The dialectical interrelation between collective illusion and self-imposed illusion: consequential internalization of the ruling narrative by the left.

 How the bourgeoisie plant the seed, and the left unconsciously waters it.

Preface

In the era we live in, especially since the 1990s, the Marxist-Leninist left has been overcome by the anti-Leninist, anti-Stalinist organizations, most of which are the inevitable consequences of the US-Western institutionalized waves of propaganda carried out with the support of US-NED, EU-NED (National Endowment for Democracy), and similar bourgeois organizations and Foundations. This is not a failure of the Marxist-Leninist left but their defeat in the ideological warfare against the bourgeoisie. The distinction is not semantic: failure implies inherent character; defeat implies contingent outcome. Failure forecloses the future; defeat leaves it open.

One of the main shortcomings of the Marxist-Leninist left has been the lack of grasp of the importance of "ideological struggle," which was transformed into "ideological warfare," starting especially after the death of Stalin. Getting stuck in the era of "ideological struggle" - which is an internal struggle- the Marxist-Leninist left either disregarded or minimized the importance of "ideological warfare"- which is an external struggle deeply influencing the internal struggle. This approach flat-out opened the door to defeat against the bourgeoisie in both an ideological and practical sense. Having no serious financial, institutional, or organizational means compared to the bourgeoisie, who had all the financial and mind-management means, was bound to lose this battle.

This study examines how this internalization occurred, how it produced the sectarianism and rote theory that dominate the contemporary left, and what conditions would be required to break the circuit.

The distinction between ideological struggle and ideological warfare is central to this study. Ideological struggle is internal to the working-class movement: the ongoing work of theoretical clarification, comradely debate over line and tactics, and the education of cadres. Ideological warfare is external: the organized campaign waged by capitalist states and their institutions against socialism as a system. The two are dialectically connected — external warfare shapes the terrain of internal struggle — but they are not the same, and confusing them is a root cause of the left's contemporary weakness.

This distinction emerged historically. During the time of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, ideological conflict was largely internal to the socialist movement. With the consolidation of the Soviet Union, and especially after the Second World War, capitalist states began to wage ideological warfare systematically — through intelligence agencies, foundations, media, academia, and cultural institutions. The means of mental production are controlled by the capitalist class, and they have been used to devastating effect against socialism.

The left that has internalized the narratives of this warfare — that treats them as its own independent critical judgment — does the work of the enemy regardless of its intentions. When it publicly denounces fellow socialist states and parties in the language and categories of the capitalist narrative, it is not engaging in legitimate criticism. It is participating in ideological warfare on the side of the enemy. (E.A., Ideological Struggle to Ideological Warfare: Historical Evolution.)

If we leave aside the centers of bourgeois ideological warfare, like the US, Britain, Australia, and France, the effects of this defeat have been staggering in countries like Turkiye, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan - aside from Latin America, which was inevitable due to its proximity and history.

In Turkiye specifically- a country once called the "castle of Stalinism " during the 1970s and 80s- the defeat has been immense to the degree that "Bookchin-ism", Trotskyism, Bundism (Ethnic Socialism), opportunism, liberalism, and pacifism dominate the entire arena. Ironically, they have started with "self-critiques" or "critiques" of the 1970s and early 80s. Through these critiques, they have justified their desertion not only of the decisiveness, uncompromising stands, and activities of the revolutionaries, but also of giving up the organisations related to the means and methods of connecting and mobilizing the masses: youth organisations, associations, local (neighbour)  organisations, most of which had direct contact and integration with the working-class masses and manufacturing workers.  This case is just one I am intimately familiar with, but there are many   reflections of this defeat in many countries in many variations, which manifest themselves in their theory and practices regarding current events and their stances on conflicts and developments.

This article examines the “how” and through “what method” they have achieved the (temporary) defeat of the Marxist-Leninists. and what are the visible consequences of this defeat in theory and practice worldwide.

What follows traces how this defeat occurred, how it produced the sectarianism and rote theory that dominate the contemporary left, and what conditions would be required to reverse it

  Introduction

Definitions, narratives, and images that a society attaches to people, groups, and issues shape social relations. Because they shape how people think and act, ruling classes try to influence them in order to produce false consciousness and manufactured consent; many people internalize dominant narratives and treat them as reality. When such influence succeeds, it can become institutionalized as a shared social-collective illusion: people act on it as if it were real, so it acquires real social consequences. Its inconsistency with material reality may become evident only through prolonged practical experience. In dialectical terms, this is not merely one-off propaganda about a particular issue; it is a structural feature of the ideological struggle that ruling classes wage against socialism, socialist states, and anti-imperialist movements.

