For a Left That Does Not Fear Criticism: Our New Book Is Out
"Criticizing as Comrades, Advancing Together" — Our book on criticism, self-criticism, and democratic culture in socialist politics is out free, in every format
The sentence we all know
"Leftists do nothing but fight among themselves anyway."
We have all heard that sentence at a family table, in a workplace, on a television program. And every time we heard it, the same sting rose in us: we wanted to be angry, because the sentence was unjust — this country’s socialists have written honorable pages in strike tents, in the rubble of earthquakes, in courthouse corridors, on the darkest days. Yet our anger always remained unfinished. Because when we open social media, when we read the comments under an article, when we remember how a meeting fell apart, we know: we sometimes carry the material for the ruling ideology’s smear with our own hands.
This book is an effort to face that unfinished anger.
The problem is not one of manners
We all know the familiar scene. An article is published; it contains a reasoned criticism directed at an analysis, at a policy. The reply is not delayed — but the reply takes no interest in a single thesis of the article, in a single piece of data. It takes interest in the author. First comes insult, then contempt, then mind-reading of motives. The young writer is told “you weren’t even born yet”; a dossier is opened on the older writer; the unorganized one is asked “who are you?” And the debate reaches its most economical form: “You are attacking the movement.”
One thing is entirely absent from this chain: the content of the criticism. The theses have gone unanswered, but the debate has been “won.” The losers are clear: the youngest, most curious, most hopeful people among those watching have quietly learned something — questions are not asked here.
The book’s first thesis is this: This is not a problem of politeness, not a character flaw of a few ill-tempered people. It is directly a problem of political organization and intellectual development — and it has material, historical, solvable roots.
Criticism is the dialectic itself
The book’s philosophical starting point is simple, but its consequences are sharp. In the Marxist tradition, dialectics teaches that thought develops by passing through contradictions. Criticism is the motor of that development: it is the bearer of the operation that keeps an idea’s true core, weeds out what is false, and carries it to a higher grasp — of sublation, of preserving by overcoming.
The conclusion that follows is this: To treat the criticism of a thought as an “attack” is not merely crude behavior; it is the direct rejection of dialectics and of historical materialism. To sacralize a thought, to exempt it from criticism, is a remnant of religious dogmatism that has seeped into the ranks of the left. Revolutionism is not faith; it is method.
Indeed, Marxism was born as a tradition of criticism: Marx’s 1843 program is the “ruthless criticism of all that exists”; even the subtitle of Capital is “A Critique of Political Economy.” A Marxism that fears criticism denies its own birth certificate.
From ’68 to today: understanding the conditions without perpetuating their outcomes
The book’s most delicate section descends into the historical roots of today’s intolerance — without sacralizing and without condemning. The dedication of the ’68 and ’78 generations is beyond dispute: by risking prison, torture, and heavy costs, they turned socialism in this country into a mass hope. But the same period holds another truth as well: a theoretical deepening equal to that mass passion never took place. Translation of the classics was late and incomplete; theoretical formation was built largely on pamphlets and summaries; the tempo of the street postponed reading; and the factor that left the most lasting damage was that theoretical debate proceeded by the ready-made recipes of international camps — “what do you think?” gave way to “which line are you on?”
The book names the result that reaches into today as follows: the identity-ization of thought. Once a defended thesis ceases to be an analysis and becomes a sign of who one is, an objection directed at that thesis is inevitably lived as an attack on identity. Today’s reflex is not a personal flaw; it is an inherited cultural form.
And the real problem is not historical limitation itself — that was a product of conditions. The real problem is that the limitation was frozen and sacralized instead of being overcome. To claim a legacy is to put it to work; to freeze it turns the legacy into a grave.
The platform’s profit, our quarrel
The book also analyzes today’s arena of debate. Social media is not a “classless, free, neutral public sphere”; it is the architecture of for-profit corporations. The attention economy produces value from anger; the algorithm elevates not the most patient analysis but the sharpest reply. So the decay of our culture of debate is not merely our moral weakness; it is the business model of the ground on which we debate. The platform makes money from our quarrel; it does not make money from our making peace.
A generational encounter is added to this: a generation raised in a culture of oral debate and a digitally native generation are, for the first time in history, debating in the same arena without intermediaries. When a vertical culture ordered by age and seniority collides with a horizontal space that formally equalizes everyone, what creates the problem is often not bad faith but a mismatch of codes — and the debate detaches from content and turns into a lynching.
Being a democrat: we ask for little, not much
Perhaps the book’s most contested section refuses to leave “being a democrat at a basic level” abstract and defines it in ten behavioral points: recognizing the right to think differently, looking at the argument, withdrawing a claim when the evidence collapses, treating even mistaken criticism as a right, being able to say one was wrong, protecting the rights of the minority, not closing debate by force…
There is nothing extraordinary on the list — and that is precisely the claim: Being a democrat is not an extraordinary virtue; it is the minimum civil condition of political life. Moreover, these rules were not borrowed from the bourgeoisie; they were learned, at a cost, in the working class’s own school of organization, from the trade union to the Paris Commune. The claim that “we will transcend bourgeois democracy” cannot serve as an excuse for falling behind democracy.
And one question carries the spine of the book: Will a movement learn democratic culture only when it comes to power? An understanding that silences a different view in today’s membership meeting — how will it govern social plurality tomorrow? The germs of the socialist future either sprout or rot in the relations we build among ourselves today.
What is in the book?
Five parts, twelve chapters. The philosophy and ethics of criticism; the definition of comradeship and of being a democrat; the historical balance sheet of ’68–’78; the political economy of the digital sphere; the debate on continuing Marxism without freezing it (Gramsci, Althusser, Brecht, Ilyenkov, Vygotsky); an open inventory of our theoretical arsenal; Marxist criticism in the age of artificial intelligence; mechanisms of criticism and self-criticism; not consuming one another when our numbers are finite; and a direct address to young comrades.
At the end there are three appendices: the Revolutionary Discussion Ethics and Guide to Purging Fallacies, usable also as a stand-alone handbook (ten rules each for offering and receiving criticism, the most familiar fallacies of debates inside the left, sentences of a constructive language of debate), a glossary of concepts, and an annotated reading guide.
An invitation, a pledge
This book targets no movement, no generation, no person. Every example in it is a composite tableau distilled from hundreds of similar events; none of them carries a name. And those who write these lines are not outside the culture they criticize — the book is, at the same time, a text of self-criticism.
Let us close by applying to ourselves the principle we defend: This book was written to be criticized. It is not a last word; it is an invitation to debate. Criticisms directed at it will be published and answered on our site; a criticism that proves right will be worked into the text in the next version, and the contributor will be acknowledged. The text in your hands is a version, not a holy book.
Because if the whole of the book is to fit into a single sentence, that sentence is this:
Criticism is not enmity; it is a comradely offering of the shoulder, a tightening of the ranks, and an act of purifying collective will.
We await the first shoulder.
Publication note
Criticizing as Comrades, Advancing Together Criticism, Self-Criticism, and Democratic Culture in Socialist Politics Knowledge Commons, 2026 — Version 1.0.1
The book is available free of charge in PDF, EPUB, and Markdown formats.
Revolutionary Discussion Ethics and Guide to Purging Fallacies has also been published as a stand-alone pamphlet; it may be freely reproduced and distributed in educational work.
The book is dedicated to İmran Aydın.
For criticism, contributions, and corrections: bilgimusterekleri.org
