A Note for New Readers: This article uses the Affective Socialization Theory (AST) framework, a neuro-materialist science I am developing to explain how our environment physically shapes our behavior. You will see variables like Material Strain (MAT) and Agency Expectancy (AE) used throughout. If you are new to the theory, you can find the full glossary and research at [Here].

Growing up in a conservative North Carolina town, I was taught early and consistently that communism was basically an ideology of authoritarian, totalitarian government power. I was taught that it shared this trait with fascism and Nazism; that they were all different forms of the same strict, absolute power over political decisions.

I was also socialized into desiring power, as all of us are who are born under capitalism. I even told my parents when I was in elementary and middle school that I wanted to be the emperor. That was my dream. I think when I first got to high school, I told them that I hadn’t given up on that. They told me I had to be realistic, and I said that I saw so many problems in the world, and I felt like if I could wield absolute power and have total say over political decisions, it would be easy to make the right choices and just fix everything. Throughout my childhood, I would talk about what I would do for the people, and how I wanted to make sure everybody had a house and food and was taken care of. I don’t think I’m the only one who has had thoughts like this, especially as a child born under capitalism.

When I was 17, I traveled the country hitchhiking and hopping on freight trains. I embraced a hippie lifestyle, trying to be humble, focusing only on the positive, and seeking peace in all things. At this point, I had been convinced that the problem wasn’t that we didn’t have enough stuff, it was just that people were fighting too much since they had been misdirected by toxic culture. I thought we just needed to heal. I had dreams of being a great musician like Jimi Hendrix. I thought if I could just make great music, I could influence the world and start a new hippie movement like the ‘60s. We could all embrace each other in a new movement of love and understanding, and society could be a better place.

By the time I was 21 years old and decided to read The Communist Manifesto for the first time, I had already come to an understanding that to succeed in this society, I would have to be ruthless. I saw a statistic once that stuck in my mind as a teenager, which said that a large percentage of successful people, like CEOs and people in high positions of power, have antisocial personality disorders. At the time, I knew this as being psychopaths, sociopaths, or narcissists. I took this information to mean that to succeed in this world, I had to be ruthless and completely selfish. I had to take advantage of whoever I could to get what I wanted, since that is how the world we live in works.

I thought if I adopted this mentality, I would surely rise in the ranks of society given that I had such great potential; everybody always told me I was smart. So, after a few years of trying to do what I could, getting arrested for selling drugs, spending 5 months in jail, and then two and a half years on probation, I came out and started doing hard labor. I was doing framing and roofing, landscaping, and other manual labor work. Going through that hard labor all day, every day, and having to get up the next day to do it again, I came home so tired and worn out that I didn’t have any time for my music or for any of the creative pursuits I really wanted to do to prove that I was somebody.

After realizing that, I slowly just stopped caring about priorities. I completely stopped worrying at all. I quit going to work if I didn’t feel like it. I gave up. I couldn’t pay the rent, I got evicted, and I eventually ended up being homeless on the streets again.

My mental health got a lot worse. For years I had studied occult knowledge, spiritual mysteries, and other philosophies to try to find an answer, some kind of intellectual edge that could help me step up in the world and secure a better life. So, it was at this point, while I was homeless, that I would stay in a local gym in my town at night. Nobody really went there, so I would just hang out inside since I had a membership. I was sitting there one night, and I started listening to the audiobook of The Communist Manifesto.

The reason I even listened to it in the first place was desperation. My whole life I had learned it was evil. Having always held a belief in God and good and evil, I thought if I ever went down a path like that, my soul would be doomed to hell. If I ever became a Nazi or communist or anything extreme, my soul would be damned for participating in something I knew was evil. For that reason, I never dared read anything from a communist. At this point, however, I felt I had no other options. I was desperate for any tool that could give me power. Recognizing the absolute totalitarian power that was portrayed to me growing up around a white nationalist step-family actually made me more curious about it.

I decided to read it knowing I didn’t care anymore if my soul would be damned. I told myself that escaping this suffering and depression, and finding security no matter the cost, would be worth at least examining all sides. I always considered myself intelligent for being objective, so I decided that even if I didn’t fully become a communist, I could still use their tactics. I thought, if this is an ideology that leads to people becoming totalitarian autocrats, then reading it should be just like reading The Prince by Machiavelli or The Art of War. I could read it to gain insight into power and learn how to manipulate it for my own benefit.

That was my mindset going into The Communist Manifesto. Yet after spending about an hour listening to it, I was blown away.

I realized that this was not evil. Regardless of the “Communist dictators” I had heard about (whose legitimacy I was now objectively questioning), what this book was actually saying was that we can make the world better for everyone. It made my striving for power meaningful. It taught me that as an oppressed person facing the coercion of capitalism, it is natural for me to desire a better position for myself. The key thing, however, was this: the best way for me to secure that power and safety is through a collective effort. I had to collaborate and cooperate to achieve liberation for us all.

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This was so powerful to me. After reading more writings from Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Che, and other revolutionaries, I saw how they theorized. They became honored for the intellectual labor they did, and they became leaders. I thought to myself that this could be an honorable path for me to actually be a leader, not in that juvenile sense of being an emperor from when I was a kid, but being an intellectual leader who proposes theories and plans for the collective liberation of the masses.

Still, I felt guilt for this desire. I knew within myself that it was probably a common ambition, especially for someone like me who had trained himself for years to try to disregard feelings and be completely cold and calculated in order to survive. Today, I know the reality is much more structural. Getting into those positions of power structurally makes people act that way, and simply adopting an antisocial personality disorder doesn’t guarantee you’ll get rich. However, I had this lingering feeling that if my personal desire for power and safety came before my revolutionary work, it could be corrupting. I told myself that my desire to be the best revolutionary made me want to be the most principled revolutionary, serving as an ideological fail-safe.

My friends, if you have read all that and you’re wondering if it’s just a rant about my life, I’m telling you that this is where we get to the point: Ideological purity will not stop anyone, even the most principled, most studied, and trained revolutionary theorist, from inserting their own bias for the security that power gives, unless there are structural mechanisms in place to not allow it to happen.

This is a brief explanation of what we will be going into today, and it is all grounded in the sociological framework I have been developing that bridges neuroscience, psychology, and sociology: Affective Socialization Theory (AST).

With the formulaic connections this theory empirically outlines, we can actually explain what drives a great revolutionary theorist, their true role in the dialectic between the individual and society (without devolving into Great Man Theory or pure structural determinism), and finally, why some of those who claim to fight for a noble cause can become paranoid and drift toward authoritarianism. And to be clear, this does not mean authoritative (exercising democratic authority for the benefit of the masses), instead it refers to authoritarian (authority that is not democratic and exists solely to uphold itself), a distinction I broke down in a previous article.

Under the coercive architecture of capitalism, the working class is subjected to artificial material strain, or Exogenous Material Strain (MAT), occurring as a direct, intentional action of the authority in power. Meanwhile, this same ruling class continuously tells the population that it’s in their best interest to keep serving the system creating that strain. When a person is educated with class consciousness, or develops the internal context framing to understand the nature of the oppressor and oppressed relationship, it causes cognitive dissonance.

The volatility and insecurity of this environment has a macro-sociological effect: it causes neural responses to default to a sympathetic (fight-or-flight) or shutdown state. This overarching cultural hegemony creates a “Yellow Zone” response.

Recently, another theorist developing their own framework, , reached out to me. He explicitly outlined misinformation as an “environmental toxin” which destroys epistemic care and breaks down the cooperative potential of society. I agreed with this immediately. It made me realize that misinformation is the primary weapon capital uses to redirect that Yellow Zone sympathetic state. It is all about divide and conquer. I am helping him create a substack more people can see his work, and when he does I will update the article tag him here.

When you have that internal context framing that allows you to see the oppressor/oppressed relationship (class consciousness), the brain recognizes that the threat is not a physical thing that can be punched or outrun. Instead of pushing you into a mode to attack an innocent victim or do something irrational, the brain triggers you to try to map out the structural threat.

When the material strain becomes so great that a threshold is reached, a person can experience an amygdala override. The threat of complying with the oppressive authority becomes perceived as worse than the threat of fighting it.

This state is called Hyper-Vigilance Pattern Recognition. The brain frantically attempts to build a complete map of the current circumstance, examines all the possibilities to fix it, and analyzes the dialectical relationship between those possibilities and reality.

The key thing about this type of thinking is that it actually supercharges intelligence. It initiates a process of Affective Myelination. Every time a theorist successfully synthesizes a contradiction or discovers a new dialectical concept, the brain rewards them with dopamine. This creates a biological positive feedback loop. The more you theorize to survive, the more physically dense and efficient your systems-thinking neural pathways become. You literally supercharge your own intelligence through sheer revolutionary necessity.

The Receiver and the Prophet

Human society operates as a massive, interconnected biological organism. When this organism encounters a lethal structural pathogen like late-stage capitalism, it manufactures specialized nervous systems to identify the threat.

Think of the concept from The Giver, where an authoritarian society requires one person, the Receiver of Memory, to bear the entire cognitive and affective burden of humanity’s past. While the film adaptation distorts this through an individualistic, capitalist lens, the core premise perfectly illustrates a real-world dynamic. The revolutionary theorist is the real-world Receiver. The masses, crushed by survival exhaustion in the Red Zone, do not have the metabolic energy to map the invisible systems oppressing them. Out of pure neurobiological necessity, the social body produces the theorist to act as its specialized processing core. This person accesses the collective memories of humanity to offer wisdom based upon how that history relates to current struggles.

As we see in the story, the Receiver wakes up to the lies of the system once exposed to this history, attempting to bring class consciousness to the rest of society. The important thing to note here is that this understanding comes with great anxiety. The deeper the theorist’s knowledge gets regarding how structural systems apply to their current situation, the more chaotic and intense their internal experience becomes. What is the objective, empirically observable phenomenon which this story tries to metaphorically conceptualize?

First and foremost, this ability to access the history of the world and have this vast expansion of knowledge was gatekept by the ruling class for many societies throughout known human history. Today, we have a historic opportunity as the masses to utilize the education available on the internet. This power to understand the collective memory of humanity, and the necessity of our current struggle, is available to anyone. While the movie gives an extreme case version based in capitalist culture of the one lone hero, I believe the phenomenon shown in the movie is actually an environmentally induced Hyper-Vigilance Pattern Recognition. When the brain understands the dialectical process of material reality influencing our ideas, and those ideas going back to reshape reality, it invokes a sense of historical urgency that many communists and anarchists share.

The constant awareness of the macro threat of the capitalist system puts that context framing in your mind. Dwelling on it forces your brain into the Yellow Zone, which is built for threat detection and competition. When it is used to map out dialectically how these structures can be changed, it becomes Hyper-Vigilance Pattern Recognition. Because it is so emotional and deeply felt, this only strengthens the neural connections that form. This is how great theorists are made.

It is important to point out the crucial factor here: this is a form of cognitive processing, and therefore a behavioral output, of the Yellow Zone. Since the Yellow Zone is built for fight-or-flight survival and competition, a theorist must spend enough time cultivating Green Zone microclimates in their own life and in their community organizations. They must be part of a cooperative context that enables Collective Agency Expectancy for its members. While the threat detection of the sympathetic nervous system can be a very powerful tool, if it is not combined with healthy doses of the Green Zone, it will breed paranoid, competitive, and eventually coercive behavioral output.

In On the History of Early Christianity, Friedrich Engels explains and gives historical evidence to the fact that all religious and spiritual movements started as socioeconomic movements of the oppressed. We know today that these movements are eventually co-opted by those in power and just become another tool of their oppression. But why does that happen?

Historically, there are multiple case studies showing that the greatest religious leaders that appeared in early human history, like Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, and many others, taught a message of peace and love. They actively taught their followers to do rights and rituals that created temporary Green Zone microclimates. However, they also utilized a strategic use of the Yellow Zone energy, mapping out the structural reality of the oppression their people faced. They channeled that sympathetic nervous system energy into constantly fighting that threat.

Whenever a threat is not physical, you cannot punch it. You have to understand how it works. When the threat is the environmental order being imposed upon the nervous system itself, blocking its evolutionary ability to maintain a Green Zone neural state, our powerful brains have the ability to actively engage in an intellectual fight. This is what we call ideological struggle. It is not only this inner ideological struggle of mapping out the system to regain agency, but also the practice of deploying that action into real-world organization with other people. This practice then shows what ideas were correct, what was wrong, and what should be done away with, as described by the Marxist school of thought.

Maintaining a focus on creating Green Zone microclimates while actively using the structural mapping of Hyper-Vigilance Pattern Recognition is what I would call an art. It is much different from the concept of ideological purity. It is recognizing that channeling anxiety constantly without substituting it with healthy doses of the Green Zone neural state will eventually create a predatory neural baseline, or at least a paranoid reactive one. Furthermore, that worked-up Yellow Zone energy will eventually cause a Systemic Integration ($\Delta$MSI) crash, since the inherent volatility of the fight-or-flight response creates an unstable mood.

The people in history who learned to use this Hyper-Vigilant Pattern Recognition along with a continued cultivation of Green Zone microclimates were able to become what AST calls an Affective Conductor.

The Affective Conductor is able to truly synthesize the historical position and provide a believable trajectory that feels innate because it connects deeply to our neurobiology. It becomes more than just mapping out current societal forces. It becomes an analysis of the self in relation to that society. Through that process, a universal human experience emerges: our collective future depends on the cultivation of Green Zone environments which enable us to operate in solidarity, cooperation, and higher social learning.

This gives us the ability to ensure our survival and actually work together as humanity to create the best solutions for the climate crisis we currently face. The historical urgency felt by the leaders of these different movements throughout history was a real, necessary thing. Our bodies specifically evolved to have this Green Zone neural state. As Peter Kropotkin outlined in his book Mutual Aid, cooperation among members of a species is a defining phase in evolution. Working together equitably to solve our macro-level problems with solidarity is not just urgent today because of the looming climate crisis and constant wars. It is urgent because the structural systems currently in place are causing the majority of people on the planet to operate strictly in the Yellow Zone, or in a state of Commodified Agency Expectancy.

The Affective Conductor taps into this neurobiological truth through a process of dialectical discovery. When they communicate this with the oppressed masses, it resonates with them because it is an accurate reflection of their lived experience. Even if the conceptual explanations were based on mystical forces like gods or devils, as they often were in the past, the structural mapping of reality and the contradicting dialectical forces all around them were understood and explained by people like this.

Prophets were simply early Affective Conductors. They absorbed the Hegemonic Volatility (HV) of the traumatized social body, processed it through their supercharged intellect, and reflected it back as a unified path to salvation.

A revolutionary vanguard using democratic centralism, as outlined by Vladimir Lenin, is an organization specifically made to consist of these exact types of people. While Lenin called them professional revolutionaries, AST would call them Affective Conductors. This does not mean that all of them had achieved the art and skill of synthesizing the Green Zone microclimate experience with this Hyper-Vigilance Pattern Recognition.

People like Lenin and Stalin were undoubtedly professional revolutionaries who I respect and appreciate for the work they did. The fact is that they were heavily influenced by their environmental circumstances. They were socialized into consistently maintaining a sympathetic nervous state of fight-or-flight, and they built a cultural belief that this state was preferred. They neglected the cultivation of the microclimate Green Zone experience which allows the nervous system to access the feeling of social connection, rather than just the cold, calculated, scientific understanding of it. Being part of healthy, enabling Green Zone community organizations is vital because this is what keeps the brain in a state of remembrance of cooperation.

AST outlines how human behavior is an output of these different neural states. If the Yellow Zone neural state produces specific hyper-vigilant, reactive, competitive responses, it can indeed be used to continuously fight the oppressor intellectually. However, it becomes continuously harder to upkeep the remembrance of that feeling which motivated the collective goal of liberation in the first place. Without that initial Green Zone inspiration, revolution just becomes a desperate, and in some cases very effective, way of ensuring personal power, seeing as power is the ultimate security.

I am not going to sit here and say in this article that Lenin or Stalin specifically did this or that, at least not without direct evidence. I do think a more thorough examination of specific factors like this can be productive to understanding where previous revolutionaries went wrong. When I think about this, I think about Mao Zedong’s critique of Stalin. Mao said Stalin undoubtedly was a great revolutionary who served the international working class and defeated fascism, but he created some dialectical errors. Mao talked about how the repression of the Soviet people was one of those errors. Even though some counter-revolutionaries were rightfully dealt with by the hyper-vigilant state apparatus that Stalin helped create, embedded in that system is the possibility for abuse of power due to the implemented hyper-reactive response against anyone perceived as a threat.

Mao Zedong examined the lesson to be learned from this: there is a difference between contradictions among the people and contradictions among the enemy. The way we handle a citizen protesting the government or doing something perceived as a threat to the overarching socialist project should never be dealt with using violence or force unless they become a direct physical threat to others. Contradictions among the people are handled through democracy and education, not coercion. Only in the struggles against the enemy must we use force.

After these true artists die and are replaced by others who take over the organized structure, a problem arises. When the new leadership takes over, if they haven’t been skilled in the exact science of balancing these neural states, they are doomed to drift the movement itself. They will create a Hegemonic Mood Climate that fosters Predatory Agency Expectancy, ultimately creating a coercive Class Character of Context which results in an authoritarian organization.

I am not saying that there has never been an extended period of successive leaderships in human history just because they didn’t have this exact math. The beauty of human experience comes from seeing how different cultures dealt with this problem, what types of structures they tried to create, and how different material conditions created different types of struggle. What I am saying is that the math of Affective Socialization Theory measures these different variables. Once AST empirically validates the relationships of these variables, we will have undeniable science showing us exactly how to avoid the authoritarian trap.

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Beethoven and the Suppression of the Green Zone

I said earlier that I was not going to say Lenin or Stalin did this or that without evidence, and so I would like to present this key piece of evidence that directly points to the overarching concept I am trying to convey. We have historical proof that the vanguard actively suppresses its own neuro-affective health to wage revolution. There is a famous conversation recorded by Maxim Gorky where, after showing Lenin Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata, Lenin remarked on how beautiful and powerful the music was. He noted how it made him want to say sweet, silly things and pat people on the head; he immediately followed this up by saying that he cannot listen to music like this too much, or listen to music at all much these days, since he has to be vigilant. Basically, here is what he said:

“I can’t listen to music very often, it affects my nerves... Today we mustn’t pat anyone on the head or we’ll get our hand bitten off; we’ve got to hit them on the heads, hit them without mercy, though in the ideal we are against doing any violence to people.”

Now, I know this is another person saying that Lenin said this, and we can never really know the exact truth of it; however, it is a well-cited and accepted quote that many people attribute to him. Furthermore, his writings and work suggest that he saw the revolutionary readiness and the professional nature of being a dedicated revolutionary as very serious. Lenin did have his own localized micro Green Zone climate with his wife and with other comrades when he was with them, as well as during other times when he spent time in nature. He did have to face exile, however, and at times was very isolated from the working-class movement he informed; consequently, that level of cooperative social learning inherently necessary for a socialist movement was understood by him perfectly. The way it was set up, however, was done in a hyper-vigilant way. This is not any kind of bad remark on him, as he was an individual who existed in his historical and cultural context, which socialized him to see the historic necessity of that hyper-vigilance.

The concepts of the revolutionary vanguard and democratic centralism have historically shown to be correct in seizing and establishing a new type of socialist power; this is why there is the famous quote that says once you learn a certain amount of history, you either become a Marxist-Leninist or a liar. Myself being one, I can tell you for sure that we take immense pride in this historical validity and the reproducibility of our methods. Many of my Marxist-Leninist comrades, even to this day, cannot reconcile with the fact that there is something wrong or some correction that needs to be made to Marxism-Leninism; this correction is not based on cultural and national conditions, nor the fact that we have a different national culture and thus a unique struggle, rather, it is on the basis of the entire application to the ideological strategy itself.

Marxism-Leninism needs a fundamental upgrade to be a sustainable method. If we can gather anything at this point as to what is the necessary upgrade to Marxism-Leninism, where we can directly address these certain coercive, hyper-vigilant, paranoid actions of certain Marxist-Leninist states, we first have to actually use dialectical materialism; we must look at what the other side has to offer on a level of good faith.

Kropotkin and the Ignored Biology of Mutual Aid

And that other side, of course, is the anarchists. We Marxists officially split with this ideology at the First International, marking the beginning of a 150-year-long ideological debate. I believe this neuroscience, which recognizes the necessity of the authoritative state structure while also recognizing the necessity of actually addressing the neuro-affective health of the revolutionary vanguard and the masses, can be used to construct a solution; it is directly tied to the cultivation of Collective Agency Expectancy (CAE) and gives us the awareness of the empirical problem, which is neurobiological.

Peter Kropotkin, who identified as an anarchist and is looked to as one of the leading thinkers who outlined the historical necessity for anarchism, did so with his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. He empirically demonstrated how mutual aid, cooperation, and working together for the benefit of the entire species was not only a part of life, rather, it was the defining factor in species survival. He documented through anthropological and biological evidence how different species, including early humans, were able to get through some of the harshest environmental conditions through this cooperation and mutual aid. While Kropotkin was only able to observe the external behavior of this mutual aid, modern neuroscience has finally mapped the internal biology of it. This is echoed in Polyvagal theory, which identifies the ventral vagal state; AST calls this the Green Zone, representing the highest evolutionary capacity that humans have achieved. This state enables social cooperation, higher social learning, and communication, which has proven to be useful in psychology and therapy for understanding the behaviors of people. We are taught in school that the fight or flight response is the sympathetic nervous system; however, there is also the shutdown state, the Red Zone. Standard biology right now might only mention the sympathetic nervous system and the homeostasis of healthy vital signs, conveniently leaving out the fact that there are well-documented neural states which influence behavior greatly. There are different interpretations of these states, yet the fact that these different states exist is well accepted across neuroscience.

Affective Socialization Theory identifies that Peter Kropotkin correctly recognized Collective Agency Expectancy as a necessary part of our survival as a species; it is an evolutionary progress that has brought us to where we are now and has given us that tool to use. This tool expresses itself differently across the branches of evolution. Ants, for example, have a highly cooperative society based on a completely different architecture of pheromones and signals, whereas ours is based on neural state activation determined by our environment. In the early stages of human history, this was affected by the natural world and its different environments, both dangerous and safe. This taught us that in safe spaces, we could connect and engage in creative projects together to plan, invent, and work cooperatively. Since we constructed a second environment, a social environment on top of the natural one, we created the base and the superstructure that Marx outlines. This affects our nervous systems in a recursive feedback loop largely dictated by the cultural hegemony introduced by Gramsci; AST gives mathematical formulas to interpret this with variables that go from the individual and aggregate to become macro-level variables. These, in turn, go back down and influence those individual variables, which represent the individual neural baselines of all the people within that social context, whether it be a country, a community, or even a smaller group.

While the Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries of the twentieth century did prove the scientific validity and reproducibility of the vanguard and democratic centralism to organize a movement for decisive action, replacing the old state and constructing a new one based on socialist ideology, they lacked the hard understanding of neuroscience that we now have in the twenty-first century. This science shows that relying entirely on survival-panic logic will inevitably destroy the cooperative capacity of the very society you are trying to build. Relying on the ideological purity of the intellectual members of the vanguard is an error that Lenin, Stalin, and many other revolutionaries did not have the ability to know. It would be impossible for them to consider that their sympathetic nervous system was driving this hyper-vigilant pattern recognition out of a threat response, set up to be competitive and to dominate. Even though professionals collaborating on these plans can make very logical decisions, if the revolutionary authoritative state is not set up correctly, cozy intellectuals living a privileged life can easily form a breeding ground for opportunists. These opportunists still carried capitalist or feudal culture programmed into them before the founding of the new socialist state; they relied on the sympathetic nervous system threat response to defeat the revolution ideologically. You take those people who are locked into a competitive, threat-response reactive state, give them a cushy apartment, and let them live a privileged life separate from the real struggles of the population; it is easy to see how this environment will decay from its original purpose. If this explanation is not convincing enough, we only have to look at the fact that the party saw this pattern of opportunism and reacted several times to purge it.

