitalism; critique is the precondition of the solution. The real problem is where the question is directed: the solution cannot be expected from a single person, from a journalist, from a leader. The right form of the question "what do you propose?" is the question "what can we do?" We wrote a proposal in order to produce the answer to this question together: Organising 2.0. But that proposal, too, gains meaning only when it is discussed together, and applied together.
The question to ask: "Is the diagnosis right? If it is, whom am I expecting the solution from? And where am I inside that solution?"
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: "Futile"
What it is. The belief that "nothing works" holding people back from trying, and then, because nobody tries, nothing really working. The prophecy produces its own evidence. This is often accompanied by a hasty inference from the past to the future: "It did not work in the past, therefore it will not work in the future either." It misleads, because what was tried in the past and what could be tried in the future may not be the same thing.
In the replies:
"Because, whatever we do, it's futile."
"Don't waste your energy for nothing; it's the same old tune for years, unfortunately."
"So."
"Since Mayor Ahmet was arrested in Esenyurt we have held rallies almost constantly; what have we gained?"
The Marxist reply. The last reply is different from the others: "What have we gained?" is not a prophecy, it is a justified question. And the answer is inside it: we did the same thing all along, that is, we held rallies. The conclusion "futile" draws a wrong generalisation from this experience. Not everything was tried; the same thing was tried all along. History is full of moments when things called "futile" worked. In the early 1960s, when the strike was banned in Turkey, the Kavel workers went on strike and opened the way to the law that brought the right to strike. In Serbia, in the autumn of 2024, nobody foresaw that occupations beginning in a few faculties would force a prime minister to resign. Psychology says the same thing: according to Seligman and Maier's 2016 reassessment, under prolonged pressure helplessness comes of itself; what has to be learned is control. "Futile" is not a fact. It is the sign of an experience of control that has not yet been lived. And control is experienced not alone, but only together.
The question to ask: "Was everything really tried, or was the same thing tried all along?"
The Nirvana Fallacy: "If it does not solve the root, it is letting off steam"
What it is. Counting a solution worthless if it does not solve the problem entirely. Behaving as if there is no solution at all if there is no perfect solution. It misleads, because no single step solves a large problem entirely; by this measure, no step can be taken.
In the replies:
"The result is zero. Something must be done for rational solutions that will get a concrete result and aim at the root of the problem. The rest is letting off steam. I'm sorry."
"They're letting off our steam, meticulously…"
"Gathering five thousand, ten thousand people as if holding a rally and then dispersing has no effect, and this number is not going to become a million either."
The Marxist reply. Going to the root is a right demand. The observation "they're letting off our steam" catches something important too: ritual action can turn into the means not of anger pressing on the system, but of the system discharging anger safely. But one does not reach the root in a single move. As Rosa Luxemburg discussed in Social Reform or Revolution? (1899), the partial struggle is not the aim itself, but it is the path that leads to the aim. Every partial struggle is carried out both for its own gain and in order to grow the organisational capacity of the next step. A small victory does not solve the problem; but it grows the force that will solve the problem. What should be criticised is not the small step itself, but the small step not being tied to the next step.
The question to ask: "This step may not solve the problem; but does it make us stronger? Does it tie on to the next step?"
Generalising from a Single Example: "The boycott died down, so it does not work"
What it is. Concluding, from the failure of a particular application of a method, that the method itself does not work. It misleads, because the cause of the failure may be not the method itself but the way it was applied.
In the replies:
"An economic boycott was going on; what happened? It was reduced to three or five brands and died away."
"People are hurt... Even the boycott faded; the shopkeepers were wretched anyway, and it was said let's not sink them completely... If we're not to gather and shout, what, for example, should be done?"
And the opposing voices, among the same replies:
"In a year and a half, the only thing that got under the government's skin was the boycott. The next day they sent every minister there was out shopping, they dropped the celebrities who supported the boycott from their series, they detained them…"
"The only thing of value to them is money; the boycott should not have been given up. If we cut off their money with determination, maybe it would make a sound."
The Marxist reply. When these four replies are read side by side, the picture becomes clear: the boycott worked; that is why the government reacted to it harshly. The government makes plain what it fears by what it punishes. If it died down, the cause is not that economic action does not work, but the way the boycott was carried out. It had three causes. It was unorganised: every purchase was a choice made alone, and there was no decision-making body. It was based on the consumer: the consumer is scattered, and when the mood changes the action dies. It did not distinguish capital: while aiming at the big chains it hit the small shopkeepers too, and the movement clashed with its own base. The strongest form of economic action is not the consumer's action but the producer's: the strike, the slowdown, the work stoppage. The lesson of the boycott is not "economic action does not work", but "economic action grows stronger with organisation."