The relationship between power and consciousness is not a one-way street. It begins as imposition and ends as conviction. The ruling class produces narratives; the subject internalizes them; the internalized narrative then becomes self-policing. What was external becomes internal, and what was imposed becomes "common sense." This is the fundamental mechanism of ideological reproduction, and it operates at every level of social life.

We can distinguish two moments in this process, though in practice they are inseparable.

The first is the collective illusion:

The collective illusion is a narrative produced and disseminated from above, through media, education, and the cultural apparatus. It is manufactured. It has authors, interests, and a class standpoint. It presents itself as neutral — as fact, as realism, as what everyone knows — but it is the product of a specific historical and material configuration. Its function is to produce consent.

The second is the self-imposed illusion:

The self-imposed illusion is the point at which the subject takes ownership of the manufactured narrative and becomes its guardian. The narrative is no longer experienced as external. It is experienced as the subject's own independent judgment. The subject defends it not because they are forced to, but because they believe it. And because they believe it, they reproduce it. The illusion now sustains itself.

The transition from the first to the second is the moment of ideological capture. It is not a moment of deception in the ordinary sense. The subject is not lied to and then believes the lie. The subject participates in the production of their own consent. They experience the imposed as chosen. This is what makes the self-imposed illusion so powerful: it cannot be exposed by pointing to its external source, because the subject no longer experiences it as external. It is theirs.

These two moments are not sequential in a simple way. They are dialectically interrelated. The collective illusion provides the content—what to believe, what to fear, who the enemy is. The self-imposed illusion provides the defense—why not to question it, why the facts do not matter, why dissent is betrayal.

In ideological warfare, this interrelation is the central mechanism. The ruling class does not need to suppress dissent if the population polices itself. It does not need to enforce conformity if the subjects of the illusion experience their conformity as freedom.

This is why the left's internalization of the ruling narrative is so consequential. When the left reproduces the template of the ruling class—when it accepts the framing, the categories, and the conclusions of the manufactured narrative—it does the work of ideological warfare on behalf of the enemy, regardless of its intentions. The left that believes it is thinking independently while reproducing the template is the ideal carrier of the self-imposed illusion. It is sincere. It is committed. And it serves exactly the needs of the bourgeoisie.

Among those captured by the collective illusion, there is no effective resistance to the narrative in question. They will not and, under the conditions of that illusion, cannot resist it.

The illusion must be distinguished at four levels:

1. Subjectively real — believed to be true even if it is not.
2. Socially real — having real institutional or behavioral consequences, regardless of its truth.
3. Materially real — actually true independent of belief.
4. Replacing reality — the illusion functions as a substitute for material reality in thought and practice.

An illusion is not an agent that resists or believes. The subjects are the people constituted by the illusion. Better: “the unit of analysis is the collective illusion and the subjects it constitutes.”

The illusion becomes subjectively real and socially consequential, though it does not replace material reality.

Self-imposed illusion is different from an illusion imposed from above by a ruling class through media and propaganda. In the self-imposed case, the subject actively adopts and defends a narrative—not because they are simply duped, but because the narrative serves a deeper function for their identity, their political commitments, or their social belonging. The illusion becomes part of who they are. They will not and cannot change their mind even if they see the truth. It is  a kind of epistemic lock-in. The facts are not the issue. The issue is that accepting the facts would require dismantling a whole framework of meaning, identity, and perhaps material or social investment. That is why it feels like they cannot change their mind. Psychologically, it is not that they are literally incapable, but that the cost of changing is too high—so they resist, reinterpret, or dismiss the disconfirming evidence.

This is where concepts like cognitive dissonance, motivated reasoning, and identity-protective cognition become useful. They don't replace the alternative framework; they explain the micro-mechanisms by which a self-imposed illusion is defended. A person who has spent years arguing that China is capitalist, and whose entire political identity is built on being "correct" about that, will experience a threat to self when confronted with evidence that China is something else—state capitalist, socialist-oriented, or whatever one’s position is. The threat is not just intellectual; it is existential.