As a Marxist-Leninist, I know even the CIA admitted that Stalin was not the dictator they portrayed him to be; official FBI reports stated he was more like a captain of a football team, and that Khrushchev would be the new captain. This was spoken about upon the time of Stalin’s death. I have always completely rejected the liberal framing of Stalin as an evil boogeyman, and I have definitely always resented Khrushchev for portraying everything as Stalin’s fault. If we use Affective Socialization Theory, we can see that not only was Stalin a product of his time, which would be the standard apologia excuse, he was also humbly and righteously motivated by a very real desire to be a great revolutionary who took part in changing the world for the better. He and the other members of the intelligentsia could not realize that their necessary hyper-vigilance trained their brains in pattern recognition suited for always detecting threats and dominating the enemy. Even though it was a historical necessity, this continued dependence on the Yellow Zone to construct theories and improve society once the socialist state had been won deeply affected the organizational culture of the apparatus itself, and therefore also affected the masses. This paranoid, hyper-vigilant culture was a very reasonable reaction. Fourteen countries invaded during the civil war after World War I to stop the socialist state from existing and defying capitalist rule. They understood the necessity of hyper-vigilant pattern recognition using the correct internal framing context of dialectical materialism. They correctly pointed out its necessity, yet it was impossible for them to know that this state blocks the Green Zone, which is the cooperative, higher social learning state they were seeking to foster. That is not to say that Green Zone microclimates and spaces enabling Collective Agency Expectancy did not exist in the Soviet Union; they definitely did, which is why AST classifies it as an authoritative socialist state. The party intelligentsia continued to operate on this hyper-vigilant pattern recognition, however, and as we know, many purges happened under Stalin, who kept seeing threats. The Soviet Union did foster a paranoid culture from that time, not as an inherent property, rather as a collective reaction to strong opposition from the capitalist world.

This is traditionally explained through the concept of siege socialism, which basically says that the failings under socialist governments were not inherent properties of socialism, rather they were the effects of socialism under military and economic siege by capitalists. With AST, we can more concretely see why. We can understand that even if there was no capitalist threat, if these professional revolutionaries developed a hyper-vigilant pattern recognition system in their brains without also cultivating the Green Zone as part of their neural baseline, the vanguard will quickly breed the same opportunism they are trying to destroy by being so hyper-vigilant about ideological purity once given the power of the state.

The Repressed Drive and the Fascist Trap

The understanding of the nervous system’s capture by the Yellow Zone, which keeps training systems of protection from threats, can be used to explain the broader trend of opportunism, especially among those who are part of revolutionary movements.

The Neurobiological Roots of the Savior Complex

The drive to secure a better future for humanity, which fuels this hyper-vigilance pattern recognition, can also construct a dissociation Hegemonic Mood Climate (HMC) that is unique to the individual; they develop what we traditionally call the savior complex. At this point, the neural pathways of self-preservation driven by this hyper-vigilant threat detection have enabled a high capacity of understanding. This may even be demonstrated in the success of the individual’s actions; actually coming up with a theory that moves people and spurs them into action becomes a powerful catalyst. Seeing your work make people move can very easily lead to a false perception that putting yourself and your preservation above this noble task is justified. You convince yourself that doing whatever is best for your individual body is what is best for the rest of the collective.

This savior complex is developed by the sheer awe of seeing that hyper-vigilant pattern recognition pay off and affect the real world. When one is disconnected from the broader revolutionary movement, this is even easier to fall into. It is especially true when one is not connected to marginalized and oppressed groups and is not inside building Green Zones of solidarity. When this happens, it is much easier to operate with an internal context framing that is convinced it needs to suppress the Green Zone and be ruthless in the quest to see the material world change by the power of that pattern recognition.

Combine that biological state with the security that the Imperial Cushion provides to the masses of the imperial core, especially white male citizens, and you get a chauvinistic, nationalistic movement. This movement seeks to opportunistically use old symbols of power to trail behind the masses, as Lenin would say, and warp that around to claim it is socialism. What I am talking about here is the patriotic socialists and the American Communist Party.

A lot of people can be outright disgusted and horrified that these groups display very toxic behavior toward each other, the marginalized, and the actual socialist and communist parties that exist. This echoes an earlier movement, the LaRouche movement, which used the language and symbolism of socialism yet spent most of its time physically attacking other socialist groups in the US. They believed their mission was to crush the competition, achieve dominance, and become the vanguard of the masses. It is very easy to see from just these two movements how this threat-based, hyper-vigilant pattern recognition operates when not kept in check with any Green Zone.

You have a toxic masculinity culture that people like Haz and other men were already a part of or influenced by through the manosphere. You already have that toxic masculinity that seeks to convince the masses of working-class men to stay in the sympathetic nervous system state all the time. It tells them they must always remain vigilant, never let their guard down even for a second, and suppress all emotions. That is literally capitalist culture trying to force working-class men into the Yellow Zone and the Red Zone of the dorsal vagal shutdown state; it directly socializes them into abandoning their highest, most recent evolutionary hardware, which gives them the ability for higher social learning, cooperation, and communication necessary for our survival.

From Individual Salvation to Collective Neuro-Capture

Take this mindset and internal context framing, then give it to someone who is religious. Many people have noticed there are a lot of these patriotic socialists who are religious. I am partially religious and mostly spiritual myself, however, that is beside the point. The issue is not the fact that they are religious in itself; it is the fact that they use religion to give excuses for Christian white nationalism and evangelicalism, which form the bedrock of the modern settler-colonial state of the United States.

When you are religious, I can tell you from personal experience, you can fall into this trap. I experienced this while going down into the depths of convincing myself to be ruthless and trying to actually become a sociopath, thinking that would give me success in my early adulthood. I told myself that God wants me to be good. Even though I was being ruthless, if the end goal was something good and it was all to help the rest of humanity, I could excuse any of my actions. The preservation of my body and my success was most important since I was the one who had this great hyper-vigilant pattern recognition. This felt like either divine insight during times of severe dissociation or just the acknowledgment that I am smart and have the potential to be the leader who fixes things.

I have direct experience with this feeling. I convinced myself that, despite my selfish ambitions, I would karmically still receive a great place in heaven or the afterlife. This deeply affects the internal context of some people. Even if it is not for that specific religious fear of the afterlife, there are a number of reasons people do this. This particular reason makes sense, as it is based on the fear of death and the uncertainty after death. Faced with the great, constant uncertainty of capitalism in life, it is natural that many of us will also fear what is next while fearing what is now. We may take refuge in religion or spirituality and find strength in it, as I also do. That fear of uncertainty after death, however, can create a mental justification that the individual is more important than the collective goals they claim to be trying to achieve.

The Affective Conductor in Power

As the article has thus far shown, the professional revolutionary theorist faces a dialectical biological struggle within themselves. They are using hyper-vigilant pattern recognition, which is a Yellow Zone threat-based survival state, to map out and construct how to defeat the oppressive apparatus inhibiting the cultivation of Green Zone social environments; they are also using it to reorganize society in a way that fixes these problems. They are doing so from the very same survival-based recognition and planning of the Yellow Zone most of the time, especially since they had no way to be aware of the dialectic itself. The happiness or mental health of revolutionaries was not always seen as important as we view it today, in the sense that it was believed that sheer ideological purity and will is what made the best and most principled revolutionaries. This understanding was based on the fact that there was no science to identify the real biological causes that motivate the organism. An explanation had to derive out of what the organism had to work with; thus, we Marxist-Leninist organisms have convinced ourselves that this threat-based pattern recognition, alongside the ability to construct networks and organizations that can respond to and defeat threats, is at times the revolution itself. I think this is most particularly evident in another historical figure for whom I have deep respect: Mao Zedong.

The interesting thing about Mao is that he was very committed to understanding this problem the article talks about and fixing it, yet he still sought to fix it through ideological purity and will. He believed he could use the threat-based pattern recognition he had developed to such a high degree that his words literally moved the masses. With that supreme confidence, he had no reason based on the current scientific understanding of the time to think this dialectical recognition and response system he had developed was actually not the best state to be in for the required empathy and Collective Agency Expectancy to be enabled in the environment directly after the revolutionary authoritative state is set up.

I am not saying that Mao was wrong about the continuous dialectical struggle that never ends even after the revolution; I will say that he misunderstood the complexity of all the dialectics involved, simply since there was no way he could know about the neuroscience that had not been developed yet. Basically, Mao saw this threat-based pattern recognition as the primary dialectic in the movement. Sharing this context with others and creating a collective internal context framing based on using these threat-based pattern recognition systems was believed to be what would create the class consciousness that Marx talked about to fully enable a revolution that creates true Collective Agency Expectancy and is able to surmount all obstacles. For the information they had at the time, this does make sense, and it may have even been historically necessary. Understanding the fact that Mao could not know the neuroscience in his time, his actions do paint the picture of someone who was trying to address these problems objectively and do what he believed was the best for the people and the masses. Due to this lack of understanding that modern neuroscience gives us, he could not understand the fundamental error of his ignition of the Cultural Revolution.

When the professional vanguard revolutionaries successfully used the survival threat-based response of the hyper-vigilant pattern recognition to successfully fight back against oppression, neutralize the agents of oppression, and construct the socialist authoritative state of China, they had achieved the first part. They were already on an inevitable path to make certain errors. This survival response in both the Soviet Union and China caused a massive push for rapid industrialization. This rapid industrialization would not be necessary if there was not the threat of capitalist imperialist nations waiting to use their military and economic power to destroy the socialist state and reinstitute capitalism in these countries. This is why we see the critique of siege socialism is also correct on this point. Who knows what the different outcome would have been if there wasn’t this necessary push for rapid industrialization to defend the socialist state, especially regarding the professional revolutionary intelligentsia class having that threat-based pattern recognition as their weapon to not only wage the revolution and seize the state, rather also to govern it afterwards. I am not going to go that deep into it here.

The point is that this push for rapid industrialization creates what AST theorizes as a maximum amount of objective Material Strain. All the survival categories of the MAT discussed and outlined in the other article discussing authoritative versus authoritarian states are checked off; this gives them an objective material strain score of 14, since the threshold is 15 in the current theoretical conceptualization of these interacting variables. What that means is that it is entirely dependent upon the subjective element: how the internal context framing shapes the material strain, and how much that internal context is contributing to the nervous state fixating on it and therefore being inhibited by it. What this means is that socialist rapid industrialization is a very real phenomenon which is not a totalitarian imposition from above; it is a true Collective Agency Expectancy in progress that is a powerful, empowering collective moment for all the citizens of the nation. The AST math also outlines that eventually this high objective Material Strain, even though there is no subjective material strain due to the empowering message and seeing that your work actually makes a difference for future generations that capitalism does not offer, produces a Mood Stability Index crash. This crash occurs due to the fundamental contradiction between the material circumstances and the subjective opinion of it. While this rapid industrialization of having everybody work hard all day every day by their own free will can produce tremendous results, it is not sustainable in the way it was practiced in the 20th-century movements. While labor can be reeducating and empowering, strictly subjecting the body to labor for many years, no matter how empowering it is, eventually cannot last. People need to rest culturally; they need to engage in leisure activities and have these Green Zone microclimates of safety, connection, and cooperation with others, not just a shared trauma of material strain.

Mao's Materialist Insight and Dialectical Limitation

Mao correctly identified the intelligentsia becoming a bureaucratic apparatus disconnected from the masses in the developing authoritative socialist state of China, as this was a core contradiction in Marxism-Leninism that he was already paying attention to and trying to figure out. Whether he saw himself as part of that bureaucracy or as somebody who contributed to its creation, his solution was telling the masses to bombard the headquarters and rebel against any corrupt party officials, stating that rebellion against the state was their right. By doing this, he made a real effort to use his power as an Affective Conductor to give power to the masses, which is in line with his ideological position and claimed goals. The key point, however, is that this tactic to try to remove the bureaucracy and force a collective AE environment utilizing the fight-or-flight sympathetic nervous system response was a dialectical error. If the socialist state is already set up to find ideological purity and let that rise through the ranks, why would the answer just be to remove the intelligentsia who are at the top of the party and part of this united social organism being developed? If this is a historical problem that Mao correctly identified in the USSR under Stalin, and he wrote extensively about how to ideologically combat this opportunism trend, it seems like a solution should actually look at why people in trusted democratic socialist leadership roles become opportunists. Instead of confronting this contradiction and doing more investigation, which he may not have felt necessary since the neuroscience did not exist, his neural architecture arrived at a conclusion that a new struggle had to be waged against this new bureaucratic class that he himself helped create. Not only his extensive writing on how to ideologically solve this problem, rather also his actions of directly telling the citizens of China they had a right to rebel against the government, is what started the separate ideology of Maoism. People around the world understood the contradiction of this new intelligentsia class, recognizing the big danger of opportunism once the Marxist-Leninist vanguard seizes the state. Seeing Mao’s seemingly enabling response telling people they had the right to rebel seems to have created this new ideology of Maoism, as it gives a proposed dialectical answer to the problem based in the same threat-based pattern recognition. It would make sense to people using that pattern recognition that this solution be a continuous struggle that never ends. Once you get into that intense dialectical thinking, you have to find an answer. That built-up confidence in the power of hyper-vigilant threat detection makes it hard to accept that there isn’t a material or scientific answer, and we already know with modern neuroscience that our brain will always try to fill in the gap.

This is where Mao actually ventured into idealism and took actions based not on dialectical materialism, rather on the broader field of dialectics. What this means is that he was making real dialectical observations: the observation that this new intelligentsia class creates opportunists, and thus those opportunists must be struggled against by the working class, creating a continuous dialectical struggle that is hard to see an end to. That answer is grounded in dialectical relationships, showing the back and forth, yet it is not grounded in material reality, which is the second most crucial part of dialectical materialism in our attempt to be real empirical scientists as Marxist-Leninists.

Using the understanding that AST gives us alongside modern neuroscience, we can say that Mao made a dialectical error, just like Mao said about Stalin. This shows he believed the understanding of dialectics itself could solve a material problem when the scientific solution of understanding neuroscience was not available as hard science yet. Many cultures have cultivated a wisdom for it for many years, especially Indigenous cultures like the Zapatistas in Mexico. They spent thousands of years cultivating a Collective Agency Expectancy and horizontal organizing, so when they had a revolution and claimed their autonomous territory from the Mexican state, they were able to actually transition into a non-hierarchical system of power where the leadership roles are rotated. They actually do not face the same problem that the Soviet Union and China faced. Some people might say it is due to a smaller scale, yet that is not the whole truth; the fact is that for thousands of years they trained a generational Collective Agency Expectancy that was much easier to go back to than the generational trauma of the neural baselines of the people of the Soviet Union and China, who for thousands of years built up Predatory Agency Expectancy and coercive Class Character of Context environments with pre-capitalist systems of hierarchical oppression.

The hard science that AST proposes is even less necessary for Indigenous communities that have been practicing communism and organized socialism for thousands of years. For societies that have gone through many generations of Predatory Agency Expectancy, being trained in that way necessarily creates individuals who use hyper-vigilant threat-based pattern recognition. These people need the hard science in their fight-or-flight theoretical thinking. They do not necessarily have it culturally embedded the way certain Indigenous cultures do; they are trained on a completely different baseline. They are operating primarily from this Yellow Zone hyper-vigilant perspective that knows how to think dialectically and incorporate material facts to make it work. If the material facts are not there to give answers to the toughest questions, however, the brain will give an answer that makes perfect sense dialectically yet is wrong materially.

Uncoordinated Chaos and the Limits of Perpetual Fight-or-Flight

This is where we fully understand the action of Mao Zedong saying bombard the headquarters and telling the masses they have a right to rebel. Even some right-wing historians say it does not make sense for an authoritarian leader to tell people to rebel, noting it more reflects an anarchist ideology, while others just say it was a 5D chess move to manipulate the population to preserve his power. I think it is very evident that he truly believed he was resolving a dialectical contradiction materially by telling the people to bombard the headquarters. At that point, he also forsook his earlier sworn understanding that there is a difference between contradictions among the people and among the enemy. The intelligentsia class, who were professional revolutionaries that fought for the freedom for this socialist project to exist, are part of the people. If the new socialist society failed to implement measures to stop one of these people from abusing power and created this culture of abusive power, the issue is structural and does not call for violence. Revolutionary self-defense is fine, yet the uncoordinated, chaotic result of Mao’s instructions to the populations who so admired him as an Affective Conductor created a big spike in Hegemonic Volatility. He was able to use that to misdirect the responsibility for any of the problems off of himself to solve these dialectical contradictions.

When Mao was operating in the Yellow Zone hyper-vigilant pattern recognition, he constructed a plan for the survival of the socialist project itself. Putting that plan out to the masses as the Affective Conductor ended up creating a massive spike in Hegemonic Volatility. This unorganized mandate to rebel created a Hegemonic Volatility that would be similar to the breakdown of a capitalist state, even though it has its differences; it creates that revolutionary environment where a power vacuum opens up, and all of these different factions come up trying to either take advantage of it or repair it. This volatility pushed people into organized and even high-end expressions of both the Green Zone and the Yellow Zone. People who were already primed for conflict reacted exactly how you would expect. When you give people in certain villages or towns that have existing rivalries a reason to create an "us versus them" dynamic, it justifies their dislike of that person personally; if they have a personal grievance with them, this top-down authorization means they can finally act on it. Some groups organized genuine Green Zone mutual aid to survive the instability, while others locked entirely into Yellow Zone factionalism, using the ideological mandate simply to act on those existing rivalries.

Before any Maoists, Marxist-Leninists, or anybody else who is a fan of Mao like myself gets defensive and wants to write me off, I 100% do not believe he did this consciously. I really believe there are times where a dialectical materialist theorist can guess about the nature of a material thing and be scientifically wrong about certain facts simply since there isn’t enough science available. When he was saying bombard the headquarters, I truly believe it made perfect sense to him as the answer to the dialectical contradiction, and he did not know it was in opposition to the actual material reality of the neurobiology.

Writing the Biological Code for Liberation

The historical contradiction of traditional Marxist-Leninist states is that you cannot force a population into the Green Zone using the hyper-vigilant, threat-based neural state of the Yellow Zone or the sympathetic nervous system. If a movement relies on a single Affective Conductor, or even a group of Affective Conductors who act as the professional revolutionaries and intelligentsia at the top of the party making and proposing plans, the Marxist-Leninist socialist state will continue to fail if the effect of that leadership on their nervous systems is not counteracted by hard empirical safeguards. These safeguards must not allow them to enforce these ideals of hyper-vigilance on the rest of the population trying to achieve Green Zone liberation. This is exactly why Affective Socialization Theory demands a structural cure. We cannot rely on the “ideological goodwill” of the vanguard, the “ideological purity” of the movement, or even the “principled nature” of its members.

There must be structural, implemented methods not only for the maintenance of professional revolutionaries’ connection to the Green Zone alongside the Yellow Zone; there should also be mandatory mental health protocols. Furthermore, there must be mandatory training away from the toxic masculinity which suppresses the Green Zone and can create this savior complex. We need systems of horizontal hierarchy integrated within the vertical hierarchy of the authoritative socialist state. It is true there must be an intelligentsia at the top proposing and submitting plans; however, this must be accountable to a truly democratic representation of the masses who can vote on these plans.

There basically needs to be a complete rework of how we envision this authoritative socialist state if it is going to be sustainable and viable for future projects. Currently, it has proven its use and effectiveness at building a revolutionary movement and taking control of the state, yet it has shown that it is not sustainable with the current conditions of the ever-changing social environment of our planet. It has been shown biologically why this has been unsustainable; even though the world is changing, there is a neurological basis that needs to be paid attention to, regardless of capitalism’s power to force siege socialism.

Ensuring the social body finally achieves true Collective Agency Expectancy and social liberation from the toxic systems of power that keep us in the Yellow and Red Zones requires rewriting the biological code of our movements.

In next week’s article, I will go in depth on a proposal I have for this, and about two weeks after that I will put out an article showing you how local community organizations are already intuitively recognizing this organizational necessity. So if you are not subscribed already please consider becoming a free subscriber to support my work and get the latest articles using the AST analysis.

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References

Baumrind, D. (1966). Effects of authoritative parental control on child behavior. Child Development, 37(4), 887-907. https://doi.org/10.2307/1126611

Engels, F. (1958). On the history of early Christianity. In K. Marx & F. Engels, On Religion (pp. 312-343). Foreign Languages Publishing House. (Original work published 1894)

Gorky, M. (1924). Days with Lenin. International Publishers.

Kropotkin, P. (1902). Mutual aid: A factor of evolution. William Heinemann.

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1969). The communist manifesto. Progress Publishers. (Original work published 1848)

Tamargo, A. (2026). Affective Socialization Theory: A unified model of behavior (Part 1: Neural wiring & the recursive system). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18514658

Thony. (2026). Personal communication, April 2026.

In Part 1-4 of this series, we looked at the historical origins of socialist theory and the word itself, examined how it fractured into distinct ideological branches, and identified the six core pillars that unite all of these movements. Now that we have defined what socialism actually is, we must define what it is not. By cutting through the propaganda and analyzing the technical differences between socialism, communism, liberalism, fascism, and social democracy, we can finally clear away the misconceptions that dominate modern political media.

Since the word “socialism” has such a broad and varying definition, and is also defined in relation to similar or overlapping concepts, identifying distinctions and misconceptions between these different concepts, for a technical basis, helps us understand what socialism is not, and also where the overlaps between it and these other concepts lie. According to Cynthia Resor, the professor of social studies mentioned earlier, “Capitalism, socialism, and communism are three key concepts in social studies, with complex definitions and complicated histories. Explaining these concepts… is muddled even more by how these words are used in modern media. The meaning is often obscured by political alliances and deliberate attempts to mislead.” So, in this section, different related concepts will be explained relative to socialism, to create a more encompassing understanding of the word “socialism.”

Socialism vs. Communism

The words “socialism” and “communism,” throughout their history, have been used interchangeably by many people, even to this day, but also have been distinguished from each other in different contexts. Today in American mainstream media, politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties are calling each other communists and socialists. As I write this, only a few days ago the governor of California (the state I live in), Gavin Newsom, said, “It’s just perverse that they could be shaping the Democratic Party in the context of the socialist brand, when, in fact, this guy is the leading nationalist and socialist of our time, Donald Trump.” Newsom and other Democrats have labeled Trump a communist, and have received the same labels from members of the Republican Party, which adds a lot of confusion to the true definition of these words. Another interesting thing about this quote from Newsom is that he says “nationalist and socialist,” which are two different things, but combined was the name of the Nazi Party in Germany (which, despite the name, was not socialist, and this is explained further down in this section).