The boycott asked the right question: where can we hurt them? But it answered with the wrong unit. The basket is scattered; the counter stands side by side.
The question to ask: "Why did this action fail: was the method wrong, or was the organisation missing?"
The Novelty Fallacy: "The old kind of politics is finished"
What it is. Counting the old as bad of itself, and the new as good of itself. Not distinguishing what is still valid inside the old from what is no longer valid. It misleads, because in order to build the new it also throws away the lessons and the tools that have to be taken from the old.
In the replies:
"The old kind of political understanding is finished and inspires trust in no one. I write this without distinguishing parties. Unless the youth that tore down the barricade in front of Istanbul University on 19 March 2025 takes this situation in hand, nothing will be put right either."
The Marxist reply. This reply carries two right intuitions: trust in spectator politics is gone, and youth is a new source of energy. But the generalisation "the old kind of politics is finished" is incomplete. Part of the old really is finished: the party with a single leader, the ritual rally, the politics of spectacle that makes the crowd a spectator. But part of the old is still valid: organisation, the union, solidarity, discipline, continuity. As we said in the piece Organising 2.0: the core is the same, the world it runs in has changed. The youth that tore down the barricade dispersed too, because it could not turn into a lasting structure. What is new is to apply the old principles to new conditions; not to throw the old principles away. The energy of youth becomes a force when it combines with the organising experience of the older generations.
The question to ask: "Which part of the old is finished, and which part is still necessary?"
Romantic Populism: "The people's intuition is infallible"
What it is. The reverse of the "the people are ignorant" fallacy: defining the people as a single essence, but this time a positive essence. The people are always right, their intuition is infallible, the problem is only the politicians who have broken away from the people. It misleads, because exalting the people can be as passivising as looking down on them: the person who says "the people know" is saved from the responsibility of thinking and organising together with the people.
In the replies:
"The people's INTUITIONS are strong. Phoney business. Going through the motions. Words far from sincerity. They look. They listen. They watch. They reach a conclusion. Politicians broke away from the people long ago. Their contact with the people is diplomatic. Superficial. They do not build an unceremonious, plain, ordinary relationship…"
The Marxist reply. This reply's observation about politicians being cut off from the people is well placed. And the people's intuitions really are strong; the boycott intuition is the evidence. But intuition does not turn into consciousness on its own. The relation Lenin discussed in What Is to Be Done? (1902), between spontaneity and consciousness, matters here: the spontaneous reaction shows the anger, but it does not always show the source of the anger and the path of the solution. The people may be seeing "phoney business"; but if they do not have a tool that will change what they see, what they see only leaves them hurt. Intuition is a beginning; that intuition has to be turned into analysis, and the analysis into organisation. The criticism that politicians "do not build a plain, ordinary relationship with the people" points somewhere too: a relationship with the people is not a leader's visit. It is built inside the people's own organisation.
The question to ask: "Is this intuition right? If it is, what organisational form can we turn it into?"
Wishful Thinking: "They will collapse like a sandcastle"
What it is. Counting the wish that something should happen as the reason for believing that it will happen. Putting hope in place of evidence. It misleads, because it keeps a person waiting: if change is going to come of itself, there is no need to organise.
In the replies:
"Until the election is concluded, everyone will wage the struggle for democracy with whatever they can. At the moment we least expect, they will collapse like a sandcastle! I have a guess, I'm not at all sure; very close to the election's normal date, might 'the chief' step down for health reasons? They may be using the time?"
The Marxist reply. The first sentence of this reply is valuable: "Everyone will struggle with whatever they can." But the continuation turns the struggle into a waiting. A person going is not the structure that produced them going. If the structure is not changed by an organised force, it produces a new person. In history, the death or withdrawal of authoritarian leaders most of the time changed not the regime, but only the face. The real question is not "when will they go?" but "when they go, what will come in their place, and who will determine it?" 2026 showed how fragile the road to the ballot box is, too: court rulings, trustees, access bans. Sometimes the sandcastle is not on the other side, but in the expectation itself.
The question to ask: "When that day comes, will we be ready as an organised force?"
False Equivalence: "They are all the same, keep a distance from all of them"
What it is. Spreading a fault in part of a group to the whole of it, and erasing the differences between different actors. The conclusion "they are all the same" exempts a person from every kind of participation. It misleads, because when the differences are not seen, it is also not seen what can be asked of whom, and criticism turns from an analysis into a surrender.
