The first layer of Socialism is a set of political explanations that divide society into groups that fall into either Oppressed or Oppressor classes.
An ambitious, young leader promises the disgruntled majority that the reason they suffer is a small group of unjust, morally bankrupt, greedy individuals have tricked them in ways their saviour understands; and that this leader, if elected, will use the power of the state to right those wrongs and liberate the oppressed classes from the oppressors.
Lenin's Russia
- Oppressors
- The Christian Tsarist aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, capitalists, and imperialists
- Oppressed
- Industrial workers, peasants, women and Jews
Applied via the Bolshevik Revolution, the "dictatorship of the proletariat," and the Red Terror against class enemies.
Stalin's Soviet Union
- Oppressors
- Kulaks, the wealthy peasants and farming landowners, the bourgeois, Christians, and anyone against the Party
- Oppressed
- The Soviet toiling masses: Russian workers and farmers
Applied via forced collectivization, dekulakization, the Holodomor, Siberian work camps,and the Great Purge.
Hitler's Germany: The National Socialists
- Oppressors
- "Greedy Capitalist Jews," cast at once as finance capital and as Bolshevism, together with Marxists and the Versailles powers
- Oppressed
- The Aryan German Volk; White Europeans
Applied via the Nuremberg Laws, the camps, and the Holocaust.
Mao's Communist China
- Oppressors
- Landlords, rich peasants, business owners, Capitalists, and Republicans. The Black Classes, those who inherited privilege from The Four Olds.
- Oppressed
- Poor peasants and workers
Applied via violent land reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution.
Castro's Cuba
- Oppressors
- The Batista regime, the Cuban bourgeoisie, U.S. imperialism and capitalism
- Oppressed
- Cuban workers, peasants, and the poor
Applied via Centralized govenrment control, mass expropriation, the firing squads at La Cabaña, and the labor camps.
Pol Pot's Cambodia
- Oppressors
- The urban "new people," intellectuals, and professionals
- Oppressed
- The pure rural Khmer "base people"
Applied via Year Zero: the cities emptied, the population marched into the countryside, and the killing fields.
America, 2026
- Oppressors
- Racist, straight, Christian white men; colonizers, the privileged, billionaires
- Oppressed
- The colonized, African Americans, LGBTQ, Jews, atheists, the poor