The media of many capitalist countries has often called Marxist-Leninist states “communist countries,” even though the government and majority of people in these countries have a common understanding that they are “socialist countries” run by a communist party. The reason for this common understanding is explained by the theoretical notion in Marxist-Leninist thought that communism is a future society in which class divisions among the people cease to exist. With class division (rich owners and poor laborers) no longer existing, it is theorized that money and the state itself, which enforces the economic rule of the ruling class, will cease to be necessary. In Marx’s analysis of history, he asserts that before class stratification (distinctions between rich and poor, intellectual and physical laborers, etc.), human societies engaged in what he calls “primitive communism.” Marx explains that these early human societies, which had no advanced means of production (things that help them produce goods), operated on a principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” Marx believed that a revolution of the people rising up and claiming power for the working class would eventually create the conditions for human society to come back to this principle. Other socialist thinkers and later Marxist-Leninists began to describe socialism as “from each according to their ability, to each according to their work,” which meant, usually aside from basic needs, people were given wealth and resources proportionate to the amount of value their work created, basically a meritocracy.

The same capitalist media that usually calls Marxist-Leninist countries “communist countries” often attributes the label of a “socialist country” to countries like the Nordic countries that have strong welfare systems, which would more accurately be defined as social democracies.

Socialism vs. Capitalism

“Socialism” and “capitalism” are often described in contrast to each other, but sometimes what these two terms actually mean is intentionally or naively not part of this comparison. Political arguments over the two terms can turn into pointing at things that may or may not actually exist in a specific socialist or capitalist nation, then comparing them to examples from the opposing side and saying this is why this one is good and this is why this one is bad, ignoring the context of the events or phenomena observed and just looking for instant anecdotal proof of the morality of the ideas. Capitalism, however, is a specific economic mode of production (type of economic system) in which the freedom of private individuals to own the means of production (the factories, large-scale farms, apartment complexes, etc.) is established in law, where single individuals can be the autocratic dictators over businesses and even whole industries. The main difference between socialism and capitalism is the level of economic power that single individuals have over the economic lives of others. Socialism attempts to make production (what the society’s labor goes toward) a democratic process, while, in contrast, capitalism seeks to allow single individuals to determine the direction of production. Also, the capitalist is entitled (by law) to all of the profit the worker makes minus the agreed-upon wage for the amount of time worked; in socialism the wealth is democratically directed back into the pockets of the workers, into investment in the business or industry, or into the collective welfare of the whole population. The economic motivation of socialist society is for the collective benefit of all those who participate and the rest of the broader society; capitalism’s economic motivation is to get as much value out of the labor of others as possible while giving them as little as you possibly can, to increase profit and thereby the personal welfare of the individual.

The Illusion of Liberalism and the Imperial Core

As a citizen of the United States, I have heard the correlations of socialism and liberalism my whole life. Growing up in a very conservative environment, a small town in eastern North Carolina, I was told by my elders that liberals like Obama wanted to make the United States socialist, and that they basically were socialists. I was told that things like universal healthcare were socialist policies that would bankrupt our government and drive us into another Great Depression. The prices of everyday items, like a cheeseburger, would go up to 20 dollars and we would not be able to afford anything. With a new understanding that policies like universal healthcare in a capitalist system are a form of social democracy, it is easy to see that the extent of “socialism” that this would entail is very minimal compared to most other forms of socialist thought, if it is socialist at all. But what does the term “liberal” have to do with any of this?

“Liberalism” as an ideology arose alongside capitalism, as a philosophical justification for its policies and structure. Prabhat Patnaik, a professor of economics at Cambridge University who has many published books and articles, says,

“The evolving liberal democracies were typically accompanied by the evolving economic formation of capitalism; the political ideas and principles that make up the doctrine of liberalism are, therefore, deeply integrated with economic ideas about the nature of capitalism. My objective is to look at the notion of ‘freedom’ in the context of this integrated political and economic framework that we have come to call ‘liberalism.’ Liberalism is concerned with the freedom of the individual. Within liberalism, however, … ‘every strand of classical liberalism, whether or not it says so explicitly, must believe that the emergence of capitalism—that is, of the employer–wage laborer relationship, in so far as it has a history (and has not been a dominant form for ever)—was a voluntary process. And, since it is a voluntary process based on the freely given consent of all individuals, a competitive capitalist economy represents the only economic system under which individual freedom can be fully realized.’ ”

His explanation of liberalism’s role in presenting this “true freedom of the individual” as being inextricably tied to a capitalist system shows that liberalism is actually an ideology that produces and reinforces capitalism, not socialism. So why are they compared?

In the United States, the self-identified “liberal” party, the Democratic Party, has historically presented itself as having social democratic values. For example, FDR, a Democratic president from 1933 to 1945, was the president who signed the New Deal into law. This was a set of social democratic reforms which started unemployment and disability insurance, aid for families with children, government help with housing, and many other programs. This belief in social democratic ideals is what has continued to lure Americans into supporting the Democratic Party since. Liberal political parties in capitalist societies have an ideological goal of preserving the existing power structure that allows for capitalist rule over the working class. Due to political pressure or threat of revolution, however, these parties may choose to make a “deal” (like the “New Deal” reforms) with the working class: you continue to accept the rule of capitalists over industry, and we will make them fund safety-net programs that will ensure that even if you fall into poverty, there will be resources to help you survive, instead of just letting you become homeless and starve to death.

This aspect is not usually pointed out by these liberal parties, since it benefits them for people to believe that liberalism is just synonymous with the word “freedom” in general, like “freedom of choice,” “freedom to express yourself and be who you are,” and other commonly associated concepts. If liberalism is technically defined by the members of the liberal party, if it is explained how “liberal” means the freedom of one individual to be the autocratic dictator of a workplace or industry, then some of the supporters may decide they want to find a different ideology that actually challenges that.

We can understand this dynamic even more clearly by looking at the updated empirical political compass of Affective Socialization Theory. Liberalism, as an ideology, thrives primarily in what we call the “imperial core” (wealthy, Western capitalist nations). Why does liberalism flourish here? It is a matter of objective material conditions. The imperial core artificially lowers its own Objective Material Strain (MAT-O) by outsourcing its poverty, exploitation, and systemic violence to the “periphery” (the colonized or historically exploited nations). Since the citizens of the imperial core experience relatively lower material strain, their nervous systems have the cognitive bandwidth to engage in liberal idealism. They can comfortably support a system that preaches “freedom” while remaining neurologically detached from the violence occurring on the other side of the world to sustain that freedom.

Conversely, when we look at the periphery nations, the material strain is engineered by capitalism to be devastatingly high. In these environments of extreme, inescapable scarcity, the population is structurally forced into survival panic. This high-strain environment creates fertile ground for opportunist authoritarian movements to take over. This is not to say that the imperial core is inherently “safe” and periphery nations are inherently “dangerous.” Rather, it is a strict neuro-sociological observation: when capitalism crushes a population with extreme material strain, it breeds authoritarian pathology, while the comfortable beneficiaries of that exploitation adopt liberalism to mask the violence.

Nazism, Fascism, and the Authoritarian Pathology

Because the German Nazi Party’s official name was the “National Socialist Party,” people who are either malicious or ignorant attribute Hitler’s “National Socialism” as just another form of socialism, when, in reality, the Nazi Party’s policies had nothing in common with what the word “socialism” had come to mean. The Nazi Party used the color red (which was the color most communist parties around the world adopted) and put the word “socialism” into their name, with the word “national” in front, to try to attract working-class members, and then, once these working-class people were in, tried to convince them that true socialism was the capitalist and working class working together, based on racial solidarity, to make their nation “great.” While the Nazi Party did have a stated goal of creating a “welfare state” for their citizens, it rejected the idea that there needed to be class struggle or any change of economic system, and it rejected international working-class solidarity, which is a socialist principle of recognizing that the workers of every country have more in common with each other than they do with their own national rulers.

In 1934, at the beginning of the Nazis’ political rule, Hitler and his allies in the party murdered other members of their own party who had stated anti-capitalist ambitions (which is literally, as we have discussed, what socialism actually historically meant: being anti-capitalist, finding a way to create a better life than what capitalism has given us) in what is called “the Night of the Long Knives.” They also banned other socialist or communist parties and imprisoned or killed many of their members. The only possible connection that could accurately be drawn between Nazism and socialism would be if we went all the way back to the beginnings of the conceptualizations of the term, which we discussed in chapter 1. Henri de Saint-Simon, an early thinker in socialist thought, believed that colonizing the world and forcing people to work was what would achieve a “better society” than what he perceived he had, but after this early discovery process of public discussion on what this new concept meant, it quickly became widely accepted that socialism was anti-capitalist. Identifying capitalism as the issue for the modern problems of society, early socialist thinkers then agreed that socialism would entail ending capitalism, or at least reforming it into something new. The Nazi Party did not only fail to do this, it protected and empowered capitalist corporations and did not redistribute wealth, despite promises of a “welfare state.” The following quote, pulled from an interview with Hitler himself in the 1930s, describes this, admitting that his government was trying to replicate fascism:

“Fascism offers us a model that we can absolutely replicate! As it is in the case of Fascism, the entrepreneurs and the workers of our National Socialist state sit side by side, equal in rights, the state strongly intervenes in the case of conflict to impose its decision and end economic disputes that put the life of the nation in danger.”

Fascism, the self-described ideology of the Italian government under the dictator Mussolini, comes from a Latin word associated with a ceremonial symbol of power. It was popularized by Mussolini and admired by Hitler. It is even said that Hitler wrote fan mail to Mussolini saying he wanted to be like him, and in interviews, he speaks about replicating fascism. But what is fascism in practical terms? What does it mean to do, what are its aims? To quote Mussolini directly, “The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State, a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values, interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.”

Mussolini describes fascism as being a totalitarian state, one that decides what things mean, one that attempts to mold the people into the shape it wants them to be by forcing a top-down violent suppression of any resistance to it. Speaking of totalitarianism, in anti-communist propaganda, I myself remember watching as a teenager and as an adult, fascism and communism are constantly presented as two sides of the same coin, both supposedly totalitarian systems that produce autocratic dictatorships and devastation for many people.

What is the actual difference between the socialist state and the fascist one, then? The answer to this seems to elude much of the mainstream media discourse on the subject, yet it becomes very clear when we apply the framework of Affective Socialization Theory.

The difference lies entirely in the distinction between an authoritative state and an authoritarian one. Fascism, like social democracy, is a response of capitalism in decline when citizens are threatening a revolution to take power for themselves. Instead of making a “deal” with the working class, a capitalist class that has chosen the path of fascism demands absolute obedience. Fascism is pure authoritarian pathology. It relies on high demandingness and zero responsiveness. It manufactures its own internal material strain to force compliance, demanding the working class not question or speak out about the political suppression they are witnessing, and demanding they continue to produce value to protect capitalist interests.

A healthy socialist state, conversely, is authoritative. It utilizes necessary demandingness to protect the masses from capitalist violence, while maintaining high responsiveness to the proletariat through democratic workers’ councils and mass participation. Not only do Marxist-Leninist socialist leaders not profess their ideology to be totalitarian, or to want to control the population for control’s sake, even the CIA apparently agreed that they were not an absolute autocracy. In a declassified CIA report on leadership of the USSR, it is noted: “Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain.” This reflects the responsiveness required in an authoritative framework.

Speaking of totalitarianism, it is worth noting that Mussolini publicly admitted that fascism (his government’s ideology) was totalitarian. In anti-communist propaganda I myself remember watching as a teenager and as an adult, fascism and communism are seen as two sides of the same coin, both totalitarian systems that produce autocratic dictatorships and devastation for many people. However, not only do Marxist-Leninist socialist leaders not profess their ideology to be totalitarian, or to want to control the population, but even the CIA apparently agreed that they were not. In a declassified CIA report on leadership of the USSR, it is said, “Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain.”

“Everybody Gets the Same”

Many people who are completely ignorant of socialism as a concept also assume that socialism means “everybody gets the same.” I say this from personal experience; I once even had a cop say to me, “that means that everybody gets the same, right,” when I had mentioned socialism. To some this may seem ridiculous to explain, yet my personal experience refuting people so uninformed and propagandized on the topic has taught me to be thorough.

As mentioned earlier, socialism has a variety of perspectives, none of which advocate actually dividing up the products of society equally among everyone. Many strains of socialism agree with the idea of “from each according to their need, to each according to their work,” a principle of meritocracy, not illogical, forced “sameness.”

Viewed through the lens of Affective Socialization Theory, forced sameness would actually be a rigid form of coercive demandingness. The actual goal of socialist economics is to structurally lower Objective Material Strain (MAT-O) below the critical biological threshold for every single citizen. By universally guaranteeing basic survival needs like housing, healthcare, and food, society stops the amygdala from forcing the population into chronic survival-mode panic.

Once that secure material baseline is established, the nervous system can exit the Red Zone. This allows individual human diversity, high-level neuroplasticity, and Collective Agency Expectancy to finally flourish. Socialism is about equalizing the foundational environment to unlock diverse human potential, not flattening everyone into identical clones.

This concept often comes with the belief that socialist society does not have markets or businesses. It is as if some people hear the word “socialism” and imagine a dystopian society where everyone lines up to receive their daily allotment of goods that are equal to everyone else’s.

Why anyone would actually advocate for that, or be passionate about it, is something I do not know. I do know that now, after going through the historical development of the word “socialism,” defining its core principles, and looking at its distinctions from other concepts and misconceptions, an examination of socialism in practice can begin.

Coming Up in Part 6: Now that we have defined the core principles and cleared away the misconceptions, we will finally look at socialism in practice. We will examine historical and modern examples of Marxist-Leninist states, social democracies, market socialist economies, Maoist movements, and anarcho-socialist experiments to see exactly how these theories have been applied in the real world.

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This article is a serialized, adapted excerpt from my book, What is Socialism? A Concise Analysis to Clarify the Concept. If you prefer to read the entire framework at once, or want to support this publication, you can [grab the physical paperback on Amazon here].

Also you can Dive into the full AST framework (still in development) on my website here: Affective Socialization Theory

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References

• Baumrind, D. (1966). Effects of authoritative parental control on child behavior. Child Development, 37(4), 887-907. https://doi.org/10.2307/1126611

• Berlet, C. (2005). Mussolini on the corporate state. Political Research Associates. https://politicalresearch.org/2005/01/12/mussolini-corporate-state

  Coaston, J. (2019, March 27). Adolf Hitler was not a socialist. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2019/3/27/18283879/nazism-socialism-hitler-gop-brooks-gohmert

• Engels, F. (1880). Socialism: Utopian and scientific. Marxists Internet Archive.

  Kołakowski, L., & Falla, P. S. (1978). Main currents of Marxism: Its rise, growth, and dissolution. Clarendon Press.

• Marx, K. (1867). Capital: A critique of political economy (Vol. 1). Marxists Internet Archive.

• Neammanee, P. (2025). Gavin Newsom calls Trump a ‘leading nationalist and socialist’ over deal that riled up MAGA. Yahoo! News. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/gavin-newsom-calls-trump-leading-183931922.html

• Patnaik, P. (2024, October 25). A Marxist critique of liberalism: On capitalism and individual freedom. Economic Sociology & Political Economy. https://economicsociology.org/2024/10/25/a-marxist-critique-of-liberalism-on-capitalism-and-individual-freedom/

• Resor, C. (2024, October 11). Capitalism, socialism, communism: Distinguishing important economic concepts. Social Studies School Service. https://www.socialstudies.com/blog/capitalism-socialism-communism-whats-the-difference/

• Tamargo, A. (2026). Affective Socialization Theory: A unified model of behavior (Part 1: Neural wiring & the recursive system). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18514658

A Note for New Readers: This article uses the Affective Socialization Theory (AST) framework, a neuro-materialist science I am developing to explain how our environment physically shapes our behavior. You will see variables like Material Strain (MAT) and Agency Expectancy (AE) used throughout. If you are new to the theory, you can find the full glossary and research at [Here].

In psychology, affective socialization officially refers to the process by which children learn to process emotions and context from their parents. The sociological framework I have been developing, Affective Socialization Theory (AST), which bridges psychology, sociology, and neuroscience to prove that capitalism is neurodevelopmentally toxic, looks at all sources of socialization, even after adulthood, and how our socio-economic system, the architecture of our society, constantly wires our brains in a certain direction.

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With AST’s focus on connecting the micro of psychology to the macro of sociology One of the biggest things that is seemingly of great importance is if a larger sociological apparatus is being “authoritarian.” Now before I lose the people reading this who have red Engels, or maybe are Marxist leninist like me, I just want to say that I agree with Engels and I am not here to say that any socialist revolution or movement that uses the force of authority is authoritarian; rather I am proposing that we as Marxists take on a new terminology and describing this act of taking exercising authority on behalf of the people, as the democratic apparatus representing the people, which is borrowed from mainstream clinical psychology, particularly the foundational 1960s framework of authoritative versus authoritarian parenting styles developed by Diana Baumrind.

Acknowledging that parenting is a form of early life authority and not only that, but also that it is a necessary authority and combining that with the scaling from micro to macro and the transition to adulthood whereby the state practically becomes the supreme material authority over an individual; AST proposes that there is a difference between authoritative and authoritarian governments, revolutions, and social movements in general. The reason it is necessary for us as Marxists to take on this new framing is the same reason it is necessary for psychology to make a distinction between these two forms of parenting: because all authority is not the same. Authority on the basis of enforcing authority over others in itself, authority being the end goal, is authoritarian. Authority that is exercised democratically for the benefit of those who are under the authority is authoritative. In a socialist context this authority is democratically decided by a working class democracy but for all general context authority that is exercised in the benefit of the people the authority is over is authoritative. Just like whenever we must give rules to our children, responsible leaders must make laws for a population for their safety. And even in a revolutionary movement or even in a community organization, the group must have rules that are enforced by some kind of leadership, which can expel people who do not abide by those rules, so that the relationship can be mutually beneficial for the members and the authority.

Engels was right when he wrote about how authority is inherent in a revolution, and so the word authoritarian as a slur against revolutionary movements of the masses is incorrect. However, since Engels’ time, not only have we seen the rise of fascism, but we have also seen the rise of other movements using the symbolism and vocabulary of socialist movements to gain political power and then become something that is not at all aligned to what we as socialists are trying to achieve. This same old argument we Marxists use today was originally put forth by Engels at a time period when this word, authoritarian, was predominantly used as slander against socialists. It didn’t have the real-world context of later regimes like those of Nazi Germany and the Khmer Rouge to compare to socialism and say these are the same thing as socialism, and try to portray their ideologies as the same as socialism. The historical situation has now evolved, and we have to redefine and re-address the concept of “authoritarianism” to be able to be better understood by the masses.

My case in point: A little while ago I saw that the channel Second Thought on YouTube had put out a video and which was titled “we need to talk about authoritarianism” and basically the video was a basic Marxist critique in the same style as Engels gave of the word authoritarianism and how all revolutions are inherently authoritarian; you know, the same argument we all as Marxist have basically been trained to use. There was a lot of reaction to this from different parts of the left and other people on the political spectrum, and to these people, just denying the existence of authoritarianism creates confusion because what they’ve learned about what authoritarianism is. They have learned through socialization from school, popular media, or other sources that authoritarianism is what the Nazis did, what the Khmer Rouge did, and of the horrors it has caused. Not only that but they have also learned through propaganda (even some that originated from places like Nazi Germany) that the Soviet Union, China, and other socialist states also commit this authoritarianism, and if as socialists our best defense to that is to say that authoritarianism is just buzzword used to de-credit revolutionary movements and don’t push our analysis further and outline what separates socialist authority or the socialist state using authority from a state or a regime using the language of socialism or just a regime in general being authoritarian (you know, exercising authority for the sake of exercising authority itself for the maintenance of that power and that authority), then we keep giving those who propagandize against socialism an easy way to make us look bad by cherry picking our words and turn people against our ideas before they even hear us out.

I am all for being a principled Marxist-Leninist, but at a certain point, relying on Engels’ 18th-century critique becomes dogma that, as time goes on, becomes more and more obscure to the masses. Yes! I love Engels’ article “On Authority!” It should definitely still be read in historical context, but if we are really seeking to “bring class consciousness to the masses,” we have to update our scientific analysis. Since Engels’ time we have seen the rise of movements that used socialist language and were authoritarian (like Nazi Germany and the Khmer Rouge) and developmental psychology has identified a difference in necessary, even beneficial authority and unnecessary, harmful authority; these two understandings lead us to a historical, cultural moment where if one denies the word “authoritarian” as a meaningful descriptor, the general public who is not educated in Marxism will most often assume your overall position is either one of delusion or apologia.

So us solely denying that the word applies to our movements and not giving a deeper analysis of the concept itself can shut the ears of the modern masses before our deeper analysis can be heard. When we try to say the movements that use our language are not us, on this basis, we often explain that these movements are fascist, counterrevolutionary, or opportunist, and we do provide evidence that these movements objectively operate differently than our movements, but it takes time for someone to go through all that research, or even piece it all together sometimes.

With all this in mind, I am proposing that there’s a better way that we can define these types of governments that more closely aligns to the modern understanding of these words and can give us better ideological armor against these attacks. With this new framing we can say no, the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, etc, were/are not we’re not authoritarian but the Khmer rouge was; and not just subjectively, I have proposed as part of the sociological framework I am developing, AST, a formula that we can use and test against different regimes to determine which category they would fall into: authoritative or authoritarian. This is called the revolutionary pathology quotient.

One of the core variables in the RPQ formula is the material strain. The material strain is not just a measure of objective material strain that the population is experiencing under the regime or revolution but also of the subjective strain felt from that objective strain and this is done in an intricate way that is still being developed and hasn’t undergone testing yet but you can see more about it here. Anyways the point is after that this material strain is separated by endogenous and exogenous, meaning is the material strain imposed on the population by the current authority and power by their direct intent and action or is it the result of a blockade, sanctions, or imperialist aggression and encirclement? The next key variable is determining whether the regime or revolution is building Collective Agency Expectancy: are the people constructing and participating in democratic processes, being empowered and building a sense of agency that’s tied to their community? This represents scientifically that the socialization of the environment is training the nervous system of the members to actually cooperate and communicate with others, better fostering the green zone that AST talks about on a collective level.

The math is still being developed but here is the relevant variables and formulas as they currently are in development:

The Revolutionary Pathology Quotient (RPQ) formula mathematically isolates the origin of a society’s material strain and the way it directs agency to determine if a force of authority or group is authoritarian or authoritative; this is scientifically based on the affective socialization hegemonically produced by the relationship between material conditions and agency expressions.

Before we can calculate the RPQ, we have to measure the material strain of the population, which would come from aggregated scores, similar to indices already in use to measure material suffering or security.

The Material Strain Index (MAT)

Material strain is not just an objective lack of resources; it is how that lack biologically taxes the nervous system. The MAT formula calculates this by combining objective deprivation with subjective worry:

MAT = (MAT-O * 2) + MAT-S

• MAT-O (Objective): A score from 0 to 7 based on severe deprivation in foundational categories (housing, food, healthcare, debt, transportation, income, utilities). It is multiplied by 2 to mathematically prioritize physical reality.

• MAT-S (Subjective): A self-rated stress score from 0 to 10.

AST hypothesizes that there is a critical biological threshold which is currently proposed as a score of 15. When the scores of the population cross this line, their nervous systems lock into survival mode. The prefrontal cortex is overridden by the amygdala, and complex social cooperation and higher learning (the Green Zone) shuts down.

Exogenous vs. Endogenous Strain

To objectively judge whether a state (or any force of authority) is authoritative or authoritarian, the RPQ looks at where this material strain is coming from:

• Exogenous MAT: Strain forced upon the system from external structural violence (capitalist embargoes, imperialist encirclement, foreign-funded civil war).

• Endogenous MAT: Strain artificially engineered or deliberately exacerbated by the state’s own intentional policies.