In the replies:
"Keep your distance from the Opposition (all of it), which takes politics for empty talk that comes to nothing, a kind of family gossip."
"And don't even mention the Marxist left; each of them is little better than market shopkeepers who have each opened their own shop."
The Marxist reply. The opposition and the left have a great deal that should be criticised. The fragmentation of the left is a real problem, and it is right to say so. What Freud called "the narcissism of small differences" works on the left too: we fight most with those who most resemble us. But to say "they are all the same, keep a distance from all of them" makes the solution of this problem impossible. Putting an equal distance to all actors means, in the end, forming a relation with no actor, that is, taking part in nothing. The right stance is not "distance from all of them" but "calling all of them to account", and above all changing them by our own participation. The most effective thing a person angry at the fragmentation of the left can do is to be part of an attempt at unity. Uniting the shops is possible not by standing outside the shops, but by going into them.
The question to ask: "Are they really all the same? If I do not see the differences between them, what can I ask of whom? And when I keep my distance, whom does it serve?"
A Guide to Reason: Summary Table
| Fallacy | The pattern | The Marxist reply | The question to ask |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essentialist generalisation | "The people of this country are like that" | The human essence is the ensemble of social relations | Which conditions produce this? |
| Personalisation | "The MPs are comfortable, the politicians are bad" | Persons change; the structure produces the same people | If the person changed, would the problem be solved? |
| Cultural elitism | "The half-educated people" | The real line is property and labour | Do we depend on the same employer? |
| False dilemma | "A rally, or nothing" | There are hundreds of forms of action | Are there only two options? |
| Shifting the burden | "Whoever criticises should first offer a solution" | Critique is the precondition of the solution; the solution is produced together | Where am I inside the solution? |
| Self-fulfilling prophecy | "Futile" | Control is learned; history is a field of struggle | Was everything tried, or the same thing? |
| Nirvana fallacy | "If it does not solve the root, it is letting off steam" | The partial struggle grows the force | Does this step make us stronger? |
| Generalising from one example | "The boycott died down, it doesn't work" | Economic action grows stronger with organisation | Was the method missing, or the organisation? |
| Novelty fallacy | "The old politics is finished" | The core is the same, the world has changed | Which part of the old is still necessary? |
| Romantic populism | "The people's intuition is infallible" | Intuition is a beginning; it must turn into organisation | What can we turn this intuition into? |
| Wishful thinking | "They will collapse like a sandcastle" | The person goes, the structure stays | Will we be ready that day? |
| False equivalence | "They are all the same, distance from all of them" | Not distance, but account and participation | When I keep my distance, whom do I serve? |
What the Twelve Fallacies Have in Common
When we put these twelve shortcuts side by side, we see something in common: all of them hand the problem either to someone else (the people, the politician, the left, the journalist) or to a fate (futile, a miracle, old and new). None of them begins with "we". The common denominator of the fallacies is that the thinking subject keeps themselves outside the problem and outside the solution.
This brings us back to the piece's main thesis: the shortcuts of a tired mind are the shortcuts of the lonely person. People who think together catch one another's fallacy, correct one another, and walk together a longer but truer path. Thinking well, like being well, requires being together.
A fallacy is the shortcut of a tired mind. The mind alone takes the shortcut; minds that think together find the path.
Part Six: How Do We Get Out of Today? A Road Map
The diagnosis, the portraits and the fallacies arrive at a single place: there is anger, but it has no path; belief in efficacy and a shared identity are missing. This road map aims to produce these two missing components step by step. It is not a prescription. It is a proposal open to debate; every step can be changed according to your own conditions.
The road map is the step-by-step application of the "network with a spine" model we proposed in our piece Organising 2.0: An Idea for a Justified Revolt. The rank-and-file committees, open assemblies, solidarity networks, readers' cooperatives and cross-border bonds of fraternity that we told of there with examples from around the world are tied here to a timetable and to measurable indicators. For the detail of the models and their applications around the world, that piece can be consulted.
Principle: producing the three components together
Every stage of the road map must answer three questions:
Does it give anger an object? Anger should turn not on its own side, but on the real source of the problem.
Does it produce a belief in efficacy? At every stage there should be a small but real victory, an experience of control.
Does it build a shared identity? The feeling of "we" should be built not through culture, generation or party, but through a common condition and a common action.
Stage one: the first thirty days: the core
Aim: To break the loneliness. To turn the unit from the individual into a small group.