From a dialectical perspective, one could say this is a contradiction between subjective commitment and objective reality. The illusion is sustained not by ignorance alone but by the subject's active participation in maintaining it. That is why it is "self-imposed": they are complicit in their own mystification. But even that complicity has social roots—peer groups, ideological ecosystems, career incentives, emotional investments.

It is a different kind of collective illusion. The first kind is more top-down: manufactured consent, false consciousness imposed by the ruling class. The second is more bottom-up: a defensive ideological formation that individuals and groups maintain to preserve coherence. Both can coexist, and often do. The ruling class may plant the seed, but the subject waters it.

In practice, some people do change their minds, usually through a slow accumulation of contradictions, a crisis of faith, or a transformative theoretical and practical experience. But for many, the lock-in holds. The question is what conditions make the lock break. That is where the analysis must go next: not just why they resist, but what it would take for the resistance to give way.

The two illusions are not separate phenomena that happen to coexist. They are moments of a single process, and in ideological warfare they function as offense and defense of the same position.

The ruling class manufactures the initial narrative. But a manufactured narrative is fragile—it requires constant external reinforcement. The transition to a self-imposed illusion is what stabilizes it. The subject takes ownership of the narrative and becomes its guardian. At that point, the illusion no longer needs to be imposed from above; it is reproduced from within.

So the relation is: External imposition → internalization → self-imposed maintenance → reproduction of the external conditions

The first illusion produces the second. The second then protects the first. That is the feedback loop.

Complementarity in ideological warfare

In ideological warfare, the two illusions divide labor:

• The ruling-class illusion provides the content: what to believe, what to fear, what to desire, who the enemy is.
• The self-imposed illusion provides the defense: why not to question it, why the facts don't matter, why dissent is betrayal.

The first is the weapon. The second is the shield. The weapon creates the shield, and the shield protects the weapon.

That is why attacking/exposing only one side fails. If you expose the ruling-class narrative as manufactured, the self-imposed illusion absorbs the critique: "That's just conspiracy theory," "You're simplifying," "Both sides do it," "You're a foreign agent." The shield holds. If you attack only the self-imposed illusion as irrational stubbornness, you miss that it was produced by a material system of narrative control. You end up blaming the victim.

The "guise" without jargon

The two illusions use similar narratives without jargon, which is a key mechanism.

The narratives do not present themselves as "ruling-class ideology." They present as: common sense, realism, pragmatism, "what everyone knows", "the facts", patriotism, moderation, maturity.

The same narrative can function as top-down imposition in one context and self-imposed identity in another. "China and/or Vietnam is capitalist" can be a media talking point and a deeply held personal belief. The content is identical. The function differs by the subject's relationship to it.

The most effective ideology is the one that does not appear as ideology at all. This is why the two illusions can appear as "two sides of the same coin." The coin is the narrative. One side is the production of the narrative; the other is the internalization of it.

Within ideological warfare

The ruling class wages war by producing narratives that serve its interests. The self-imposed illusion is the occupation — the point at which the target population polices itself on behalf of the ruling narrative. The two together create a closed system — the narrative is produced from above and defended from below, with no external force required to sustain it.

This is why ideological warfare is not just about controlling media or education. It is about producing subjects who will defend the narrative as their own. The most effective ideological weapon is one that the target believes they chose freely.

The ruling class manufactures the narrative; the subject internalizes it; the internalized narrative then becomes self-policing. In ideological warfare, the first is the production of consent; the second is the reproduction of consent. The first creates the second, and the second conceals the first. Together they form a closed circuit: the narrative is imposed from above and defended from below, and the subject experiences the defense as their own independent judgment.

That keeps the framework intact and connects the two within ideological warfare without collapsing them into one.

 If the two illusions are complementary, what breaks the circuit? Usually it is a crisis that makes the cost of maintaining the self-imposed illusion higher than the cost of abandoning it—material crisis, defeat, exposure, or a practical experience that contradicts the narrative so sharply that the shield cannot absorb it. That is where ideological warfare can be won or lost.

The material determination of the apparently free choice.

The subject experiences their position as freely chosen. But the conditions of that choice — class origin, theoretical formation, and the source of knowledge — set the boundaries within which the choice feels free. This is not a contradiction. It is exactly how ideology works: it produces the illusion of autonomy while determining its content. This is essentially a materialist epistemology of belief:

Class origin shapes the horizon of what seems plausible, desirable, or threatening. Theoretical knowledge, or its absence, determines whether the subject can identify the narrative as ruling-class ideology or mistake it for common sense.