If a socialist state is managing a massive external crisis (Exogenous MAT) and enforcing strict rules to distribute resources fairly and make sure everyone has the highest chance at survival and relief possible, it is acting as a protective scaffolding. It is engaging in necessary protective measures, just like an authoritative parent would to protect their children. This is what AST calls Affective Triage: the necessary, emergency management of resources to secure their material needs and psychological well-being.

If the state itself is manufacturing the crisis (Endogenous MAT) to demand absolute obedience and destroy democratic feedback, it is a pathology.

The Revolutionary Pathology Quotient (RPQ)

We combine the engineered strain with the social character of the environment to calculate the final diagnosis:

RPQ = Strain Shift * (Coercive CCC Index / Collective AE Index)

The math asks two measurable, falsifiable questions:

1. Is the state manufacturing its own scarcity? The Strain Shift compares the state-engineered Endogenous MAT against the historical baseline of the pre-revolutionary society. External attacks from capitalists do not count against the revolution here.

2. Is the environment coercive or cooperative? This measures the ratio of the Coercive Class Character of Context (CCC) against the population’s Collective Agency Expectancy (AE).

The Boundary of Authority

This formula can hopefully be a starting point for ending the subjective debate of authoritarianism with a proposed mathematical boundary, dependent exactly on the actual material conditions and effects of the authority apparatus. The math is formulated here as it was initially, for revolutions specifically, but it theoretically could apply more broadly to any authority apparatus; though it may have to be conceptually reworked for other applications.

• The Authoritative State (RPQ < 1.0): If the RPQ remains below 1.0. The math shows the state is successfully mitigating external strain while ensuring that collective agency heavily outweighs top-down coercion. It is a healthy, necessary protective mechanism for ensuring the well-being and will of the people.

• The Authoritarian State (RPQ > 1.0): If the RPQ crosses the threshold. The math shows an authoritarian turn. The state apparatus is now manufacturing more endogenous strain than the historical baseline, and that top-down coercion has successfully eclipsed the collective agency of the working class. The state has drifted into pathology; it is not healthy.

The math ultimately proves the core neuro-sociological truth: actual socialist states are authoritative, and Fascism is authoritarian. Also, note the wording here, “socialist states.” This math is not ideology-dependent; it is empirical dialectical materialism. With the conclusions of this math, states like Libya under Gaddafi (which made basic necessities like food and housing a human right, and set up institutions built on direct democracy) would also indeed be considered socialist states, even if it is not a “traditional Marxist-Leninist state.”

We no longer need to rely on 19th-century vocabulary to analyze modern revolutions. With the RPQ, we have not only a mathematical backing for calling actual socialist states “authoritative,” but also a tool to ensure our movements remain forces of liberation rather than new architectures of oppression. This math takes what we have already been saying as Marxists, grounds it in the science of Affective Socialization (which is a field itself beyond my AST theory), and gives us something we can use as social scientists to see if our movements and others are living up to the defining factors of what socialism actually is. The improving of the material conditions of the masses and construction of truly democratic institutions of the working class like Michael Parenti outlined in his works like “Blackshirts and Reds.”

Dive into the full AST framework (still in development) on my website here: Affective Socialization Theory

References

Baumrind, D. (1966). Effects of authoritative parental control on child behavior. Child Development, 37(4), 887-907. https://doi.org/10.2307/1126611

Tamargo, A. (2026). Affective Socialization Theory: A unified model of behavior (Part 1: Neural wiring & the recursive system). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18514658

Author’s note: In Affective Socialization Theory (AST), there is a heavy focus on diagnosing the disease, analyzing how the coercive architecture of capitalism physically wires our nervous systems for anxiety, predation, and burnout. But a diagnostic framework is useless if it cannot point to a cure. Before we can fully operationalize the math of how to dismantle the capitalist macro-environment, we have to define exactly what we are building to replace it. We have to define socialism. Not as a utopian buzzword, but as a concrete, structural alternative. To do that, we must trace its origins, strip away the propaganda, and look at the empirical history of the concept.

In Parts 1-3, we traced the origins of the word socialism, explored how Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed it from a utopian ideal into a materialist science, and mapped out the complex ideological branches that grew from those foundations. Now that we have identified the differences between movements like Marxism-Leninism, Democratic Socialism, and Anarchism, we can synthesize our analysis. In this section, we will strip away the specific factions and look at the six fundamental core values that unite all forms of socialist thought.

Collective ownership of the means of production means that the people as a whole all become co-owners of the industries in their society (being able to democratically decide how they are run) and of the workplaces they work in. Although in Social Democracy the ownership of the means of production is still in the hands of private individuals, those individuals are taxed, and so it is argued sometimes that, in this way, the citizens are democratically participating in decisions of allocation of where certain profit created goes; and so, in this way, a small form of collective ownership is present, although this idea is heavily argued against by other forms of socialist thought.

Economic planning is a key concept that, as the interview with Stalin in the last chapter shows, has been understood by some people to be a core idea of socialism. Wells, the interviewer, attempts to show the similarities of American Social Democracy with the USSR’s Marxist-Leninist socialism by explaining how they are both organizing and planning production in ways that benefit the general population. This continues to be considered “the essence” of socialism in some people’s understanding of the word, but economic planning is not something only found in socialism. The economic planning of the USSR and China proved to the world what organizing production could do when directed at a certain goal. At the time both of these socialist states were beginning to do this, most capitalist governments did not try to control the direction of industry in the country, especially not to the extent that Marxism-Leninism did, and so the contrast of the two systems in their level of organized economic planning was often remarked on. However, especially with the concentration of capital into fewer hands, the trend of capitalism to form monopolies identified by Marx, the monopolized industries began to conduct their own economic planning, not toward the goal of socialism, but toward achieving the highest amount of profit for the shareholders, or individual owners, as possible. A great example of this is the planning that goes into running modern American corporations. Walmart, specifically, has every aspect of its business down to a thoroughly studied and developed science, and writings and video documentaries have been made about it.

Up-down wealth redistribution means enacting political policy (or, by other means) that expropriates wealth or resources from the people in society who have the most and transferring it into the hands of a broader population of poor or working-class people. The distinction of “up-down” is necessary in technical terms because wealth redistribution happens consistently under capitalism, but from the bottom up: capitalists continuously and increasingly, systematically transfer the wealth generated and held by the working class to themselves. This represents socialism’s commitment to improving the lives of working-class people.

Social welfare refers to the act of a society collectively providing vital and convenience services to its individual members. Examples of this include free or universal healthcare, free education, public transit systems, government investment in developing cheaper and better products like cars, subsidized housing or other resources, and many more. Details on the implementation of these policies will be discussed in the “socialism in practice” chapter.

Democratic participation is seen as a necessary element of socialism because, to better the quality of life of the working-class people, or even the broader society as a whole, the actual needs of the people need to be understood through their own participation, by them making decisions of their own accord, and their liberation is only truly their liberation when it comes from their own agency, not bestowed upon them by a ruling power, but self-declared and made law by their democratic vote. This core value shows the desire of socialism to bring more agency to the working class by empowering them to come to a consensus among themselves.

Labour relations, ideally, under socialism, completely transform from the exploiter/exploited system where an autocratic ruler (the capitalist) maintains the right to the final say on all business (and even sometimes industry-level) decisions, to a democratic process in which the collective will and welfare of all the workers are taken into account.

Coming Up in Part 5: In the next section, we will clarify exactly what socialism is not. We will break down the crucial distinctions and common misconceptions between socialism, communism, social democracy, liberalism, and fascism to cut through modern political propaganda.

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This article is a serialized, adapted excerpt from my book, What is Socialism? A Concise Analysis to Clarify the Concept. If you prefer to read the entire framework at once, or want to support this publication, you can [grab the physical paperback on Amazon here].

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In Parts 1 and 2 of this series, we defined the foundational concepts of socialism and traced its origins back to the shifting material conditions of the Industrial Revolution. We examined the transition from early utopian experiments to the scientific framework developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. That framework introduced dialectical and historical materialism, illustrating how class struggle and conflicting forces in society drive the emergence of new socioeconomic systems. With that groundwork established, we can now explore how those foundational theories fractured into the distinct ideological branches we see today.

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Marxism Leninism

Lenin’s Key Contributions and the Bolshevik Split

As I stated previously, Marx’s ideas gradually became, in the eyes of many people, synonymous with socialism itself. The words “Marxism,” “socialism,” and “communism” also started to be used interchangeably in some of the public discourse on the subject. There were some other perspectives, like anarchism, which will be explained later on; for now, we will discuss Marxism-Leninism. Named after the socialist thinker, writer, organizer Vladimir Lenin and his further development of Marxist theory, Marxism-Leninism gradually became the self-described ideology of the USSR (a.k.a. the Soviet Union) and many more self-described socialist states that came after.

Some of Lenin’s key contributions to Marxist theory were the idea of the vanguard party and Democratic Centralism. Both of these ideas distinguished the Bolshevik Party from other Marxist and socialist parties and movements at the time. The Vanguard Party was a concept that there should be a political party made up of trained (in socialist theory and practice) professional revolutionaries, and that this party would be a vanguard to the working class’s struggle for liberation. A vanguard in battle formation is a small group at the front of the army that leads the rest of the army into battle. Democratic Centralism was the concept that within the political party, all decisions made by the vote of the Congress would be binding on all members; even if a member personally disagrees with the policy, they are expected to follow it, and if they don’t, they could risk losing status or membership. These two concepts were seen as ways to overcome the stagnation and reformism that were observed in other European socialist parties (in other countries) at the time. The Bolshevik Party was originally a faction of the RSDLP (the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party), but a split in the group occurred over key disagreements the other members (called the Mensheviks) had with key concepts of Lenin’s theory, which was written on pamphlets and passed out in cities and read among party members who debated the ideas.

Tactics, the Duma, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

All of the disagreements were on tactics; both parties had the same goals, that of a socialist society that ended oppression of the working class. How that transformation of society was achieved was not just a matter of opinion to these people debating in these political parties; it was a matter of life and death. Seriously. It may seem so abstract to us to think about different ideological perspectives of the issue and wonder why it matters, but at this time, revolutionaries who advocated for the end of the Tsardom (an autocratic monarchical system where the Tsar and his family have absolute, unquestionable political power) were being sent to prison deep in the Siberian wilderness, or even killed.

It was not just their own lives on the line; the lives of all the people who were suffering under the oppressive tsarist regime were on the line as well. Many preventable deaths from war and other disconnected, incompetent, and greedy governmental policies. These people’s future, their children’s future, were all on the line. These disagreements in policy were ones that would make or break the revolution in the eyes of these opposing sides.

One of the first disagreements, which caused an initial split of the party into factions (before the group fully split), was on the matter of the Duma, which was basically the newly created legislative congress of Russia. The thing about the Duma, though, was that the Tsar still retained the right to veto any law that was made by this legislative congress. So instead of it truly being a governing body with power to allow democratic processes to make laws, this Duma could be seen as more of a democratically run suggestion box that the Tsar could entertain if he wanted to. The members of the RSDLP who became known as the Mensheviks came to the conclusion that, although it was not a true legislative congress, reform might still be possible through this process, and eventually, maybe, the Tsar would give up the control he had, and it would transition into a real congress.

The party members who became known as the Bolsheviks agreed that this was ineffective and would only hold the movement back. Lenin and others in the party argued that the party should boycott the Duma elections and work on creating its own organizations, even underground illegal ones (because certain political parties and views were illegal at the time), because the power is in the workers; all they need to do is be organized and led by the vanguard party, which, with their socialist theoretical and practical training, would lead the working class to overthrow capitalism and create a new state based on the dictatorship of the proletariat (a Marxist concept of the working class, the proletariat, dictating society, instead of the capitalist class dictating them, called the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie). Later they would go on to have a position of entering candidates in the elections to increase public awareness of their cause and intended policies, showing that it was not about strict dogmatic decisions on what is the “right” strategy, but instead about calculated decisions on what is the right move for the right time.

Theory, Practice, and the Scientific Approach

The Mensheviks also believed that it was not immediately necessary or practical to try to construct the dictatorship of the proletariat upon the overthrow of Tsardom. To them, it was more practical to create a wide base of support which allied with liberal bourgeois (capitalist) parties that wanted to establish a bourgeois democracy (a democratic revolution that does not aim to establish socialism, allowing capitalism to continue to exist and claim the reins of power). By doing this, they believed that they would be more successful, and it makes sense, this policy of socialist parties joining forces with liberal capitalist parties (that also want democracy but wanted capitalism to continue with it) was one that was followed by many other European socialist parties, and it had succeeded in ending some monarchies in some countries, turning a few states in Europe into liberal Democracies. However, as this was achieved, capital dominated and did indeed take the reins of power, and this was the stagnation that Lenin wanted to address with his theories.

This is where we can see why his ideas are labeled “Marxism-Leninism.” The emphasis on the scientific approach that Marx took in his analysis of capitalism and what socialism could be was almost like a tradition that was followed. Lenin looked at what the problems and setbacks of other European socialist movements were and theorized possible solutions to them, and this was not just in this specific case. Lenin’s writings, like Marx’s, heavily emphasize the concept of theory, practice, theory, practice. Empirically observing the material conditions and present class conflict, coming up with a theory of how the oppressed class can be liberated, putting those ideas into action, then seeing what worked and what could be improved on, then reapplying that revised theory to the practice, and so on, and so on. Marx once remarked that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it” (Marx, Collected Works 5), and this scientific-method style of approach to social change was something the Bolsheviks took very seriously. In real time they were helping unionize and organize workers for strikes and rebellion, then going back to the pen and paper, describing the movement’s progress and events that had occurred, critically analyzing them, and then offering any suggestions for improvement of methods or highlighting of what worked and why, then continuing that process over and over again, as the movement grows.

The Ideology of the Superstructure

The Mensheviks also did not agree with the concepts of the vanguard party or democratic centralism, and would continue to write and advocate for their ideas, and so eventually were kicked out of the party. The party’s name was now “the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolshevik),” and this party would end up winning the power struggle after the Tsardom was dissolved in 1917, and would lead the country into its plan to create a socialist state (or country), and soon after changed its name again to become the “CPSU” (Communist Party of the Soviet Union).

This revolution was a very influential moment in history; it inspired similar movements to form all across the world, but what did this new strain of socialist thought mean in terms of state policy? What policies characterize a “Marxist-Leninist” government? The relevance of this question is the fact that since this 1917 revolution, many countries around the world have formed from revolutions led by self-described “Marxist-Leninists.”

To try to understand the policy of a nation without understanding the ideology of the superstructure (the broader society and its institutions) can lead to a confused or entirely incorrect analysis. Without understanding what the intended purpose of the policies passed by governments is (which is revealed in examination of the ideology of the superstructure), we can look at policies and look at their effects, or even assumed effects, and guess what the purpose is, but what will we then say when the same government passes a new policy that contradicts, or even seems antithetical to, the purpose previously assumed? This is why, in political discourse, discussion of the “ideology of a nation” is remarked on. Stigmatizing these labels increases confusion, and so that is why an essay defining socialism requires the length this one does.

In the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, as previously stated, the scientific approach to creating a better society is emphasized, and ideally, practiced, as seriously as the science of any other field, and so the structuring of the state after the 1917 revolution, and the policies passed by the new government, can best be understood in this sense. With this in mind, many contemporary commentators on the subject will also use the term “socialist experiments” to describe these countries.

State Ownership and Workers’ Democracy

Marxist-Leninist socialism is most often characterized by a state-run economy, and this, contrasted to the liberal concept of freedom of individuals to own entire companies and exercise personal control over industries, has often been labeled as evidence of “authoritarianism” or a “dictatorship,” but to the socialists of the USSR, their society was even more free because of this state ownership. The reason being that these state-owned industries were owned by the state for the purpose of enforcing these industries to be democratically run, with the power of the state, which was described by many citizens and outside observers to be a workers’ democracy, a democracy without influence from single individuals with enough wealth to influence the outcomes of the elections.

Pat Sloan, a British economist and academic, lived and worked in the USSR for 6 years (from 1931–1937) and, upon his return to Britain, wrote the book Soviet Democracy, which was an analysis of life in the USSR and the new economic system the country had developed. He concisely bears witness to what I have described, in these two brief quotes from the book, where he says, “The means of production and propaganda are socially owned and controlled, and there is no longer the domination of society by a small class that owns the property,” “To-day the actual experience... has shown how real democracy can be, once the power of private property is finally broken” (Sloan, Soviet Democracy). More detail on the content of the policies and their effects will be provided in a later section, but for now let us move on to the other perspectives of contemporary socialist thought.

Democratic Socialism and Social Democracy

The Evolution of the Terms

Before the separation of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the words Democratic Socialism and Social Democracy were broader, encompassing terms that could be synonymous with Marxism or socialism itself, but that would change, and these terms would develop distinct, commonly accepted definitions. Understanding the significance of this split, and how this new strain of socialist thought (Marxism-Leninism) influenced the defining thereafter of all these other terms, is key to understanding not only what these terms mean, but how they formed and became the more specifically defined concepts they are now. What the Mensheviks advocated for, pursuing political struggle in Congress through voting for policies that would create socialism, was a similar strategy of socialist movements all throughout Europe, and when the Bolsheviks came up with a new strategy toward socialism that did not fit in those parameters, it became a new thing, leaving the Mensheviks and all the other socialist movements at the time who followed those same strategies to be defined by that same form of struggle that they pursued. When the “RSDLP (Bolshevik)” became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the term “communism” became a word that many people outside of the USSR used to describe the Marxist-Leninist socialism of the USSR. To be clear, the Marxist-Leninists in the CPSU did consider themselves communists (and also socialists), but they considered their economic and political system to be a socialist one. This is because they believed communism would be a future ideal society where the state (the power structure of the government) is no longer needed, but the workers’ democratic state was a socialist state.

Welfare Policies and Modern Political Confusion

With Democratic Socialist movements stagnating in their goals to democratically vote in socialism, and economic crises continuing to devastate the lives of those living under the boom-and-bust cycles of capitalist economic systems, the appeal of Marxism-Leninism reached working-class people from other countries, and many communist parties were created with the intent of rallying the people for a mass movement which would overthrow capitalism and create a socialist state. Even in America this became very popular, and after the stock market crash of 1928, there was a wide base of support for socialism, and Marxist-Leninist tactics to achieve it, in the US and many other European countries as well. In response to this, in what is seen as a strategic retreat of the capitalist class in their power struggle over the workers, some of these governments began passing welfare policies. These welfare policies were basically safety nets, like Social Security and other publicly funded programs that help those in need.

This is where the difference in the modern, commonly accepted definitions of Democratic Socialism and Social Democracy can be explained. Democratic Socialism and Social Democracy are often confused, and can both simultaneously be represented in one government, as different people within the government will have different ideas on what the goal is. For example, two senators in the US could both identify as Democratic Socialists, but one could have the intention of actually using their vote toward an end of creating a socialist society, and the other could think the current system is fine, but that welfare reforms and public services are good, and not knowing or caring to be strict in definition, they both identify as “Democratic Socialists.”

H.G. Wells, Stalin, and the Planned Economy Debate

H. G. Wells, the popular British science fiction writer who wrote “The War of the Worlds” (which has now been adapted into many movies), liked to engage in public discourse on big topics in his day, and in 1934 he met with Joseph Stalin, the leader of the CPSU, to talk about this concept we have been discussing and what socialism meant. He begins the discussion with this statement:

“My visit to the United States excited my mind. The old financial world is collapsing; the economic life of the country is being reorganized on new lines. Lenin said: ‘We must learn to do business, learn this from the capitalists.’ Today the capitalists have to learn from you, to grasp the spirit of socialism. It seems to me that what is taking place in the United States is a profound reorganisation, the creation of planned, that is, socialist, economy. You and Roosevelt begin from two different starting points. But is there not a relation in ideas, a kinship of ideas, between Moscow and Washington? In Washington I was struck by the same thing I see going on here; they are building offices, they are creating a number of state regulation bodies, they are organising a long-needed Civil Service. Their need, like yours, is directive ability.”

We see here that Wells identified socialism as being a planned economy, and this is one of the features of the socialist state of the Soviet Union, because the workers themselves democratically ran their industries. The subjective goal of this system was for the workers to be able to determine their own destiny by planning their economy (what their labor went towards) based on their collective needs. Capitalism, on the other hand, was described as anarchy in production, a survival-of-the-fittest competition to see who can accumulate the most and find the most profitable industry to do it in. In capitalism, decisions over what would be produced, and how much of it, were left to the decisions of single individuals or small groups of people (such as in corporations with boards); socialism, in contrast, promised a more democratic way of determining what we collectively produce with our collective effort, as a people.

Wells saw the social democracy that was happening under FDR’s New Deal policies and saw it as socialism itself. Trying to grapple with these two different perspectives that the USSR and the US government seemed to have on socialism, Wells posits that these movements are fundamentally the same in their aims, but only at different “starting points.” Stalin begins his reply by immediately refuting the idea, and then elaborating on it,

“The United States is pursuing a different aim from that which we are pursuing in the U.S.S.R.

The aim which the Americans are pursuing arose out of the economic troubles, out of the economic crisis. The Americans want to rid themselves of the crisis on the basis of private capitalist activity, without changing the economic basis. They are trying to reduce to a minimum the ruin, the losses caused by the existing economic system. Here, however, as you know, in place of the old, destroyed economic basis, an entirely different, a new economic basis has been created. Even if the Americans you mention partly achieve their aim, i.e., reduce these losses to a minimum, they will not destroy the roots of the anarchy which is inherent in the existing capitalist system. They are preserving the economic system which must inevitably lead, and cannot but lead, to anarchy in production. Thus, at best, it will be a matter, not of the reorganisation of society, not of abolishing the old social system which gives rise to anarchy and crises, but of restricting certain of its excesses. Subjectively, perhaps, these Americans think they are reorganising society; objectively, however, they are preserving the present basis of society.

That is why, objectively, there will be no reorganisation of society.

Nor will there be planned economy. What is planned economy? What are some of its attributes? Planned economy tries to abolish unemployment. Let us suppose it is possible, while preserving the capitalist system, to reduce unemployment to a certain minimum.

But surely, no capitalist would ever agree to the complete abolition of unemployment, to the abolition of the reserve army of unemployed, the purpose of which is to bring pressure on the labour market, to ensure a supply of cheap labour. Here you have one of the rents in the ‘planned economy’ of bourgeois society. Furthermore, planned economy presupposes increased output in those branches of industry which produce goods that the masses of the people need particularly. But you know that the expansion of production under capitalism takes place for entirely different motives, that capital flows into those branches of economy in which the rate of profit is highest. You will never compel a capitalist to incur loss to himself and agree to a lower rate of profit for the sake of satisfying the needs of the people. Without getting rid of the capitalists, without abolishing the principle of private property in the means of production, it is impossible to create planned economy.”

This detailed explanation of the perceived fundamental differences in the economic systems represents the development of the defined differences between them in public consciousness as a whole. In response to Stalin’s last quote, Wells tries to label this American reform as “socialism in the Anglo sense of the word,” and Stalin replies, questioning what kind of socialism this “Anglo socialism” is, giving the impression that, in the eyes of Marxist-Leninists of the time, what their government was doing was the “real” socialism.