What is done: Meeting face to face with five to ten people who share the same worry. At the workplace, in the neighbourhood, on campus, or in the professional organisation. Not on social media, around a table. The only agenda of the first meeting: "Who are we, what is our trouble, can we meet once a week?"
For whom: Everyone. The first table Selin sets up with her shuttle workmates, Mehmet with his neighbours in the neighbourhood, Deniz with her friends on campus, Emre with the couriers waiting in front of the same restaurant.
Indicator: At least five people meeting every week for four weeks.
Victory: The group itself. Meeting four weeks in a row, experiencing that one is not alone.
Stage two: three months: the committee and the first victory
Aim: An experience of control. Carrying the group to a committee, and the committee to a victory.
What is done: Choosing a single winnable target. Examples: filling the courtroom of a journalism trial. Collectively objecting to an unjust rent rise in a neighbourhood. Collecting a petition to win a right back at a workplace. Recording couriers' unjust penalties and objecting collectively. Finding a hundred subscribers for an independent publication. The criteria of the target: concrete, measurable, winnable within three months, and visible when it is won.
The structure test: Measuring participation at every step on the way to the target. How many people signed the petition, how many people came to the hearing, who did not come, and why? Failure is not a personal defeat. It is measured data.
Indicator: One target won. At least three actions in which more than half of the committee took an active part.
Victory: The first gain. The experience of control that Derya lived in the boycott and lost, lived again this time with a lasting structure.
Stage three: six months: the assembly and the network
Aim: A shared identity. Linking the committees to one another, taking decisions in an open assembly.
What is done: An open assembly where committees working in the same city, the same sector or the same neighbourhood come together. Open to everyone, deciding by direct vote, with rotating spokespersons. Like the plenums in Serbia. In this assembly a common list of demands and a common timetable are set. For example, four demands for press freedom: freedom for imprisoned journalists, the lifting of the trustees, the annulment of Article 8/A of Law No. 5651, and the publication of access-ban rulings together with their reasoning.
A bridge between generations: The assembly brings to the same table Hasan's memory of defeat, Mehmet's experience of organisation, Nuran's polling-station organisation and Deniz's energy. It sits Ayla at the same table as the cleaner, and Kemal at the same table as the subcontracted worker.
Indicator: An assembly that meets regularly, with at least five committees taking part. Common demands and a common timetable.
Victory: The forming of the feeling of "we". People from different committees getting to know one another and standing side by side in a common action.
Stage four: one year: the spine and the campaign
Aim: Continuity and cost. Bringing the network together with a spine, passing from actions of visibility to actions of cost.
What is done: The assembly forming relations with unions, professional chambers, press organisations and political organisations. These organisations become the spine of the network: legal protection, resources, education, a long memory. An escalation ladder announced in advance and measured by structure tests: a mass demonstration, then simultaneous short walkouts at workplaces, then a joint day of publication blackout, then a national day of action in which the confederations take part. At each step participation is measured, and the next is adjusted accordingly.
The organised form of economic action: Carrying the boycott intuition over to producers' action. A committee organised at the workplace is a much stronger lever than a boycott carried out as consumers.
The cross-border bond: Action at the same hour with diaspora organisations and journalists' unions in Europe, a "sister newsroom" for every imprisoned journalist, solidarity with the movements in Serbia and Georgia.
Indicator: At least one union or professional organisation officially taking up the campaign. At least one simultaneous action at workplaces.
Victory: Concrete progress on at least one item of the list of demands. Or, at least, the government being forced to respond to the campaign: the government makes plain what it fears by what it punishes.
Stage five: three years and after: a generation
Aim: A lasting social force. Turning organising from a campaign into a culture.
What is done: The committees becoming lasting, and multiplying. The rate of unionisation rising. Readers' and workers' cooperatives being founded. The language of class coming back: the words worker, labourer, union, strike returning to everyday speech. The young generation gaining experience of organisation. The reckoning with the defeat being made.
Indicator: In the replies under the next lament, seeing the sentences "our committee is doing this" in place of "what do you propose?"
Victory: A society that has remembered its own strength again.