The source of knowledge — primary or secondary, Marxist or bourgeois — determines whether the subject is reasoning from the actual position of the exploited or from a mediated, already-framed version of it.

When all three converge toward bourgeois sources and frameworks, the "free choice" lands on anti-Marxist positions even when the subject claims Marxism. That is the contradiction: subjective identity versus objective practice. And it is here that the distinction between "will not" and "cannot" becomes useful. The subject will not change because their class position and theoretical formation make the alternative feel alien. The subject cannot change because their entire epistemic framework — where they get knowledge, who they trust, what counts as legitimate — forecloses the possibility.

"Choosing freely" is not the opposite of determination. It is the subjective form of determination. The subject feels free because the conditions that produced their choice are invisible to them. That is what makes the ideological weapon effective — not that it forces the choice, but that it makes the determined choice feel like autonomy.

While claiming to be Marxist in words, defending anti-Marxist narratives in “deed"  is a real phenomenon. But there are at least three different types:

1. Genuine confusion: The person has partial theoretical knowledge, reads secondary sources, and sincerely believes they are Marxist while defending positions that are not. This is the most common.
2. Careerism or social interest: The person knows better but defends the narrative because their position, income, or belonging depends on it. This is conscious, not illusion.
3. Ideological capture: The person has internalized bourgeois categories so deeply that they cannot distinguish them from Marxist ones. They are not lying; they genuinely cannot see the contradiction. This is the self-imposed illusion operating at the level of theory itself.

The first is a problem of theoretical formation. The second is a problem of material interest. The third is the problem of epistemic capture.

This connects directly back to  the two illusions:

• The ruling-class illusion provides the options.
• The self-imposed illusion makes the subject experience their selection among those options as free.

And the "class origin, theoretical knowledge, source of knowledge" triad is what determines which option feels like the obvious, natural, correct one.

It is a materialist account of why "free choice" so often reproduces the ruling narrative, and why claiming Marxism is not the same as practicing it.

The two types—conscious spreader and unconscious spreader—are functionally convergent but subjectively opposed. One knows what they are doing; the other believes they are doing the opposite. Yet the objective consequence is the same: the ideological warfare of the ruling class is advanced. This is the classic Marxist distinction between subjective intention and objective function. What matters analytically is not what the subject believes they are doing, but what their practice actually accomplishes within the relations of ideological production.

The asymmetry is that the conscious spreader is an agent. The unconscious spreader is a carrier.

The conscious spreader produces, directs, and coordinates the narrative. They are a functionary of the ideological apparatus. The unconscious spreader transmits it—not because they are paid to, but because their self-imposed illusion makes them a conduit. They are not lying. That is precisely what makes them more effective. A conscious liar can be exposed as a liar. A sincere believer cannot, because they are not lying. Their sincerity is the shield.

This is why the unconscious spreader is often more valuable to the ruling class than the conscious one. The conscious one can be bought, fired, or replaced. The unconscious one reproduces the narrative for free, from conviction, and presents it as independent thought. That is the ideal form of ideological reproduction.

There is also a dialectical relation between the two. The conscious spreader needs the unconscious one to give the narrative the appearance of organic, grassroots, "free" consent. The unconscious one needs the conscious one to supply the content and the framing. They are mutually dependent, even if only one side knows it.

The conscious and unconscious spreader find themselves on the same side they claim to be the enemy of. In the final analysis, the conscious and unconscious spreaders of the illusion occupy the same objective position within ideological warfare: they reproduce the ruling narrative and disarm its opponents. One does so by design; the other by conviction. But the effect is identical. The unconscious spreader is not the enemy; they are an objective ally of the enemy, which is a different and more painful thing.

The distinction between "objective ally of the enemy" and "enemy agent" must be maintained. The unconscious spreader can be won back through practical experience, crisis, and theoretical clarification. The conscious one usually cannot. Treating both as identical in practice is a political error, even if they are identical in function.

Ruling-class production, mass internalization, self-imposed defense, subjective free choice, and objective service to the enemy's ideological warfare. This is the chain: production, internalization, self-imposed defense, subjective free choice, objective service. Each link depends on the others.

 I. Where are we — the existing condition of the ML left

II. How did we get here — historical background

III. Fundamental issues of ML revised under disguise — the theoretical confusions

IV. Internalizing the bourgeois narratives — division and sectarianism

V. The way out

Conclusion