The Modern Welfare State

Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism have continued to have support to this day, and have influenced some countries into developing what is nicknamed a “welfare state,” one where citizens have many universal public services and rights, usually including things like free or universal healthcare, free education, and other services that increase quality of life. Examples of these systems are often shown in isolation from context, abstract. They are presented as successful examples of what things could be like if we just voted for the “right policies,” ignoring the context which gave rise to these certain states, a fuller analysis of it as a whole. While a more detailed analysis of these policies and the outcomes of these systems will be saved for the relevant chapter, it can be remarked here that Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism, in the minds of many people today, represent not only one of the two main strains of socialism, but even “socialism” itself. With the other main strain, Marxism-Leninism, being seen as “communism” by many people today who do not live in a Marxist-Leninist country, “socialism” has become a word commonly used by many to mean what, by more specific definition, would be called Democratic Socialism and/or Social Democracy. With the two main currents in contemporary socialist thought now identified, we can look deeper into the subject by examining a few more strains (of socialist thought), which arose alongside, or out of, the previously discussed two main currents.

Market Socialism

Strategic Concessions and the Free Market

Many ML (Marxist-Leninist) socialist state experiments that formed around the world tried to keep firm on their abolition of private property; the overthrow of it was a core point of Marxist theory in general, but even the government of the USSR chose to allow some private ownership during the first few years after its founding for a limited time, but why? The answer lies within one of the other core points of Marxist theory, that socialism must be scientific to be successful. In various self-described Marxist-Leninist countries, there are times when allowing a “free market” (one where profit-driven business is allowed and can be owned and run by individuals instead of collectives) has been seen as a scientifically based strategy to keep the system alive (and its subjective ideological goals for the state preserved along with it). In the case of the USSR, when the NEP (New Economic Policy) was in effect from 1921 to 1928, although private business was allowed, people who engaged in these private businesses, and their economic interests, were not allowed to be represented in the government. For other countries, like China, economic reforms that allowed a private economic sector eventually led to capitalists being allowed to be represented in the People’s Congress, becoming acknowledged as a part of the population that needs to work with the other classes, under the directive of the elected members of the communist party, for the collective benefit of all the people in the country as a whole. Sanctions and other forms of economic and political pressure were systematically placed on countries that created Marxist-Leninist governments by the capitalist world powers (the US and other European countries), which made it difficult for the complete abolition of private property to be sustainable for the material needs of the population. The reason is that over the 1900s, the economies of countries around the world became increasingly interconnected and interdependent.

Imperialist Pressure and Economic Reforms

To be able to maintain a modern standard of living, trade with other countries became increasingly necessary, and, understanding this, the US and allied nations strategically isolated these Marxist-Leninist nations from the global trade system that most of the rest of the world took part in, and in doing so achieved their aims of getting capital to penetrate these nations (by that economic pressure influencing these nations to change their policy to meet the demands of the imperialist powers, which would then allow them to participate in the global trade economy set up by these imperialist powers). Economic pressure would also be exerted by withholding aid, for example, the World Bank, which was an international organization created by these capitalist nations with a self-described purpose of giving loans to countries in economic need, set a list of conditions that the government of Vietnam had to agree to implement in their policy to receive these loans. These loans were necessary because of the wars of defense from these capitalist nations who wanted political control over the nation’s resources, which, even after these wars were won by the Vietnamese people, left sanctions, economic isolation, and a country destroyed by bombings. These loans came with conditions that private property accumulation would be made legal, which then made it so the capitalists of these nations could use their wealth to come over to the country and buy the land and resources for their own profit, not to benefit the people of Vietnam, but their own private wealth. The reforms made to receive these vital loans are called the “Doi Moi” reforms in Vietnam. Countries like China, Cuba, and Vietnam have all been able to keep their identity as socialist nations (run by communist parties) and have had varying ratios of the power of the private sector (businesses owned by private individuals or corporations) and the public sector (businesses or public services owned and run by the government for the intended collective benefit of the whole population) because, even with these reforms, the state retains power and usually retains ownership of many key industries and service-based organizations. These nations’ economies are contemporarily described as market socialist.

Maoism

Adapting Marxism to Colonized Nations

Maoism is also sometimes called Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, or MLM, because the people who follow it describe Mao Zedong Thought (or Mao’s ideas) as a continuation and development of the ideas from Marx to Lenin, a continuation and development of the scientific process of understanding our socio-economic reality and finding a scientific solution for its problems. While China itself retains its self-described ideological identity of being “Marxist-Leninist,” considering Mao’s ideas to be an application of Marxist-Leninist theory to the conditions of China in his time, Maoists, on the other hand, believe that Mao’s ideas represent an ideology of its own, with its own principles and analysis. Maoists point out Mao’s emphasis on how Marx originally believed that socialism would occur first in the “economically advanced countries” (the countries where capitalism had developed and created much wealth, and where most of the country is now employed by wage labor), but that China’s struggle for liberation from colonial powers and its alliance of members of the industrial working class and the peasant class (this alliance also being a feature of the Soviet Union’s founding) made the conditions for socialism to develop more ripe than in more advanced capitalist nations, which had many socialist parties that failed to gain any real political power.

To Maoists, imperialism has an effect on the dialectical struggle between the classes, and on the emergence of socialism. Because the most advanced capitalist nations then enforced capitalism on virtually the rest of the world by conquest and economic pressure, and thereby, with their earlier start that gave them time to develop before these other countries even came into the system, these countries would exercise economic control over these other nations through the enforced legal system of “private property.” As discussed before, forcing another nation’s government to enshrine private property into law makes it legal for the rich ruling class of the enforcer country to go there and buy the land and resources that produce wealth; thereby the potential of wealth and what it can create is not with the people of the nation it is being extracted from, but with those private individuals that came from the “economically advanced countries,” and these private individuals usually pay taxes, and by this and other ways, much of the wealth produced by some countries (the oppressed countries) is being systematically transferred to these exploiting, “economically advanced countries.” So, in the Maoist perspective, socialism will not first arise out of the more advanced capitalist countries, because of the contradiction between the fact that the working class in these countries are exploited for their own labor by their own capitalists and at the same time are benefactors of the imperialist accumulation of wealth and resources their countries’ capitalists provide. Conversely, the domination of foreign capital and wealth over their land and resources made the citizens of poorer countries, who were coming out of pre-capitalist economic and political systems, desire a better alternative to the ideology of the invading forces, and so it made them more likely to not only understand the necessity of socialism but, faced with imperialist violence, fight for it. The term “Third-Worldist” is sometimes applied to Maoists, and occasionally used as an implied insult, because Maoist theory highlights how socialist revolutions have historically arisen in poorer and colonized regions of the world. However, this label oversimplifies Maoism and can lead to confusion with other Third-Worldist ideas. Maoism does not claim that socialist revolution will only occur in these countries; rather, it emphasizes that particular material and social conditions in these countries created fertile ground for revolutionary movements. Third-Worldism, by contrast, asserts that the working class of imperialist countries benefits from global exploitation, creating a divide between them and the workers of the oppressed nations. According to this view, only by the oppressed countries rising up and reclaiming their resources can the imperialist countries be cut off from their supply of plunder and, with it, the separation of their working class from the rest of the worldwide working-class movement. It is worth noting that Marxists, MLs, MLMs, and third-worldists all support the struggle for liberation of countries suffering under imperial domination.

The Protracted People’s War

Another focus of Mao Zedong’s theory was the concept of the protracted people’s war. It was a concept that was developed in detail while Mao Zedong and the rest of the communist party and their supporters were engaging in a civil war against the government, which was led by a nationalist party that did not want to end capitalism (and thereby imperialist domination) in China. In what seems to be evidence of Marx’s belief that ideas came from material reality, and ideologies came out of the dialectical struggle of forces, Mao’s theory of the protracted people’s war came out of the constantly changing and developing struggle between the communists and their supporters and the national party and its own supporters. The civil war presented opportunities for strategies to be tested, abandoned if they didn’t work, refined if they needed improvement, or repeated if they were successful: strategies for how to successfully create a mass movement and have a revolution that overthrows the old systems of power. Mao continued the Marxist-Leninist tradition of emphasizing the scientific process (or scientific method) as being essential to having a successful revolution, and so, observing the conditions of China and reacting to the problems the communist party faced, Mao gradually developed a comprehensive set of writings that addresses the problems they faced and the solutions they found that worked and led to their victory in the civil war and the successful seizure of state power from the rival nationalist party.

Key strategies used in the protracted people’s war were using strategic retreat into the countryside when necessary, gaining popular support and mobilizing the masses (the broader population) to take part in the struggle, and a focus on guerrilla warfare instead of traditional battles.

Continuous Class Struggle Under Socialism

Another critical distinction of Maoist theory is the concept of continuous class struggle under socialism. Traditional Marxist-Leninist thought often assumed that once the vanguard party seized state power and abolished private property, the capitalist class was fundamentally defeated. Mao argued otherwise. He theorized that the bureaucratic power of the new state apparatus could naturally generate a new bourgeoisie right inside the communist party itself. To prevent the revolution from decaying into a new system of oppression, Maoists believe that the dialectical struggle does not end with the revolution. It must continue in perpetuity. The masses must be continually mobilized to criticize and challenge the party leadership, ensuring the state remains a tool for working-class liberation rather than a new hierarchy of control.

Groups identifying as Maoist (or MLM) have sprung up in countries all over the world, from college campuses in places like America and Europe to armed guerrilla resistance movements in countries like the Philippines and India.

Anarchism

The Origins of the Term “Anarchy”

Unlike the previously discussed terms, Anarcho-Socialism did not arise out of Marxism; it developed alongside it. The word and concept anarchy is about as old as the concept of democracy itself. It comes from a combination of the prefix “an” (which means without) and the word “arkhos” (which meant ruler, or leader), literally meaning, without a ruler. Thinkers well respected in modern philosophical thought, like Plato and Aristotle, used it to describe a supposed flaw in democracy (or what we would call today direct democracy), proposing that a strong, virtuous leader was necessary to lead society and make decisions on its behalf.

In medieval Europe the term was often used to describe civil disorder, and even today many people use the term this way, and many people, like myself before I was 23, believe this is the only definition of this term; but this concept, which originally meant “without a ruler,” would gradually begin to be used by socialist thinkers in a way that throws away Plato’s commonly accepted perception of it (that it is associated with chaos and disorder when a society doesn’t have a good leader, or a leader at all) and goes back to the root of the word, with a positive perception of it.

Non-Hierarchical Structures and the Rejection of the State

There were philosophers who remarked on what positive aspects a society without rulers would have, but anarchy wasn’t considered an actual political ideology or movement until it was resurrected with socialist thought. Anarcho-Socialism and Anarcho-Communism were described as simply “anarchy” by Anarcho-Socialists in Marx’s time (and even today), and he and Engels made many critiques against it, while the anarchists also made criticisms of their idea of socialism. The reason for distinguishing the term with socialism or communism in modern analysis is the fact that after this Anarcho-Socialist theory there came another ideology that also wanted to abolish the state, like Anarcho-Socialism, but in contrast did not want to abolish the economic power structures and change them; this ideology became known as Libertarianism to many of its followers, but is known to others who study it as “Anarcho-Capitalism.”

Anarcho-Socialists believe that a socialist society can be created by community organizations and power structures that are non-hierarchical and started by the communities themselves; these power structures and organizations (in Anarcho-Socialist theory) will multiply and abolish capitalism and the state at the same time, replacing them with these alternative power structures that have been created by the communities they operate in. Anarcho-Socialism rejects the Marxist-Leninist idea of the need for professional, committed social scientists (or revolutionary intellectuals) to lead the people to revolution and liberation from oppression. It is also worth noting that while Anarcho-Socialist theorists argued over whether the use of domestic terrorism is a valid form of struggle toward liberation, with some saying it was, Marxist-Leninist theory made an early, firm stance against this tactic, identifying it as something that only hinders the revolution and disconnects it from the working-class people it is meant to serve. Political struggle through people’s self-defense organizations and active organization of the working class into this “vanguard party” and broader mass movement was argued by Marxist-Leninists to be the scientifically correct approach to creating real social change. While many anarchists today (some of which I have met personally) are just hippies who believe bottom-up, or “grassroots,” community building is the path for a better life, the broadness of anarchism as a school of thought, combined with the insistence of many Anarcho-Socialists on identifying as simply “anarchist,” makes the concept of anarchism that anarcho-socialists perceive, and its relation to socialism (and other socialist schools of thought), not immediately evident to the outsider who hears the term. The reasoning for anarcho-socialists simply defining themselves as anarchist is because, to them, anarchism is inherently socialist, and so anarcho-capitalism is not seen as “real anarchism.” To anarcho-socialists, if the government or state is dismantled and there is still a ruling class (the capitalist class), then there are still rulers. To achieve a society with truly no rulers, anarcho-socialist thought says that these grassroots, community, democratically run power structures must be in place to replace the old systems of power.

Foundational Anarchist Theorists

While the word and concept of “anarchy” stretches back thousands of years, the modern political ideology of “anarchism” also emerged as a response to capitalism, but more specifically to the state apparatus that enables it. This origin of this ideological trend is attributed to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a French philosopher who is known for being the first person to identify with the label “anarchist.” In 1840 he published one of his most famous works “What is Property,” wherein he famously declared that “property is theft.” He advocated for a concept he described as “mutualism,” which would aim to create a society where the workers owned their own means of production and exchanged the items they created based on the actual amount of labor that went into creating them; in the theory, this would all be managed by a decentralized bank run by the people collectively.

In September 1864 the International Workingmen’s association was founded in London, and by this point Proudhon was nearing the end of his life and so did not have any part of it. This new International organization aimed to unite the struggle against capitalism across countries, bringing together socialists, communists, anarchists, and other unique ideological trends; all coming together in an attempt to create a united, organized political force that could challenge the rule of capitalism and oppression of the state. Proudhon died a few months after its founding, but supporters of his theory, known as the French mutualists, were active in the organization and initially had some influence in it. They argued against labor strikes and of the idea of collectivizing land, against the concept that land could be legally granted to any body, even a collective one. For three years Marx argued against them in debates in the organization and eventually they became less popular and influential within it; but the ideas of Proudhon, and this new concept/identity of anarchism itself, inspired many others who adapted it from their own insights and perspective.

Anarcho-Socialism

One of these people inspired by Proudhon and seemingly taking up the mantle of the movement was Mikhail Bakunin. You see, the thing about Proudhon’s ideological conception of anarchism (mutualism) was that it preached against violent revolution, advising that a violent uprising would just lead to more authoritarian rulers. So to Proudhon and his followers, the strategy for achieving socialism was to create this decentralized “gift economy” alongside the capitalist one; not violently clashing with it, but developing alongside it and eventually replacing it when it proves to be a better system and renders capitalism obsolete. While this was an inspiring idea for many, Marx pointed out the inherent violence and force by which capitalism (and class society itself) operates, and this made many people lose faith in the concept of mutualism. But then comes along Bakunin, and other like-minded anarchists, and they accept that insight Marx had, but still disagree on Marx’s conclusions. Arguing against the Marxist concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (the idea that the working class needs to seize control of the state apparatus and industries and democratically run them collectively), Bakunin advocated for a violent uprising by the workers and peasants united, to abolish not only capitalism, but the state itself. Bakunin argued that Marx’s concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat would just create a new ruling class, believing that any position of legal power creates oppression and is not negotiable in the struggle for a truly equitable world. He famously took an active role in the Dresden uprising in Germany (in the 1840s) and spent many years in prison for it before basically traveling all the way back around the world from Russia, through America, back to Europe. You could say Bakunin had an adventurous life but this “adventurism” is exactly what Marx criticized. Marx argued that engaging in violent clashes with the capitalist government before the masses were ready and united was a waste of time and energy, and that that time and energy should be put into educating the workers, raising their “class consciousness” so that they will understand their historical position and actually be ready to unite against their oppressors.

This disagreement on strategy was so serious and important to these men that it became an ideological battle resulting in the eventual dissolution of the IWA. Bakunin, who saw the immediate, violent overthrow of the capitalist state as the most important task, created a revolutionary organization with this aim called the “International Alliance of Socialist Democracy” (IASD) in 1868. He then requested that the IWA allow this organization to be a part of the IWA as its own distinct international branch. Since the IWA already was an internationalist organization, the Marxist leadership of the organization declined this request; however Bakunin and his comrades were allowed in the IWA after Bakunin claimed to have dissolved the IASD and agreed to have his group join as local chapters.

Now here is where it gets really interesting. Over the next few years, Marx, Engels, and other members of the IWA collected evidence (by intercepting letters gathering testimonies, and acquiring internal documents from organizations associated with Bakunin) showing that Bakunin and his supporters had not dissolved the IASD but instead were operating in the shadows with their own separate agenda. In private letters and internal documents, Bakunin and his supporters discussed and carried out their political strategy of basically, ‘operating in the shadows.’ Fearing that after the overthrow of the capitalist state Marxists would attempt to set up a new government, they decided that they needed a secret brotherhood of highly committed anarchist revolutionaries to guarantee any attempt to construct a new state would be struggled against by an organized collective force of power. The members of this secret brotherhood would hold no titles, or position in government, or pass any laws or decrees; only operate from within the working class, to be a part of, and lead uprisings against any form of state or institutional power.

Some historians argue that Bakunin’s secret group was not a serious threat to the IWA, but Marx took it very seriously. After years of gathering evidence, in the 1872 Congress of the organization (which some say was set up locationally to hinder Bakunin and his supporters), Marx shared it with the organization and successfully convinced the group to kick Bakunin and his supporters out of the organization (with Bakunin and most of his supporters not being present). He then had the location of the Congress meetings changed again to be in New York; since this was an international organization created and based in Europe, this move effectively killed the organization, and what is known as the “First International” by communists was ended.

Bakunin and Marx both kept expanding upon and advocating for their ideas, inspiring others until their deaths in 1876 and 1883, respectively. For these next two decades after the split of the First International, the debate over the methods of Anarchism or Marxism to achieve socialism continued to be debated, but without the unified platform and camaraderie that the IWA brought. During this time, a Russian prince would become disillusioned with the system he benefited from, renounce his title, and become one of the most famous ideological opponents of Marxist theory from an anarchist perspective, creating the ideology he described as “Anarcho-Communism.”

Anarcho-Communism and the Second International

Peter Kropotkin was indeed a wealthy prince and was stationed in Siberia as a military officer in his early adult years. His passion (and career in) for evolutionary biology led him to observe the inherent property of cooperation that many animal species seem to have, and its beneficial effects. This was very relevant for his time period because the idea of “social darwinism” was a hot new idea, which basically tried to distort the process of natural selection in Darwinian evolution to justify class society, and having a “ruling” class. His observations led him to advocate against this idea, and even further, to renounce his title and spend the rest of his life dedicated to the liberation of the working class.

While the Marxists of Europe came together and organized a new “Second International,” bringing over 20 socialist organizations from different European countries together in 1889, Kropotkin was busy writing out his ideas, eventually releasing them in his highly influential book, “The Conquest of Bread” in 1892. In the book, he argued that all wealth is a collective product of humanity, and so it is impossible to tally up who gets what based on any “merit,” rather everything that can be used in a society is freely shared and distributed based on need. His concept of Anarcho-Communism asserted that this must be done by dismantling any form of state power and immediately setting up this alternative, horizontal system in its place.

The Marxists in this new Second International were busy debating electoral strategy in 1893, when anarchists (presumably invigorated by Kropotkin’s uncompromising anti-state philosophy) began showing up to the meetings, fundamentally disagreeing with the tactics being debated. This took time away from the work that these Marxists felt was more important than continued ideological arguments with anarchists, and so in 1896, a new policy was passed by the Marxist leadership that to be a member organization, you had to engage in “political action,” which was defined as running candidates and participating in state elections. Since the anarchists fundamentally disagreed with the concept of using state power in any sense, their ideology was effectively banned from this “Second International.”

The high-stakes friction between anarchists and Marxists that seemed to define the socialist movement throughout the 1800s died down after this final split, but that only, again, gave each side more time to develop their theories. Kropotkin would go on to publish his most famous work, “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution,” in 1902. It gave more hard biological evidence that cooperation, not competition, is the primary driver of species survival and higher evolution in both humans and many animal species. This work gave the anarchist movement a scientific proof that validated their ideological struggle, and also all of those who feel in their hearts that we are meant to work together, for our collective benefit. From the point of view of materialist psychology, his work is infinitely valuable in validating the fact that capitalism’s forced scarcity and competition is against our own evolved wiring, putting us in neural states meant for outside threats not members of our own species. The scientific validation of collective structures provided a powerful ideological closure to Kropotkin’s era. It also directly inspired the movement’s immediate strategic shift toward Anarcho-Syndicalism, even planting the philosophical seeds that would eventually grow into Eco-Anarchism.

Anarcho-Syndicalism

After this, the anarchist movement collectively had a shared sense that Marxism and its strategies did not align with anarchism, and that trying to work with Marxists was not an effective strategy. Kropotkin, his followers, and many other anarchists believed that the anarchist movement needed to focus on building strong labor unions with horizontal power structures. They theorized that forming these revolutionary workers’ unions as a form of “direct action” and ditching the Marxist structure of international political groups and parties was a more practical, direct way to make real change. They believed that if this idea spread and more and more workers organized labor unions this way, all the unions could unite to dismantle capitalist rule and replace it with these horizontal structures that would already be set up through the process. This was expanded upon and attempted in many different places around the world and became known as “Anarcho-Syndicalism.”

Eco-Anarchism

With the climate crisis becoming more apparent in the middle to late twentieth century, the direct focus on saving our habitable planetary environment has become a necessary focus for many people, including anarchists. While traditional Anarcho-Syndicalism focused on uniting the working class for a new kind of horizontal power to distribute goods collectively, Eco-Anarchism (or Social Ecology) expands this material analysis to include the natural environment itself. The core argument of Eco-Anarchism is that the hierarchical domination of humans over other humans is the exact mechanism that leads to the capitalist domination and extraction of nature. Therefore, you cannot solve environmental destruction without completely dismantling the coercive state and class society. Through the lens of Affective Socialization Theory, all of these anarchist currents can be understood as attempts to build Collective Agency Expectancy through immediate, horizontal structures. They explicitly reject the high Hegemonic Volatility they believe a transitional state would inherently create, seeking instead to lower Material Strain directly through localized, community-controlled resources.

Finding Common Ground

All of these various perspectives of socialism addressed in this section have so far been mainly identified by their differences; for the next section, we will examine what values or principles they all have in common, and thereby we will come to a clearer definition of what socialism, in the general sense of the word, means.

Coming Up in Part 4: In the next installment of this series, we will examine the core values that unify these various socialist perspectives. We will explore shared principles such as collective ownership of the means of production, economic planning, democratic participation, and up-down wealth redistribution. This synthesis will help cut through historical divisions to clarify what socialism fundamentally represents as an alternative economic system.

This article is a serialized, adapted excerpt from my book, What is Socialism? A Concise Analysis to Clarify the Concept. If you prefer to read the entire book at once, or want to support this publication, you can [grab the physical paperback on Amazon here].

References

• Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. Marx and Engels Collected Works. Vol. 5, www.hekmatist.com/Marx%20Engles/Marx%20&%20Engels%20Collected%20Works%20Volume%205_%20Ma%20-%20Karl%20Marx.pdf. Accessed 5 Oct. 2025.