Summary of the Road Map
| Stage | Time | Aim | Component | Indicator |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core | 30 days | Breaking the loneliness | The seed of a shared identity | 5+ people weekly, for 4 weeks |
| Committee and first victory | 3 months | An experience of control | Belief in efficacy | 1 target won |
| Assembly and network | 6 months | Linking the committees | Shared identity | A regular assembly of 5+ committees |
| Spine and campaign | 1 year | Continuity and cost | An object for anger | 1 union or chamber, 1 workplace action |
| Generation | 3 years and after | A lasting social force | Class consciousness | Unionisation, a cooperative, the language of class |
A First Step for Each Stance
| Stance | First step |
|---|---|
| The one who asks | Ask the question not outwards, but to a table of five |
| The one who diagnoses | Go to the rally not alone but with three people; on the way back, talk about "what next?" |
| The one who accuses morally | Go to a meeting of your own professional organisation or union |
| The one angry at their own side | Tell your anger to a young person; turn your memory of defeat into a lesson |
| The one who looks down | At the workplace, sit at the same table as a workmate from a different culture |
| The boycotter | Turn the boycott group into a solidarity group that meets face to face |
| The fatalist | With three people who do the same job, record a common problem and object together |
| The one waiting for a miracle | Meet, outside the election too, the people you met at the polling station |
| The one who seeks | Carry your enthusiasm to a weekly group, and your group to an assembly |
A Warning
This road map is not linear. Repression may increase, committees may disperse, victories may be lost. The students in Serbia, the GKN workers in Florence, the neighbourhood committees in Sudan pulled back many times too. What matters is that the pulling back be not a falling apart but a gathering again. And this is possible only if the core, the committee, the assembly are lasting. Enthusiasm that comes in one night goes in one night; five people who meet once a week find one another even in the period when the repression is heaviest.
And one thing more: no stage of this road map waits for a leader. The only thing required to start each stage is five people ready to sit around a table.
Dear comrades,
Thirty-six people replied to Ayşen Şahin's lament. Some joined, some asked, some accused, some gave up, some searched. None of these replies is wrong; each is the honest expression of a life that has been lived, of a tiredness, of an anger. Selin, Mehmet, Kemal, Hasan, Ayla, Derya, Emre, Nuran and Deniz in our nine portraits look far from one another. But the component all of them lack is the same: one another.
Social frenzy is not a madness. It is the condition of people who cannot find a path for their anger, who cannot find anyone with whom to share their fear, who cannot find a ground on which to answer their question together. Being made passive is not a nature; it is the product of an engineering of forty-six years. And like every product of engineering, it can be taken apart. Helplessness comes of itself; control is learned. Anger is born of itself; its path is opened by organisation.
If the people who wrote those thirty-six replies could sit around a table, if they could ask one another "what can we do?" instead of "what do you propose?", there would be no need for this piece. The whole aim of this piece is a call to set that table up. We gathered our proposals for how the table can be set up in the piece Organising 2.0; now it is the turn of discussing those proposals together, developing them together, and applying them together.
The people did not fall asleep; they were left unorganised. What is needed is not to wake them, but to unite them. To be well, one has to be together.
Pass it on.
Sources
The post that gave the occasion, and the replies
- Ayşen Şahin, the X post and the replies beneath it, 21–23 October 2026
Facts
- Solidarity with OTHERS, a journalist who called for the streets over the Halk TV raid was detained, October 2026
- Karar, the ministry announced: the unionisation rate in Turkey became 13.8 percent, July 2026
Psychology and social psychology
- Martijn van Zomeren, Tom Postmes and Russell Spears, "Toward an Integrative Social Identity Model of Collective Action", Psychological Bulletin, 2008
- Steven Maier and Martin Seligman, "Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience", Psychological Review, 2016
- Martin Seligman and Steven Maier, the first experiments on learned helplessness, 1967
- Lee Ross, "The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings", Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 1977
- John Darley and Bibb Latané, "Bystander Intervention in Emergencies: Diffusion of Responsibility", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1968
- Benoît Monin and Dale Miller, "Moral Credentials and the Expression of Prejudice", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2001
- Kirk Kristofferson, Katherine White and John Peloza, "The Nature of Slacktivism", Journal of Consumer Research, 2014
- Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, 1957
- Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 1941
- Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930
- Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912
Marxist and critical theory
- Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
- Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, 1845
- Rosa Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution?, 1899
- V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, 1902
- Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 1929–1935
- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961
Our linked pieces and guides
- Organising 2.0: An Idea for a Justified Revolt (the predecessor of this piece; organising models developing around the world, and a proposal for press freedom)
- The 12 September Dossier
- The Revolutionary Subject
- Reason and Praxis Against the Sophistries of Despair
- Revolutionary Discussion Ethics and Guide to Purging Fallacies (PDF)
- Criticizing as Comrades, Advancing Together (PDF)
- Event Organizing and Comradeship
- All the guides: bilgimusterekleri.org/en/guides/