• Sloan, P. (1937). Soviet democracy. Victor Gollancz Ltd. https://ia600100.us.archive.org/20/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.261348/2015.261348.Soviet-Democracy.pdf

• Stalin, J. V. (1934, July 23). Marxism versus liberalism: An interview with H. G. Wells. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1934/07/23.htm

• Adrian (釋大道). (2021, September 11). When HG Wells visited czarist Russia (1914) and the USSR (1920 & 1934)! (Russian language sources). Sangha Kommune (SSR). https://thesanghakommune.org/2021/09/11/when-hg-wells-visited-czarist-russia-1914-and-the-ussr-1920-1934-russian-language-sources/

Author’s note: In Affective Socialization Theory (AST), there is a heavy focus on diagnosing the disease, analyzing how the coercive architecture of capitalism physically wires our nervous systems for anxiety, predation, and burnout. But a diagnostic framework is useless if it cannot point to a cure. Before we can fully operationalize the math of how to dismantle the capitalist macro-environment, we have to define exactly what we are building to replace it. We have to define socialism. Not as a utopian buzzword, but as a concrete, structural alternative. To do that, we must trace its origins, strip away the propaganda, and look at the empirical history of the concept.

In Part 1 of this series, we explored the early attempts to solve the crises of the Industrial Revolution through Utopian and Reformist currents of socialist thought.

Although Robert Owen is known as one of the early Utopian Socialists, after seeing the results of his experiments, he later became more of a reformist, seeking to change the system he was in so that it would be more fair, and advocating for legal reforms that would improve the lives of the working class. We see by this example that these two labels, Utopian and Reformist, represent not merely individual interpretations of the concept by different thinkers, but two currents within the concept that were taken into account and championed by different people at different times, and developed by the proponents of each current. Henri de Saint-Simon advocated for matters of state policy that could be legally implemented, which he believed would lead to a more ideal society. So in this sense, his ideas would be grouped with the “reformist” strain (or current) of socialist ideology, though admittedly very abstract and seemingly antithetical to later interpretations of the word.

The Engine of History: Dialectical Materialism

Marx came along and pointed out what he said were the flaws in both Utopian and Reformist socialist theory. It all started with his (and Engels’) theory of dialectical and historical materialism. As I said earlier, Marx was interested in Hegel’s philosophical concept of dialectics; Engels was also a fan of Hegel’s ideas when they met; however, the dialectics in Hegelian philosophy were spiritual and abstract, not grounded in empirical reality. For instance, Hegel believed the world progressed through the development of ideas or concepts, which, when they emerged, transformed society and brought about change. The way this emergence happens, according to Hegel, is the conflict of opposing ideas: the conflict itself, the struggling of these ideas to juxtapose one another, is what creates new ideas, and these new ideas bring about change. Change the perspective, change the reality, to put it simply.

Marx and Engels took this idea and turned it on its head. They said that it is not ideas that bring about change in the world, but the world (or society) that brings about change in ideas. When applied to society, this means that the changes we go through in our society, from small incremental changes like the gaining of rights to things as big as the change from monarchy to capitalist democracy, are all the result of a change in material conditions, which in turn change the ideas, the consciousness of the people, which then act upon those new ideas.

Marx’s outlook opposed the very popular idea in philosophy at the time (and in many civilizations throughout history) that the world we live in originates from ideas, the mind, or the spirit, and that this spirit guides ideas, which, when acted upon, change the material world. Along with this outlook, it is sometimes even implied or outright stated that the world originates from the spirit, an abstract thing that we cannot empirically observe or measure. To be truly scientific, Marx understood that we cannot start with abstract, empirically unobservable notions; we have to start with actually observing our material reality if we want to change our material world; then we can create the hypothesis. If we start with that first step of the scientific method, observation, we can easily observe that the brain, which creates our ideas, is material. It is part of the physical reality, and so our ideas come from matter; matter does not come from ideas; all ideas come from matter interacting with each other, and all matter exists regardless of ideas. Before humans, or even intelligent life in general, there is no evidence of ideas existing, but we do have evidence of matter existing long before humans or animals. We know that brain matter interacts with itself in a way that activates our thinking skills and allows us to have ideas. This is a simple point, but it is one that is hard to argue with on a scientific basis.

Class Struggle and Historical Materialism

So this concept that our material reality is what shapes our ideas, and that the contradicting material forces in society are what give rise to the emergence of new ideas and ways of life, this is Dialectical Materialism. Taking this approach to analysis and applying it to the study of the history of society is what was then named Historical Materialism. Using historical materialism in their analysis, Marx and Engels discovered that the big transitions in history, when large groups of people (nations, cultures, peoples) fundamentally changed the way they lived their lives (like the government system, organization, and stratification of society), were always the result of the dialectics reflected in class struggle, and the new system that emerged (like from monarchy and feudalism to capitalist democracy) was the emergence that resulted from that struggle creating something new.

Class struggle was/is the struggle between the ruling class (those who hold power to dictate the organization of society) and the exploited class(es). Polish philosopher and historian Leszek Kolakowski remarks, “Utopian socialists imagined ideal cooperative societies, while Marx and Engels described theirs as ‘scientific socialism’ based on historical laws of development” (Kolakowski, 1978). This explanation from Kolakowski is concise and easy to understand, but this quote by Engels gives more context as to why these ideas developed when he says, “Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict” (Engels, 1880).

Socialism, to Marx and Engels, was not just trying to make a perfect society how you thought it should be, but a scientific attempt to observe how we got to where we are in society and what the contradicting social forces are that are currently operating on each other in society, and then, with that data, try to figure out how to set the conditions where these conflicts no longer exist. To do that, Marx believed that the overarching socioeconomic system (the government, the economic way of life that sets the basis of value which that government enforces, etc.) had to be overthrown by the working class, which would then abolish the right of one person to own the factory that many people work in and profit from, all their labor.

The Anatomy of Exploitation

Marx believed the economic system of capitalism created a new class struggle between the proletariat (which was the industrial working class) and the bourgeoisie, or the capitalists who, usually by inheritance, owned the factories that the working class, who had no capital (no factories of their own from Daddy), had to use the only capital they had, their body; they had to sell themselves as cogs in the machine of those who won the birth lottery; or, in Marx’s own words:

“In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow… In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage.”

(Marx, 1867)

Marx observed that while the new form of production in factories alienated the laborer from the fruits of it (separating the worker from the products of their labor, which does not belong to him but the capitalist, who claims it all for themselves and pays the worker as little as necessary to meet their needs so they can continue to live and work another day), it also made work much more social. Instead of scattered big family farms where you would work the land by yourself or with only close relatives, now workers met and interacted with their community every day. This social aspect of the new relations of economic production is contradicted by the fact that the outcomes of their collective effort are being siphoned off by one person at the top, who has also been given total authority over all decisions within the company, and whose labor is not required for the factory to keep running day to day.

For the capitalist, how much they make is directly linked to how little they can pay their workers, because, as Marx thoroughly points out in many of his works, the profit of the capitalist is extracted from the value that the laborer creates through their work. With unions of workers becoming a thing around this time as well, workers were beginning to understand that their well-being, determined by how much money and resources they had, was directly linked to how much they could get their employers to give up. This is the dialectics of class struggle. Marx believed that only by the workers dismantling the old socioeconomic system, which was built from its foundation, coded into its laws the domination of the ruling class over the rest of the populations, only by ending this system and creating a new one (which has happened at various times in history through revolutions) based on the rule of proletarian democracy (democratic rule of the working class) could the disparities of wealth, and the suffering they create, be systemically eliminated.

The Great Schism: Revolution vs. Reform

In the early 1900s the distinction between people who identified as communist (and socialist) and those who identified only as socialist, along with what that meant to those people, became more defined. There arose people, and then whole nations, that identified with the emerged concept of “Marxism-Leninism,” and these people and nations became also self-described communists, but also socialists, who saw themselves as living in a socialist country.

The ideological reasoning for this seemingly confusing identity will be explained in a later section, but the point here is that, in response to this, the terms “Democratic Socialism” and “Social Democracy” soon evolved meanings that both shared a distinction from Marxism-Leninism (and its parent ideology, Marxism). While Marxism advocated for the overthrow of bourgeois society and its institutions, its organizations of power, the state itself; in contrast, Democratic Socialism and Social Democracy became more and more associated with the concept of using existing democratic processes within the current system to gradually move toward socialism, or at least toward more ideal material conditions for the working class.

Coming Up in Part 3: In the next section, we will go into more detail on the different ideological perspectives that have now arisen out of this defined ideological split in interpretation of exactly what socialism is, clarifying what these movements are fighting to achieve today.

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This article is a serialized, adapted excerpt from my book, What is Socialism? A Concise Analysis to Clarify the Concept. If you prefer to read the entire framework at once, or want to support this publication, you can [grab the physical paperback on Amazon here].

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References

• Engels, F. (1880). Socialism: Utopian and scientific. Marxists Internet Archive.

• Kolakowski, L. (1978). Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution. Oxford University Press.

• Marx, K. (1867). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1). Marxists Internet Archive.

In Affective Socialization Theory (AST), there is a heavy focus on diagnosing the disease, analyzing how the coercive architecture of capitalism physically wires our nervous systems for anxiety, predation, and burnout. But a diagnostic framework is useless if it cannot point to a cure.

Before we can fully operationalize the math of how to dismantle the capitalist macro-environment, we have to define exactly what we are building to replace it. We have to define socialism. Not as a utopian buzzword, but as a concrete, structural alternative. To do that, we must trace its origins, strip away the propaganda, and look at the empirical history of the concept.

In this specific series, which is adapted from my earlier book, the focus is strictly on the modern political movement that emerged in 19th-century Europe and spread around the world. It is a Eurocentric history because it traces the direct reaction to European industrial capitalism. However, since I wrote this book, I have continued research and have come to a deeper understanding: that while the political ideology of socialism is recent, the biological drive for human cooperation is ancient and universal. Long before Europe industrialized, indigenous societies across the globe successfully organized themselves around the same principles of creating cooperative, communal social systems. In future articles, I will go deeper into the differences in neuro-architecture between indigenous peoples, European colonizers, and other societies, but to understand how to dismantle the modern capitalist state, we first have to understand the specific material trauma that birthed the political movement to destroy it.

Introduction

“What he’s proposing is socialism!” Honestly, can you remember a time when you heard something like this said by a TV personality or politician? Or does it at least sound familiar to you, even if you don’t know why? If you’re someone in the United States like me, I think the chances are high you said yes. This is because socialism is a buzzword; it is used by a wide and varied range of people who all seem to shape it to their own definition, one that best suits whatever their personal agenda or motivation may be. Hold up, what does socialism actually mean?

People may have their own meanings for the same word, sure, but what is the real “definition,” then? That too, dear reader, is not something so straightforward. The concept of socialism has not only evolved or changed over time, it has also varied by place and by cultural context.

Broadly speaking, socialism is a political theory, philosophy, or ideology, and also an economic system of production. Since our overall welfare is generally determined by our economic reality, socialism attempts to realize the philosophical notion of making the world a better, or even ideal, place by transforming the economic reality, and therefore the material conditions, of the members of society as a whole.

In this series, we will first explore the origins of the term, the development of the theory, and the various ideological perspectives that have arisen from that development (over time, in different places and cultures). Following that, we will look at the common principles found across these variants, compare the concept to related ideas that are often confused with it, and then conclude with a look at the content and outcomes of socialist policies and experiments.

The Origins of an Ideology

The word “socialism” is only about 200 years old. According to Cynthia Resor, a professor of social studies and published author on the subject, “The word socialism began to be used in the 1830s, to describe a system different from capitalism” (Resor). With the inventions of heavy machinery and the factory, the way people in Britain and France made their living, and thereby the way they lived their lives, was dramatically and suddenly changed. After only a few generations, life went from being rural farming for most people to populations concentrated in dense urban cities: black smoke billowing through the air, animal waste soaking the streets, many entire families living in one-room, badly constructed structures with no furniture, and pig pens beside these living structures in cities where the buildings (and these animal pens) were wall to wall (Engels, 1845).

In his book The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Friedrich Engels gives a firsthand account of the living conditions he observed in different English cities; he also cites relevant data and research into the phenomenon, and anyone who reads this work will quickly see just how bad these living conditions were. It was because of this new economic reality, created by the emerging technology of heavy machinery, that production necessarily became more cooperative and organized: from many spread-out family farms all over the country, all paying taxes to their local lords, working whenever they needed to (usually only half a year), and with no demand to change or increase productivity (people generally made enough to support themselves, and there was not an economic or cultural reason to try to increase production), to then, in only a few decades, those same families having to vacate their land (when private property became law, and peasants’ right to live on and enjoy the fruit of the land they lived on was taken away) and move to densely populated, health-hazard-ridden cesspools that actually lowered overall life expectancy.

What does this have to do with socialism? The answer lies within this same concept of emergence: the desire for liberation from these horrid material conditions inspired a new social concept based on a desire that humans seem to have collectively had since time immemorial, the desire to create a better life, and the word for this new idea rooted in ancient human strivings was “socialism.”

First Theorists

Around the 1820s, Henri de Saint-Simon, known as one of the first socialist theorists, coined the term “social physiology” to describe his view of society as an organism, with different parts that we can study, understand, and help work together. The key point here is that he believed the scientific method could be applied to society; how it is applied, however, is what distinguishes him from later scientifically minded socialists. He did recognize that the working class should be recognized and happy, but thought that the main threat to this happiness was what he called the “idling class”; basically, he was saying that lazy people are the reason for society’s problems. Henri also believed that Europeans were a superior race and advocated for world colonization by Europeans.

While Henri was correct in his most famous point, that society, like an organism, can be looked at scientifically and manipulated toward an ideal, his social ideals were obviously a product of the racist and classist environment of the time and culture he came from, and acceptance of it, even the superimposing of it onto this new idea of scientifically analyzing and restructuring society. Henri is also recognized as one of the main founders of “Christian socialist” thought, and this is interesting when we compare his ideas to the ideas of modern-day white Christian nationalists in America. The ideas that lazy people abusing the system are making it harder for everyone else, and that it is the job of “civilized” white people to bring other cultures up to their standards and ideals, are both big topics of discussion among people who today say they are only being practical in proposing a scientific way of analyzing and dealing with society’s problems, and also that they are doing this out of some desire to make our society more ideal.

When Henri and his many followers in his school of thought first thought, basically, we want a more ideal society, this is the concept; now, how can we achieve it? Without any reference point of what a more ideal society looks like materially, Henri and other intellectuals defining this term in the early days looked within. What were their ideas of a better society? If you were growing up in the early 1800s in France or Britain, and you were like most people and accepted the mainstream ideas and opinions of the time, you might come to the conclusion that rounding up everyone who isn’t in a factory and putting them in one to maximize production, and then conquering the rest of the world in the name of God and your “superior” nation, would be the most efficient way to achieve this “more ideal society.”

In these early days of working out the ideas of what socialism meant, philosophers and scientists did not stop at thinking in their own heads what would be ideal; some of them experimented as well, putting their ideas to the test in the real world and learning from it. There were a number of people who decided to start their own self-contained communities, or communes, in which all of the members would agree beforehand to follow certain ideals and practices, which they believed, if they all followed, would create the ideal society. The most famous of these people is Robert Owen, a Welsh factory owner who, in 1824, spent most of his fortune to start one of these communities all the way across the pond in Indiana, US. After two years, his socialist experiment, like many other “utopian socialist” experiments, failed to maintain sustainability and fell apart.

In 1828, Robert Owen moved again to London, and, learning from his experience, he spent his time and energy on other methods of trying to create this more ideal society. He advocated in Great Britain for free education for children and better living conditions for people in factory towns, and even helped a project (one that ultimately failed) that tried to make wages more transparent and equal to time worked. As the years went by, the public consciousness, as well as Owen’s, of the word socialism and the concept it represented began to mature; it was going in a more scientific direction. Instead of enforcing ideals (from mind to matter), socialism began to mean, to a lot of people, addressing the material conditions of the working-class people (who were and are the majority of people in society) and seeing what direct actions can be taken to actually improve them. Owen’s writings are credited with popularizing the word “socialism,” and he also helped with the forming of some workers’ unions. He remained an advocate for the improving of the lives of working-class people until his death in 1858.

The Pivot to Marx and Engels

The views of people like Henri and Owen in these early days of socialism are described as being either utopian or reformist by the next early thinker on the subject, who is also known as the most influential socialist thinker in history, his name is Karl Marx. After getting his PhD in philosophy, Karl Marx worked as a writer, notably as a London-based correspondent for the New York Times. Marx was very interested in the philosopher Hegel’s concept of dialectics, which describes emergence as something that occurs from opposing forces conflicting with one another; by this, something new is created.

Marx was already a supporter and advocate for a better world, and was already good at analyzing problems in the world, but when he met Engels (the same one who wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, which Marx read and liked) was when he began to develop the ideas he was most famous for. They would forge a friendship and intellectual partnership for the rest of their lives, working out ideas together and developing socialist theory. Marx and Engels would write many books together, both being listed as two equal authors; they also participated in unionizing and organizing the working class, and even participated in revolutionary struggle to help overthrow oppressive governments.

A Note on Authorship Also, because Marx and Engels were two great thinkers who collaborated on many key texts of Marxist theory, which is, in modern-day, most often just attributed to Marx without recognition of Engels, I will sometimes say “Marx said…” (excluding Engels) when I talk about Marxist theory; if I am referencing Engels’ specific contribution or a text he is the sole author of, I will just mention Engels. So, if I say Marx, then most often what I mean is Marx and Engels; it is a shorthand for their collaborative partnership.

Coming Up in Part 2: In the next installment of this series, we will dive deeper into the development of Marxist theory, exploring exactly how Marx and Engels constructed the scientific framework to dismantle the capitalist machine, and how that theory fractured into the different socialist movements we see today.

This article is a serialized, adapted excerpt from my book, What is Socialism? A Concise Analysis to Clarify the Concept. If you prefer to read the entire book at once, or want to support this publication, you can [grab the physical paperback on Amazon here].

References

Engels, F. (1880). Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm

Engels, F. (n.d.). The condition of the working class in England. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf (Original work published 1845)

A Note for New Readers: This is the definitive, expanded version of a piece I briefly published last week. It uses the Affective Socialization Theory (AST) framework, a neuro-materialist science I am developing to explain how our environment physically shapes our behavior. You will see variables like Material Strain (MAT) and Hegemonic Mood Climate (HMC) used throughout. If you are new to the theory, you can find the full glossary and research at [Here].

Some people believe Netanyahu is dead, and some say he’s fled. Recently, an AI-generated video showing Netanyahu with six fingers circulated online, sparking sensationalist rumors that the footage was released to cover up his death. Even now, almost a week later, the Israeli media is releasing more videos trying to prove he is alive and well, and still people are comparing it with other images, pointing out what they identify as proof that it is just another AI image.

While the internet obsesses over the fate of one man, I think it is an important time to remind people that the death of Netanyahu does not change anything in Israel. It does not stop the atrocities from continuing or usher in the possibility of a new era; no matter how much liberals would like to believe.

Liberalism, which focuses on abstract individualism and idealism, offers an easy escape from any kind of social accountability or obligation to the rest of society. This ideology, this worldview, convinces people that showing up every few years to vote for “the other side” (regardless of the fact that the overwhelming majority of the policies of these politicians don’t actually benefit them), and spending the rest of the time in between virtue signaling, is somehow ‘all that we can do.’ By accepting this ‘logic,’ the cognitive load of the Liberal is lessened, and they have more energy to philosophize at brunch and enjoy their… um… whatever the hell they eat at brunch. It is a biological defense mechanism to preserve cognitive power weaponized by the Coercive Class Character of Context that capitalism creates.

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Liberals will assert that the genocide in Gaza is all “because of Netanyahu.” They will say that this war with Iran that the US and Israel just started is an unfortunate outcome of the wrong individual coming into power; and this is where I have to make a very important point to liberals directly: if he is gone, and nothing changes, what does that tell you? If you are honest with yourself you would have to admit that there is some bigger problem that the Palestinian people face than the cartoonishly evil machinations of one man. It is a structural issue.

Affective Socialization Theory (AST) empirically demonstrates how the idea of a change in the figurehead of the colonial state changing the systematic, overarching policy of the colonial state of genocidal violence is fundamentally flawed. The Neuro-sociological architecture of the colonial state rests upon a contradiction of the settler-colonial goal of greater regional dominion over the land and resources, and the survival of the way of life, and indeed the very life of, the indigenous people that the colonial state inherently dispossesses.

The Structural Necessity of Violence

A state built on the active dispossession of another people is neuro-affectively incapable of peace. It cannot peacefully co-exist with its neighbors, and it certainly cannot co-exist with the people it is actively displacing. To maintain the theft of land, the colonial state must enforce a hyper-coercive Class Character of Context (CCC).

To secure its borders and maintain its culturally-engineered subjective goals, the state must artificially engineer catastrophic Material Strain (MAT) against the colonized population. By systematically destroying housing, hospitals, and food networks, the colonial state intentionally pushes the indigenous population into a survival mode, what AST would call the “Red Zone;” it is the point of learned helplessness where the nervous system prioritizes conserving energy (shutting down), based on a learned sense that their attempts to influence the world around them and their circumstances, which reinforces as a neural pathway over time.

If this were the end of the analysis though, there would be no hope; the compounding nature of the effects of the neuro-architecture of the settler-colonial state would ensure continuous reproduction of their dominance, eventually guaranteeing all of the oppressed people would be infected with this enforced learned helplessness; and this does seem to be the hopeful aim of the settler state, but it is not the only effect their subjugation of the indigenous people creates.

The much more inspiring psychological phenomenon that occurs as a result of this systemic oppression, one that’s occurrence has historically shown to be correlational to the severity and consistency of the oppression, is what AST calls the “Amygdala Override. Marx conceptualized this dialectically when he wrote in the Communist Manifesto that the capitalist class produces their own gravediggers and since then it has become known as the “Gravedigger Hypothesis.” While Marx provided the initial conceptualization through using the scientific analysis of historical and dialectical materialism, AST is attempting to operationalize this into an empirically testable, falsifiable scientific proof using advancements in the modern field of neuroscience, forming the “Neuro-Gravedigger Hypothesis.” This hypothesis looks to identify the predictable, reproducible (or consistently shown) point at which the nervous system decides that compliance to the enforced authority is no longer the best survival strategy; that resisting this authority, even actively working against it, is necessary for survival.

The Fascist Trap and the Yellow Zone

This is where we have to really ask ourselves, are the Israeli citizens really just this “evil?” How can we even attempt to rationalize the fact that language like “no Palestinians are innocent” has become normalized under the genocidal colonial regime with no self awareness? Well, a study released in 2024 showed that the majority of Israelis believe the Palestinian people harbor genocidal intent towards them, but why? AST identifies the answer as the “Fascist Trap.”

To justify its endless militarization, the settler-colonial state must keep its own population in a chronic state of fear. By generating extreme Hegemonic Volatility (HV) (the constant, unpredictable threat of conflict), the state locks its citizens in the sympathetic “Yellow Zone.” When a nervous system is chronically activated in threat-detection mode, it naturally craves any structure it can find to give it that stability even if that means justifying state violence and dehumanizing others. The state utilizes the spoils of imperialism (seemingly infinite US military and economic support) to act as an “imperial cushion,” lowering the objective material strain for the settler, but tying that security entirely to the subjugation of the Palestinian people.

The fatal dialectical contradiction of this entire system is thus laid out: the colonial state claims its primary goal is to keep its citizens safe, yet its policies neurobiologically guarantee their perpetual insecurity.

You cannot bomb and starve a population indefinitely without eventually hitting the biological tripwire of the Amygdala Override. The extreme violence the state inflicts on the indigenous population ensures the eventual, explosive violent resistance of the oppressed; not as a matter of ideology, but as a biological mandate for survival. The state then uses the very resistance it neurologically engineered to keep its own citizens terrified, justifying endless militarization. The colonial architecture does not provide a safe haven; it is a neuro-biological prison for everyone involved. To maintain the occupation, the state must keep its own people locked in the hyper-vigilant Yellow Zone, constantly hijacking their capacity for empathy, collective reasoning, and genuine peace. The state neurologically devolves its own population, turning them into biological agents of the empire, while ensuring they will never actually be safe from the Amygdala Override they are forcing upon their neighbors.

The Reproduction of the Genocidal Psyche

This brings us to the compounding variable: the generational reproduction of the genocidal psyche. The Hegemonic Mood Climate (HMC) of a colonial state acts as a massive, continuous Socialization Exposure Dose (SED’) for its children.

We have all seen the videos of Israeli children in schools cheerfully singing about erasing Gaza or expressing a desire to take all the land. This is not a matter of “bad ideas” or simple bigotry; this is the physical Affective Consolidation of the human nervous system. From infancy, these children are wired with a Predatory Agency Expectancy (AE). They are biologically taught that their only path to agency, safety, and survival is through the destruction of another population. During the onset of metacognition, these experiences act as “Affective Anchors,” hardening a baseline personality built on colonial violence that can only be changed by intensive, targeted re-socialization; which is not available.

Why the Colonial State Has No “Right to Exist”

When we state that Israel, as a settler-colonial project, has no “right to exist,” it seems like liberals just start pearl-clutching with no further analysis; but under the AST framework, we are making a rigorous, scientific claim about neuro-developmental toxicity.

A state apparatus that requires the active genocide of one population to maintain the “security” of another is an engine of Affective Devolution. It forces humanity to operate collectively in the predatory Yellow Zone, actively preventing the formation of a macro-level Green Zone where true collective learning and cooperation can occur.

It is vital to distinguish that this is not a religious conflict, but a structural one. Even Palestinian Jews find themselves marginalized by an architecture that demands absolute ethnic hierarchy to function. If a single state existed where every person (regardless of origin or religion) shared equal democratic rights, secure housing, and material stability, the Material Strain (MAT) would plummet, allowing Collective Agency Expectancy (AE) to flourish. However, the current state apparatus exists specifically to prevent that stability, as its very survival depends on the permanent maintenance of inequality.

Combatting Liberalism

We must combat the liberal fallacy that demands “non-violence” while ignoring the crushing structural violence of the status quo. The liberal believes we can simply vote out the bad actors or debate the colonial state into a peaceful two-state compromise.

Affective Socialization Theory provides a scientific model with hard math showing that you cannot debate a consolidated neural pathway. You cannot negotiate with a state architecture that is biologically wired for Predatory AE. The total dismantling of the settler-colonial state apparatus is not political extremism, or even anywhere remotely similar to the systemic erasure of culture the colonial state engages in; it is a neuro-political necessity based on scientific evidence of the compounding nature of the inherent genocidal conclusion of the subjective goals of the colonial state which reproduces itself throughout the generations through Affective Socialization. To protect the human nervous system (which then in turn, protects human life from human predation) and build a future rooted in Collective Agency, the coercive architecture of colonialism must be entirely dismantled.

Although it may seem insurmountable; Though it may seem like such a hard task that you feel your nervous system begging you to drift back into accepting capitalist reformism, liberal idealism, or the idea that one man is the sole reason for the violence a settler-colonial state commits; I urge you to consider the fact that shifting your mental framing of how to view this problem to the level of your own local community could be what allows for that neurobiological resistance you feel to subside, and for a new empowering, purposeful phase of your life can begin. I don’t just say this rhetorically; I am telling you that based on the convergence of research in sociology, psychology, and now even more recently neurobiology, the act of taking part in community organizations that lower your Material Strain (MAT), decrease Hegemonic Volatility (HV), and provide an enabling Class Character of Context (CCC) will rewire your brain with the tools necessary to be a true revolutionary. When we establish these community organizations simultaneously across the country, we create the neuro-affective possibility of societal level Collective Agency Expectancy (CAE). This newfound, societal-wide, collective understanding that we have the ability to all work together to completely change our structure of our socio-economic reality to one that truly grants agency and democracy equitably for all; this is what will enable the revolution. It will enable fast, decisive political action which that can only come from a population neurologically prepared to exercise that agency to not just vote once and hope that the one of the two parties will represent their interests, but to participate in a continuous dialectical process of democratic planning, implementation, and revising. Taking part of these deliberate, empirically backed, scientific methods to bring about Collective Agency Expectancy is how we can build the power to truly dismantle the neuro-architecture of settler-colonialism and begin building a truly equitable world.

Check out the full AST framework on my website here: Affective Socialization Theory

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References

Institute for Strategic Dialogue. (2025, July 24). ‘No innocents’: The collective blame of Palestinians online. https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/no-innocents-the-collective-blame-of-palestinians-online/

Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, & International Program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation at Tel Aviv University. (2024, September 12). Palestinian-Israeli pulse: A joint poll. https://www.pcpsr.org/sites/default/files/Summary%20Report_%20English_Joint%20Poll%2012%20Sept%202024.pdf

Tamargo, A. (2026). Affective Socialization Theory: A unified model of behavior (Part 1: Neural wiring & the recursive system). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18514658

Author's Note: This is the introduction to the working paper for Affective Socialization Theory (AST). The full, continually updated framework is available on Zenodo, linked at the bottom of this post.

The crisis of agency in the United States is seen in the numerous interconnected modern phenomena we observe, from complacent despair to acts of mass violence. We live in a society where every few weeks (or sometimes even more frequently) we see a story blasted all over traditional and social media about another “mass shooter” or “school shooter.” We go on with our lives, and pretend to be in a state of “normalcy.” The phenomenon is so “normal” to us that these stories sometimes become background noise, or even worse, mere entertainment that is fed back to us in sensationalized true-crime content. A report in 2018 found that “Between 2009 and 2018, the US had 57 times as many school shootings as the other six G7 nations (UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan) combined” (Grabow & Rose, 2018). These astonishing acts of violence are not isolated events; they are the most acute symptoms of an affective crisis in capitalism’s imperial core, and in capitalism itself. The opioid epidemic, political reactionism and despair, and widespread dissatisfaction with life and work, all of these things and many more structural problems we face are currently treated as separate issues: criminal justice, public health, political science, economics, and so on. Affective Socialization Theory (AST) proposes that they are all linked, that they are systemic affective outcomes of a socio-economic system engineered to suppress real agency and blame the effects of its inadequacies on the individuals it infects.

The inability of our society to accurately diagnose and cure these social ills can be seen in the narrow scope of existing disciplines. Neuroscience can track the amygdala’s reactivity and dopamine’s reward pathways, but lacks the larger socio-economic context to explain why certain brains are wired for threat. Psychology, especially in its clinical and self-help forms, focuses on individual willpower, mindset, and coping strategies, mistaking structural conditioning for personal failing. Sociology acknowledges that macro-level factors like class and race can affect personal outcomes, but lacks a more direct, empirically grounded explanation for how these macro-level factors become embodied as emotion, mood, and behavior. History remains trapped in a stale debate between Great Man Theory and structural determinism, seemingly missing the complex array of leaders who can be either conduits absorbing and channeling back emerging collective moods, coercive redesigners of collective neural wiring by force, or opportunistic weaponizers of preexisting affective distress, who channel the anxieties, resentments, and despair produced by high Material Strain and Hegemonic Volatility into personal power.

AST provides the missing mechanism, showing how the architecture of society builds the conditions of daily life, how those conditions wire our brains and shape our moods and personalities, how those collective moods fuel social movements, and how these movements, in turn, drive historical change through a dialectical process of struggle for agency.

When I first formulated this theory, I did so because I was inspired by advancements in neuroscience, their implications for psychology, and how they could be used to empirically validate dialectical materialism. Struggling with mental illness in my life, I have sought to understand why I behave the way I do sometimes, ever since I can remember from my childhood. When I first read Marxist theory I was introduced to a worldview that did not blame me as an individual for my struggle, and instead pointed out a very real structural reason as to why, that I immediately could see the truth in. After years of studying Marxism, I went back to studying contemporary psychology; with the help of all that I read, conversations with and content from others online, and honestly even memes, I now had a vast amount of knowledge on this worldview and I attempted to link it to the contemporary understandings of emotions and moods specifically. The theory started out as an attempt to explain how repeated emotional responses to stimuli paired with contexts generate more longer lasting moods, which then turn into personality, and these individual effects are shaped by the cultural hegemony outlined by Antonio Gramsci. As the theory developed further, I began research to look for similar works and I discovered that Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet Psychologist, developed a similar framework with his sociocultural theory of cognitive development and Pierre Bourdieu, a French Sociologist also did so with his theory of habitus and field. This was exciting to me because one of the original aims of AST was to provide the empirical bridge between sociology and psychology, and here I was discovering that a sociologist and a psychologist, independently (in different countries, decades apart), through their own lines of work and starting points, came to such similar frameworks as the one I had developed.

Vygotsky’s framework correctly pointed out that building cognition, the ability to learn and learning itself, is necessarily a social act before it becomes an individually processed experience. For those outside the fields of sociology and psychology, this concept can seem too big of a claim to be true but tragic case studies like Genie and other feral children prove this in the most extreme way. Genie, the most famous case, was locked in a room with barely ever any human contact for over a decade as a child, during the crucial years of early development. This had a profound effect on her brain development, indicated by the fact that even after extensive treatment and therapy, she wasn’t able to fully develop language or higher cognitive skills; and this phenomenon was found with other feral children as well. Vygotsky did not have the detailed scientific case studies of feral children to show how necessary this social aspect of learning is, and neither did he have the modern advancements in neuroscience which AST uses to back up his claims. He had the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) variable, which describes the conditions that learning becomes possible (with scaffolding, guidance, and social support); but he lacked structural variables to determine how we can actually receive this support, who currently gets that support, and why. His theory couldn’t explain why some social environments produce learning and others produce stagnation or even harm. AST builds on Vygotsky’s work with the concept of the Green Zone (which, with advancements in modern neuroscience, provides the biological mechanism for what makes his ZPD possible; identifying which neural state must be activated for scaffolding to work); with its structural variables (MAT, CCC, HMC) which reveal the social contexts that determine access to these conditions; with the Yellow and Red Zone, AST provides a hypothesis for why learning doesn’t happen in some social contexts and provides a clear picture as to what the wrong social environment can do to an individual’s psychology.

As for our French Sociologist, Bourdieu, he provided a very sophisticated socio-cognitive theory that outlined “habitus” (internalized dispositions based on social position becoming durable, set dispositions, or personality traits), and field (the social context and the habitus it creates for the different classes of people). These two main ideas and his larger framework provide the deep philosophical mechanism that I was attempting to describe, with implications he derives himself; specifically, that class position becomes psychologically embodied and that the position one has in a class society produces predictable patterns for that class group.

While I would argue that Bourdieu’s insights were correct, they never reached empirical answers to the questions of “how” and “why.” He could explain the observed patterns of people who grew up rich vs. those who grew up poor, but he didn’t provide a biological mechanism for how this happens, or provide the structural variables to determine why; there was no mechanism for this “embodiment.” Bourdieu recognized that change is possible, but never was able to empirically explain the mechanism behind upward or downward mobility; and if you look at what he theorizes as a whole, his absence of an explanation for this leads to a deterministic, static view of individual psychology, based on birth. First, with the advancements in neuroscience, habitus and pruning can be explained by neural pathways and neural pruning. Second, the MAT threshold and Zones discussed later in this paper explain why some people get stuck in their “habitus” (a phenomenon Bourdieu observed and documented) and how embodiment happens differently per person and per context. Third, AE types operationalizes habitus forms in fields. Lastly, with the now-known concept of neuroplasticity, we have biological proof against static determinism, and with the structural variables we can actually audit our environments to see what specific aspects can be changed to make the environment more enabling and secure for the people in it.

The fact that Vygotsky and Bourdieu both already came up with a similar theory to my own, with the tools they had at their disposal in their different countries and decades in the last 100 years seems to point to a genuine convergence of ideas. We all started from different starting points and have reached the same conclusions, and used the evidence we had available to us to try and prove the connection that we, and I’m sure many others, see. The real link between our social environment and our individual psychology: something many of us intuitively feel, but cannot mathematically or scientifically explain exactly. That is what AST does. It provides the math and science to validate not just these theories, but also a deeply felt belief among all the oppressed all over the world, from the American fast food worker to the children in Gaza, and all in between; AST shows all of these people that they are not to blame for their struggles and even further, equips them with the tools they need to identify the causes of their struggles and work to counteract them.

The core thesis is that different socio-economic environments systematically wire different human potentials through affective conditioning. What capitalism calls “human nature” (competitive, individualistic, greed) is not a fundamental inherent quality of human existence (the majority of human history says otherwise!) but a manufactured product of specific material and social constraints. Perhaps the most exciting part about this is the implications that this was a process carried out over generations of human history. At the beginning stages of human society only small collective AE microclimates existed, small tribal groups where everyone depended on each other to survive, then with the creation of the state HMC’s became enforced and the AE became predatory, causing the recursive loop that we examine today through AST variables.

Using this framework, the enigma of the phenomenon of “mass shooters” becomes clear: it is not a glitch, but an unfortunately predictable output of this manufacturing process, a case explored in full later in the paper. This extreme symptom is one of many that reveal a broader truth. To break it down, this paper will first explain Core AST, the personal and (conditionally) practical math that can help us understand how our socialization shapes and affects our behavior.

Then the structural variables, MAT (material strain), CCC (Class Character of Context), and HV (Hegemonic Volatility) are used to explain the broader macro social environment’s effect on this individual process. CCC and HV are calculated from aggregated data of the core variables, reflecting the dialectical back and forth that happens between our social environments and personal behaviors. These structural variables determine if our environment is wiring neural pathways within us for agency or holding back our neurodevelopmental potential. This new lens will then be used to reframe mental health, showing “disorders” (including dissociative and delusional adaptions) as rational responses to this chaotic, coercive, and insecure environment, and to rewrite history, seeing structural forces as drivers that dialectically reinforce dominant paradigms, and shatter them when they no longer reflect reality. Also explained is the Revolutionary Pathology Quotient (RPQ), which explains why some revolutions become forces of oppression themselves and why others become long lasting successes that fundamentally improves life from what it was before, moving history forward.

Ultimately, the crisis of agency is not a mystery, it is a consequential outcome of a neuro-affective architecture defined by high MAT (precarity), coercive CCC (control), and high HV (chaos), and an HMC that has, through centuries of recursive reinforcement, come to socialize people toward predatory instincts. Understanding this, AST reframes socialism not as a utopian ideal or even a polemical ideological imperative, but as the necessary architectural project of replacing the toxic foundation of capitalism with one that instead guarantees low MAT (security), has an enabling CCC (equitable democracy), a stable HMC (predictable fairness), and the cultivation of Collective Agency Expectancy. Socialism becomes the necessary, practical project of building environments that wire us for cooperation instead of destruction.

If you want to dive deeper into the mathematical variables, the neurobiological framework, and the structural analysis of AST, you can read the complete, continually updated working paper here: Affective Socialization Theory: A Unified Model of Behavior (Part 1: Neural Wiring & The Recursive System)

References

Grabow, C., & Rose, D. (2018, May 21). The US has had 57 times as many school shootings as the other major industrialized nations combined. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/21/us/school-shooting-us-versus-world-trnd/index.html

Tamargo, A. (2026). Affective Socialization Theory: A unified model of behavior (Part 1: Neural wiring & the recursive system). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18514658

The group (Seattle Solidarity Network, or SeaSol) organized on a democratic basis with no set leadership, and one that allowed for anyone present in meetings to have a vote, a part in the decision making process. They organized around direct action against injustices from workers and tenets. When someone in the community would come to them with an injustice they had suffered, like unpaid wages from a local business or a stolen security deposit by a landlord, they would give that the business owner or landlord (which I will just calls capitalists from this point on) saying they had a certain amount of time to make things right or they would pursue further action. This further action was aimed at directly disrupting the capitalist’s business, pressuring the capitalist to make things right or close their business, which is what they were able to do in the first example they talk about in the article. They believed that the experience of organizing against injustice in your community, for yourself and/or for others in your community, was one of the best ways of radicalizing people into being committed to being part of social change, and something that stayed with people for life, with the experience and character it brings you. One of their core principles in deciding what fights to take on, was winnability. Learning from their observations of other activist movements, who protested more macro level issues, listened to paid union leaders, and other forms of activism that used up a lot of energy on ineffective forms of protest like voting and giving nice speeches that were not proving effective, SeaSol decided to focus on smaller community level issues that they had a chance at winning in their direct action to disrupt a capitalist’s business to force change where they could. To do what they could realistically take on and win, in bettering the lives of people in their community. At the same time, many group organizers (which were only distinguished by amount of service to the group, and had no power over other members or group decisions, as it was Democratic open to everyone who attended meetings) believed that this was a good stepping stone for people who want to gain experience organizing and empower them by showing them their collective action can bring real results without following the tedious expensive legal process or seemingly empty result of the political route (just vote! when voting for Biden did not change much, and even allows for the taking away of federal abortion rights, the funding and support for genocide by the government, and more; and the articles example of all the people around the country who protested the anti-union bill that still passed). Many people in SeaSol do not see it as the organization that will end capitalism, but they believe the effect on people's lives in bettering their conditions, having community support, and gaining community organizing experience, will equip them with what they need to be part of social change and organizing in general, even on a bigger level.

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“The Seattle Solidarity Network: a new kind of working class social movement”:

https://libcom.org/article/seattle-solidarity-network-new-kind-working-class-social-movement

(PDF for full article is on webpage)

Throughout my life there is one thing that I have learned to be consistently true in many ways but also because I have witnessed it firsthand in my own personal experience, that your environment will influence who you become, or as C.J. Heck said “We are all products of our environment; every person we meet, every new experience or adventure, every book we read, touches and changes us, making us the unique being we are”. I once heard about research that was done that showed that the number one reason people give for their reason why they believe what they believe, is personal experience. I have written a lot about beliefs in the past and plan to write about them a lot more but usually this is argumentative, fact-and-evidence based writing, which I think is very important, but to paint a picture for people who wonder about what led me to these ideas, or what environment gave birth to this perspective I have, I think sharing a short reflection of three very transformative events in my life will be helpful. 

Coming of Age

When I got to high school I quickly got trapped in a cycle of punishment from my parents. My parents were very strict and when I was a teenager their favorite form of punishment was “grounding me”. If I got an F in any class on my report card, I was grounded until the next quarterly report card. Being grounded meant no hanging out with friends, no playing video games or watching TV, and no using the Internet or anything that could be enjoyable, also, it meant I was to do chores inside or outside the house until I made dinner for the rest of the family, then washed the dishes after, then had to go to bed. Because I wasn't allowed to have any social life outside of school, I began skipping my classes every day and would smoke weed with my friends. When they found out I was skipping school and smoking weed, I became grounded indefinitely. This continued until my junior year when my mother and stepfather then decided that because I just skipped school every day I should just stay home and work, and so they withdrew me from school and told me after the fact. Long story short, they started locking me in my room at night so I wouldn't sneak out, and then when I kept doing it, they told me I could join Job Corps or leave the house. I was still only 16 and I had been researching emancipation for minors because that is all I wanted, to leave and make my own way. I didn't know that legally (in North Carolina law, where I grew up) as soon as I turned 16, I could have left at any time. I went and stayed with my father in New York for a few weeks but then became homeless in Rochester, NY a few weeks before I turned 17. What followed was a year of traveling around the country, homeless, hitchhiking and hopping on freight trains (the train cars that carry supplies not people) and learning a lot from so many different kinds of people in different parts of the country. I already wanted to be a hippie, so I decided I wanted to go to California.

California was like going to a completely different country for me, which is how I would often describe it to people back home on the east coast. I was exposed to and embraced by the hippie subculture on the west coast, and all the psychedelic drugs and idealist beliefs that came with it. My mother used to tell me when I was younger, before I became the “problem child,” that I could do anything I set my mind to, and these hippies explained to me the same thing, but they had a captivating word for it, “manifestation”. After doing a bunch of mushrooms, LSD, and other psychedelic drugs and feeling like I had come to supreme awareness of life itself, I felt that I had the power to make my reality anything I wanted it to be, I only had to remain pure of heart and to know in my heart that it was true. This reality I wanted, I had to believe with all my heart that it was already there and feel the feeling of gratitude to the universe for it, that is how it would “manifest”. For the first time while writing this, I see now how similar that conviction of belief was in this, and when I was in church growing up, and I had to believe and be “100 percent sure” that Jesus had saved me, or I wasn't saved. I believed with all my heart that I would be a famous musician, in a nice hotel room in San Francisco with all my family there. I would take care of them with my new wealth from being a famous musician. I knew in my heart that this was a pure wish, I had let go of any resentment to anyone in my family but I knew that money had caused a lot of our problems, I felt like I could go to scapegoat to the provider for the whole family, and everyone would be happy and love each other again. When it didn't happen, I kept telling myself that I just have to keep believing, but also that there must be some kind of ritual or prayer that I must perform to finalize it.

This eventually led me to going to a closed gas station and knocking over their cigarette garbage bin with the cops showing up soon after.

“My brother’s gonna pick me up, I have a hotel room in San Francisco,” I told them when they asked who I was (which was not the case, no matter how much I believed).

I had lost my phone and because I thought I had traveled in time forward a few weeks (too much to explain here), I told them I was 18 when I was still 17, but also started talking about time travel and aliens.

“Here’s your time-traveler suit,” one of the cops said to me when we got to the jail and I was put in a cell, handing me a green velcroed piece of heavy cloth to wear. Part of me got excited with anticipation, was this it? I put it on and closed my eyes and waited, hoping when I opened them again, the power of my conviction would cause me to be in the hotel room with my family. When I opened them however, I was still there, in the jail cell in this green piece of fabric that didn’t cover my whole body. Eventually I gave them my step-grandparents' number, and that was when they found out I was actually 17. They came to the door of my cell yelling why didn't I tell them I was 17, and I was confused. Apparently in California, if you are under 18 you cannot go to adult jail, which was interesting to me because I had already been to adult jail a few months ago in Atlanta (twice) for possession of marijuana. This made me feel more like California was like a different country, back in the southeast you go to adult jail from 16 and up, and how the juvenile center was. They had classes, even recess, nice motivational speakers and all the staff were really nice. I am not the best judge of the place though because I wasn't there long, after a few days the juvenile center bought me a Greyhound bus ticket back home. I told them I just wanted to go back to my family, and my mother said I could come back home, I felt like it would be a relief to be off the streets and around familiar people again.

When I got home my mother was nice the first night, but after that she told me how disgusting my dreads were and started criticizing everything about me, every day it felt like. I still hadn't given up on manifestation, I told myself that there must be more trials to go through, because it sure felt like my mother was putting me through some. It was easy for me to stay calm and not get angry or yell at people when I was in California, I thought I had gotten through all the negativity and lower-self parts of me, and when I got home I was able to stay calm for a while, but eventually I snapped. It was another day, and it was just me and my mother at the house,

"Look at you," she said, shaking her head at me sitting in the living room minding my own business. "Those disgusting dreads, they smell like shit. Don’t you know how stupid you look?"

I tried to stay calm, like I had in California. "Mom, why are you—”

"Why am I what? Being honest with you? You don't have a job, you don't do anything, you’re lazy and entitled!"

"I’m doing what’s best for our family, I—"

"Our family?" Her voice cracked. "What do you mean? You’re just a lazy piece of—"

"Stop!" I exploded, getting up from the couch. "You don’t know what you’re talking about! I came back here for you! How dare you treat me like this!”

She stepped back, tears starting, this was the first time I had yelled at her since I got back, before this I would just take it.

"Get out. Get out of my house," was her response. It was then that I had become homeless again, at 18, in my own hometown.

For a few months I wandered around my small town (pop. around 30,000) wondered what had happened. I came up with all these explanations in my head, telling myself long, captivating stories, about how I was actually a werewolf and my mom was from a clan of vampires, and that's why she can't love me for who I am. Or that I was on a special mission from aliens to bring the east and west coast together for peace, and that maybe my mom was just another dimensional version of herself and that is why. 

I realized in hindsight, maybe a year later, that I was in a “perma-trip,” I remember feeling the effects of the LSD strongly still, for months after, and this also influenced my thinking. I was stuck in a drug-induced long-term effect of my sensory perception being distorted (which to me felt like I was feeling “energy,” of myself, the universe, and other people), and having this as a constant affirmation (I feel so good about it, it must be true, “it resonates”) of my idealist ideological notions of manifestation that had been so socially accepted as fact in some circles in California, made my delusions seem more real than reality. This from a material perspective, was me walking around my town begging in parking lots of stores for money, and sleeping outside, while also sometimes singing loudly walking down the street or going into stores and proclaiming things that I thought thereby, would affect the energy and manifest something good. One time I walked into a bookstore and loudly proclaimed, “to everyone here, I am now converting to the religion of Islam,” and then just walked out with no explanation. I meant it with 100% conviction at the time, but I never actually attempted to become Muslim, which I feel a little guilty about. Another time, I went to the public library in town and was trying to check out a book, but I had no ID. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead as I stepped up to the counter, the smell of old furniture hanging in the air. When the librarian told me flatly,

“You need an ID to check out a book,” as she said the words I felt that this was unfair, and it was my job to correct it. My voice rose, not to a shout, but sharp enough to slice through the silence of the library. Heads lifted from books and computer screens as I declared,

“Knowledge should belong to everyone, not everyone can afford an ID, you should change the policy for those less fortunate” My words echoed across the room, heavy, defiant, and indignant.

A year or two later I remember going back to the library, without my dreads and seeing a sign that said that if you don't have an ID you can still get a temporary library card and use the computer, I felt a little guilty and silly for making it into a scene, but I always think back and remember how nice it was of them to actually take what I said into consideration and change the policy. 

Some say I was lucky, because a few months later when my father offered to let me try to live with him again in Long Island NY (where I was born), things changed. I specifically remember, when I got there, it all went away. All the delusions, the extra-sensory feeling (which I believe now, to be the after-effects of the LSD), and all the doubt and worry. Life became simple, my father had a very materialistic view of the world, to him everything is about money and time, how much time it takes you to make money. I have heard stories of other people who had taken too much LSD and never came out of the “perma-trip,” and I do accept the label of being lucky, and I am glad I was lucky enough to have a healthy mind again. I also learned a few things though, among many other things I learned that every goal needs action, without purposeful and relevant action towards a goal, nothing will “manifest”, also I learned how powerful an environment can be. I watched myself go from borderline emo kid who wanted to be a hippie, to someone who embraced fully that hippie identity and all that came with it, to someone who rejected those things for a more materialist worldview that felt like it could produce actual results, and all these perspectives came about from my social environment and my response to it. 

Unfortunately, that isn't the end of the story, although I did get a healthy mind back upon seeing my father again, our relationship did not improve much from last time. This led me to quit my job at McDonald's in New York after two months of being there and buy a ticket back to North Carolina to move back with my mom again (can you believe it?). With a new perspective on life and my mom believing in me once again after seeing me get a job, I headed back to North Carolina to finally be the good son and brother I knew I was. 

Fitting In

When I came back to North Carolina I had already decided that I had to “conform to society” so that I could get money and achieve something with my life, and because I also, I did want to be, and feel “normal”. The town in North Carolina I grew up in is a lot more diverse than most places I have been to on the west coast, but ironically there is more intolerance of diversity there. My hometown has echoes of segregation in the school system and in housing. There are two famous neighborhoods, or “projects,” Trent Court and Craven Terrace. There are sometimes one or two apartments in these government-funded housing complexes that white people live in, but you don't see any white people there usually. The school system is a little more diverse because of zoning that was made to make them more inclusive, but I went to many different schools in the county growing up because we moved a lot and you could definitely see the same echoes, some schools had a more percentage of black people, and were less funded, simple as that. Most people I grew up around were descendants of slave owners or descendants of slaves; my family came from New York when I was young and we came to America from Italy only about 100 years ago, so the generational racism, superstitions and prejudice that a lot of white people around there grow up around, was only present in my stepfathers family (who was from there), and I never felt like we were the same. I wanted to get away from it all, I wanted to just embrace peace and love, and be a hippie, but after seeing where that got me, I decided to embrace my original environment, feeling that this was the “right” thing to do. 

In my town in North Carolina, and in much of the southeast United States, there are two main distinct subcultures, the white redneck culture, and black culture. People who have studied culture have pointed out that the culture of oppressed peoples, marginalized people, minorities, this culture has consistently been what is new and exciting in the overall society that they exist in. To put it simply, black culture has had the biggest impact on American culture, and shaped it the most, because the culture of resistance, of overcoming adversity, is the most inspiring kind of culture. Think about it, we all watch movies or TV shows of people who are oppressed and face sometimes seemingly insurmountable odds, and those are the pieces of entertainment that inspire us most. American society has historically on one hand systemically suppressed the opportunities for black people, and on the other placed famous black people on a platform to admire and celebrate for overcoming it, for becoming successful in spite of it, while still refusing to acknowledge and correct the effects of historical systemic racism and the generational disparities it creates. In my town, you can see this concept displayed very well. Most white people in my hometown (specifically the older people, but many young people who follow their lead as well) will talk about black people behind closed doors as if they are another species. Many proudly have flags in their homes somewhere, some of them are not American flags but Confederate, but the American one is more common, and they talk about Christian values. When they talk about black people, many white people in New Bern, NC correlate being black with “not representing Christian values”. I will give one small example although I could write pages of them; when I was a teenager a white girl who I was hanging out with said its good I'm white because her mother doesn't like black people and when she saw her hanging out with a black person, her mother told her that she “saw a bad spirit on him” (more likely she just saw the color of his skin, and used her Christian spirituality as a justification for imposing racist values on her daughter). They will do all this, but even the most racist white teenagers at my high school would bump the latest Lil Wayne or Wiz Khalifa album in their car, sag their pants or wear clothing that was not from traditional white culture but from black culture, the same stuff black celebrities wore and did, they did. Many white teenagers start selling weed or harder drugs, to be cool. Their parents have money and have bought them a car (which they use to sell their drugs) and whatever they need, they even can get any job in town or at their parents work, but because tales of black people selling drugs to survive became popularized and glamorized with rap music, being a drug dealer is seen as having a high status in our social groups. It goes even further, to where white people use the term “n***a” as an endearing term to their close friends, just like they see black people do, and this is where the line crosses and something people from outside this environment are shocked by. On one hand, using the word as a white person is crazy because it is trying to re-appropriate the slur that was given to them by white people, “because it's cool to them we can use it to be cool too” is the mindset, but on the other hand, sometimes, when you are have a really good Black friend, they will call you my “n***a” as a term of endearment, and don't mind if you call them it back. However one might feel about the morality of this arrangement, the fact is that usually the white person thinks it is now okay to use that word freely, and to other black people. When another black person hears a white person using this term in public, not to someone who calls them it privately and allows them to say it back, it can, rightfully cause the black person to be triggered. Now when a white person is well meaning, and genuinely did not understand the complexity of this word and it's use, and apologizes, things can usually be resolved. The problem is that many white people, especially ones raised to be prejudice against black people, will then un-rightfully, feel indignant. I personally committed to not using this word, even towards a black friend who thinks it is okay, after this period in my life was over, but during the time I tried to conform to my surroundings, I did use this word often, as a term of endearment to my friends but also almost as an adjective to describe people who I didn't like as well, whether they were black or not, and this is where another problem lies, and why I think I stopped using it.

When you start to put the word “n***a” in your vocabulary as a white person, you start to use it in the way that black people do, because they are the people you hear using it the most. Black people may use the term as an adjective for negative and positive purposes, and while one black person calling another the term with negative connotations may be hurtful, it's not based on centuries of oppression and doesn't have the same weight as when a white person uses the term that way. So, the point is, invariably, white people who accept the term as part of their vocabulary will use it with negative connotations as well as positive, because the term becomes like the word “dude”. If dude is your go to word to speak about other men, you will say “what's up dude” to your friends and “this dude is crazy” to someone you don't like, and this is where the line between adjective and noun gets blurry, and so I think if you are a morally good white person, you should not use the term after understanding all this. 

When I first got home from New York, I thought I should be good and get a job, and I worked at Burger King and then Chipotle, but after being fired from both and my mom kicking me out of the house again, I decided I would be a thug, a gangster, a drug dealer. I listened to music about selling drugs to take care of your family and saw this as my way to become wealthy and be happy with my family again, or at least start my own family I could be happy with. 

I won't go into too much detail, but I'll give one quick story to help you get a picture of my life at the time. I was doing and selling heroin and weed at the time and this one guy in the neighborhood would always come to me and my homies apartment and ask for $5 of weed, which to some egotistical drug dealers (which I wanted to emulate) would take as disrespect, especially since sometimes he would come with $4 or change. I had, like most people who had similar ambitions as me do, spent a lot of time coming up with random things to say that sounded gangster, and for a while I was saying this one I came up with that a lot of my homies told me they liked, “I only kill, steal, and keep it real”. So the $5 guy comes to the door of the apartment and me and my homies are all on dope and we had been through something else that day where we were facing threats from other people, and so I tell the $5 guy

“Get the fuck out of here.”

“C’mon, look out for me man,” he says, I replied,

“If you don’t get the fuck out of here Imma come out there and beat yo ass.”

“C’mon out here and do it then,” my heart skipped a beat but I didn’t let it show, as he continued, “C’mon Austin, I’m calling your bluff, be a man and come out and fight me.”

“Fight you? Ha! If I come out there, Imma slice, dice and end yo life,” I said as I pulled out my Italian designed switchblade, “Imma slash, gash, and put a hole in yo ass” (I was Italian so I wanted to be like a mafia guy, and these lines were from the parody movie, Scary Movie, I thought they sounded cool though). Me and my friends exchanged a few more words with him and then I said “listen there's only 3 things I do motherfucker, steal, kill, and keep it real, now I done kept it real with you this whole conversation, and I already been out stealing all night, so there's only one thing left to do n***a!” I didn't mean it, I didn't want to kill anybody, but the drugs were pumping through me and every time I said something I felt more powerful. The guy started trying to mess with the door and then I tried to keep it shut because I was honestly scared if he did get in, then I would have to follow through with my threats, and I really didn't want to.

“You ain’t gonna do shit,” he said to me then “You too Mike, you scared?” to my friend who was there. Mike stood up and puffed his chest out, and his eyes got wide,

“Oh you don’t want Big Mike to open this door,” Mike said in a booming voice, “You’re not gonna like it if Big Mike opens the door."

“Yeah man, you’re not gonna like it if BIg Mike opens the door, you know Big Mike don’t play!” I chimed in.

“No he don’t, Big Mike don’t play,” Mike continued, with a sinister tone entering his voice. "

“Yeah so you might want to get outta here if you know what’s good for you” I said.

“Man whatever, you guys are trippin’ man,” the $5 guy said, and then luckily he left. After that I tried to be careful with threats I didn't want to back up. Stuff like this continued until my best friend since elementary school, who I saw as a brother, betrayed me. After that I laid low by myself and just continued selling weed to a few customers, and I started hanging out with a girl I had a short romance with in high school. She wouldn't be my girlfriend when we were in school because her parents were strict and I was a “bad kid” so I thought maybe now we could be together. I felt really good. I had hung out with her a few times and we did LSD together and I had already been off the dope for a few months, so I was more nice and humble. One night, after we had hung out the day before, she asked if I was coming over tonight, and I told her no because I wanted her to miss me, and I thought I could make more sales if I was in town. I was hanging out at IHOP where a friend of mine worked and would give me whatever food I wanted there for some weed. I would get a loaded omelet with strawberry and blueberry pancakes on the side, and it was the best thing ever to me. My friend let me hangout in their car while they worked and I was watching a documentary on my phone when some guy I knew hits up my phone and wanted 12 grams for 100, I told him to meet me at IHOP, but when he left, I looked closer at the $100 Bill and saw it was fake. I called the guy and said I need that back or we got problems and he said I could come get it, so I did. I didn't have a car but my friend let me use theirs, they told me to stay off Simmons st because of the cops, but I didn't, and a cop pulled me over because I didn't know you had to manually turn the lights on at night, so I was driving at night with no lights. I had no license, and I was smoking in the car, so it wasn't long before the cop found the couple of ounces of weed and the half ounce of mushrooms I had in the car and took me to jail. 

My mom kept telling me she was raising for money for a lawyer and for my bond, so I shouldn’t take any deals or go to court to plead guilty, so I stayed in there for 5 months when I would've been out in 1 or 2. After 5 months I decided I just want to get out, I wasn't going to listen to my mom anymore and I would just plead guilty (because when you plead guilty it speeds up the court process and you get out faster if you are getting probation instead of prison time). When I got out, my sister told me that she asked my mom if she really had been putting money away for it and she said no, but this story is about what happened in jail. 

There was a bully on the block who only took advantage of, and messed with people who were weaker than him (like me and my friends younger brother), and he was a trustee (an inmate who gets to stay out of the cell all day unlike everyone else because they help clean and hand out meals) on the block so he had power, but he didn't have real power, he had tentative power, it was based solely on his position. After a while one of the most high-ranking gang members in our county was moved to our block of the jail. The first night he was there, someone had put a hit on the trustee, for a beating. I was in the cell with and next to the people who took the hit, and as soon as I heard the two older people with us talk about it, I said I was down, before the two other people were firm in their resolve to commit to it themselves. I knew I had to seem ready and willing so I wouldn't be seen as weak. The next day when we were let out of our cells for our hour, we all rushed him in his room. I felt lucky because the other guys in charge told me my job was to take all his stuff, all the clothes, food/snacks, and extra bedding that he had accumulated over many months and bring it back to our cell. I wasn't part of the violence, but I was inches away from it, rummaging through his drawers, putting his stuff in a bed sheet as he cried. I remember him saying “why are you guys doing this to me” and “alright, that's enough” among other things, and only to be ignored as he kept being hit with fists, elbows, and then feet. When I had left and gone back to the room to hide our loot, I came back out and saw him lying on the floor outside his cell, face down with blood coming from his head. I did see him a day or so later, with his head wrapped up and he seemed cognizant. I tried to turn off my empathy. He had humiliated me before too, he shouldn't have taken advantage of his power, these are things I told myself, but I did feel bad. Not guilty, but bad. Something inside my chest didn't feel good when I heard the words of his pleas echoing in my mind later. I saw it as something I had to do, and a lesson. I felt like I had to be part of it, I was weak and if I didn't conform I would be a target, but I also knew that if I had never gone to jail in the first place then I would've never had to make that decision. So, I vowed when I got out to not sell drugs or do anything that could land me back in jail, that was just jail, not even prison. It made me think a lot deeper about the effects of simple choices, how bad choices can bring you to a situation that you can’t get out of, that can change who you are. I never wanted to have to go through that again, so I resolved it in myself that I would still be rich and able to provide for the ones I love, but I will do it legally, because I am not willing to risk what going to jail again would entail. 

Finding Something to Stand For

For my sentencing I was given two and a half years of supervised probation, which meant a lot of rules that if I didn't follow, I would have to go to prison for a year or two. One thing jail famously does, is give your brain time to recover from weed or any other addictions and so many people like me, come out sober with ambitions to keep that sobriety and “go legit,” or follow the law. This was my experience, and it was really helpful for me. My little sister got me a job at the fast-food place she worked at, and I met a girl there who I started dating, and I was happy. I stayed with my mother and stepfather again until me and my little sister got our own place together, and after a while I quit fast food to do construction work. My girlfriend had decided she wanted to go into the military, and the way she was talking to me, it sounded like she was trying to hint that if I got her pregnant that she wouldn't have to go. She would cry to me saying she is scared to go but she had a lot of pressure from her family, and she was also scared I would leave her when she went to boot camp. Regardless, I kept using protection because I knew I was not ready to have a kid, and for a few years after I regretted it, because soon after she went to boot camp she broke up with me and I was very sad thinking about the life we could have had. I think that was better for her also though, if I didn't have more time to grow up before having a kid I don't know if I would've ever got more mature and realistic ambitions for my life. Around that time, I was renting a trailer with my sister and my stepfather's brother's ex-wife. I started smoking again, I even started selling again, and eventually my little sister moved out because I was demanding her friends who were over all the time pay rent and help with the dishes, and then I told my ex-aunt to leave after she trashed the house when I was gone for two weeks and came back (I did give her 60 days, though I know this was harsh). The house became a party traphouse and I even did LSD a few times there, but I also was not going to work much and not making much in profit selling, so I got evicted after a few months. 

I lived with two of my friends at their parents' house for a little while, but their parents kicked me out when we all were smoking weed at their house, because in NC it is illegal and some people see it like any other drug, and so I became homeless again. I was living outside and begging for money to survive, and I started hanging out with a friend of an old friend sometimes. I felt like a social outcast, and I appreciated him keeping me company sometimes. I was living outside but some nights I would stay in this gym I had membership to overnight and read, I didn't sleep there because I didn't want to get kicked out. I remember I was also following a lot of different political pages and groups on Facebook from different ideologies. I was really interested in understanding power because I was powerless. Eventually this led me to decide to read the Communist Manifesto. I had heard about it, but was told all my life growing up by my stepfathers family, other people in my community, and in online documentaries that basically socialism was people wanting to take what other people had and that Communism was akin to Naziism, so I had previously stayed away from it. I always knew I would never associate with anything hateful or violent, I wanted peace and to help make the world a better place. At this point in my life I had already tried believing whole-heartedly in idealist beliefs of manifestation and then tried to embrace the individualistic ‘grind till you make it’ mindset, and I had come right back to the same circumstance, homeless and struggling to survive, because of this I was more open to reading it and learning about it. I felt powerless and from what I had learned Communism had made some people powerful, and I thought maybe I could at least learn something from it. Maybe even if I didn't agree with all of the perspective, I could still learn something applicable to my life. At this point, being 23 and searching since I was a kid for the answers to life, or at least the world, I had read and listened to many philosophical and political opinions and immersed myself in learning psychology and history, but this was one territory that I had never dared step into, until now. 

The book began with the famous line “A spectre is haunting Europe-the spectre of Communism”. The boldness of the statement, coming from someone who is advocating for Communism, instantly caught my attention, and then the authors go on to explain that much of the media (even in his day) run by the people in power, has basically demonized it and come up with all these things that they say Communists want, and so they are explaining in this pamphlet (the Communist Manifesto) what their true aims are and where their ideological position comes from. The authors then give a material analysis of how class society was arranged in feudal Europe, how different professions had guilds where they all coordinated with each other, but when factories came along and the new economic system of capitalism along with them, all these professions are taken away and there becomes only two classes, capitalists (the bourgeoisie) and workers (the proletariat). The communists argue for a system in which the workers of all these factories are all co-owners of their workplace, to take away the position of “owner”. (Think about it, there are managers upper and lower, and lower level workers who all make factories and other workplaces run, and they don't need the one who owns the business to run it, they could all hold meetings and democratically decide how they run the business together.) By doing this, taking away the ability for one person to own a business (and thereby have complete dictatorship over all workplace decisions) that many people operate in , democracy will be between people who work voting for each other, not rich people who “represent” us. Basically, just like the founding principle of America “no taxation without representation,” but applied to class, we should not be “represented” by people whose lives (because of their class position) have nothing in common with us or our daily struggles as working-class people. 

I could go on explaining the theory of Marxism, but this writing is more about reflection. When I read this for the first time, I was amazed how it explained how the world is, not blaming our problems on some spiritual force or on people's own individual ineptitude, but giving real material, historical explanations why our society is structured the way it is today. I was hooked.

I ended up listening to an audiobook of what is called Karl Marx’s Magnum opus, Capital, while I was staying in a tent at night in a small, wooded patch of unused land in the middle of town.

My tent was wedged between a cluster of pine trees that dropped needles like rain every time the wind picked up. The narrator's robot voice filled the tent with the buzzy sound of the cheap speaker my phone had as I lay on a sleeping bag that reeked of mildew, explaining surplus value while mosquitoes whined around my head. My phone screen was the only light, casting blue shadows on the nylon walls as Marx's words about worker exploitation played over the distant hum of late-night traffic on MLK Boulevard, the main street in town that was nearby. Every few minutes, I'd pause to scratch new bug bites or adjust my position on the tree roots digging into my back.

One early morning while listening to it, I heard a voice of a man say from maybe 20-50 feet away,

“oh you're still here, you can't be here on private property” and then followed by something like “you better not be here tomorrow”, I stayed still and listened, trying to hear if footsteps were coming my way, but I didn't hear any, so after a moment I opened my tent and looked around and he was gone. 

The next day I left for the day and when I came back to the patch of woods, my tent was gone, and only a small part of it left behind, in a way that felt like they wanted me to see that they took my tent. I called my friend who I had been hanging out with sometimes and told him what happened, and he was nice enough to say I could stay on his couch if I can help with rent. I was exhausted because I didn't get much sleep the night before and so when I got to his place I passed out, and when I woke up in the morning, I told myself I was a Communist now. I then spent the next month or two fervently reading from the most famous Marxists throughout history, especially those who had led successful revolutions, and hardly did anything else besides that and debating and discussing with other people online.  Since then, I have always identified as a Marxist and a communist. I have studied a lot about previous Marxist movements and read the theories, and results of their actions, from many revolutionaries, and I have only continued to become more inspired and resolute in my conviction.

Final Thoughts

Looking back now, I see how each environment shaped me like water shapes stone; slowly, inevitably, leaving permanent marks. The strict Christian-nationalist household that drove me to rebellion, the California hippie community that fed my idealism, the North Carolina streets that taught me survival, the jail cell that forced me to confront violence, and finally the gym and that patch of woods where Marx's words found me at my most desperate moment. Each place demanded a different version of myself, and I became what I needed to become to survive.

Marxism explained to me scientifically and concretely, among many other things, something very profound, something that I had already learned through my own experiences: our beliefs don't form in a vacuum. They're forged in the processing of lived experience, in the collision between what we're told the world should be and what we discover it actually is. My mother once told me I could do anything I set my mind to and while that was motivational, what she couldn’t prepare me for was how the world would try to stop me, and how that resistance would ultimately lead me to understand not just my own struggle, but the struggles of everyone trapped in systems bigger than themselves.

I often wonder if I was from a wealthy family would I ever feel the need to read Marx or if I would just accept what I was told about it, if someone who never went hungry would ever question why some people have too much while others have nothing. Maybe my path was inevitable—maybe every homeless night, every jail cell, every moment of powerlessness was leading me toward that tent in the woods where I finally found words for what I had always felt but could never articulate. Or maybe that's just how we make sense of chaos afterward, by finding patterns in the pain. Either way, I know this: I am who I am not despite my circumstances, but because of them. If my story can help even just one person recognize the forces shaping their own life and help them process it better, then maybe all of it, even the worst parts, were for something after all.