The four conditions under which institutional expansion becomes near-universal: persistence, retained expertise, continued budget, and no designed containment.
Adversarial reciprocation
A sovereignty strategy: counter-sanctions, currency competition, and bloc formation that impose reciprocal costs on imperial powers.
Boomerang (the)
The visible return of a tool against the population it was supposed to serve; the central diagnostic of reciprocal materialism.
Chapter
The basic organizational unit: 5–15 people with a shared purpose, internal discipline, and no central command.
Chapter dissolution
The healthy end of a chapter that has completed its purpose; treated as a normal cycle, not a failure.
Containment materialism
The prescriptive practice of building structural “dams” to prevent expansion before it starts.
Dictatorship of the proletariat
Marx's original term for working-class rule as a class, not rule by a single party or leader.
Dual power
Building parallel institutions (cooperatives, mutual aid, tenant unions) that serve people better than existing structures.
Federated vanguard
A network of autonomous, disciplined chapters coordinating through shared analysis rather than a command hierarchy.
Kill switch
A graduated protocol (inquiry, heightened posture, full activation) that enables rapid, coordinated defence when the state attacks one part of the network.
Professional-managerial class (PMC)
The top buffer layer of the working class, granted enough comfort to identify with owners and enough precarity to fear falling.
Proportional praxis
The rule that the form of resistance must match the specific form of oppression, calibrated to local conditions and state behaviour.
Reciprocal materialism
The foundational observation: every tool, institution, and apparatus expands into available space and will eventually turn against its creators unless structurally contained.
Safeguard floor
The non-negotiable constitutional guarantee of housing, healthcare, food, education, water, and basic transport - provided outside the market.
Surplus value
The gap between what a worker produces and what they are paid, captured by the owner.
These are the essentials. The full architectural glossary of 100+ terms is in Architecture Against Empire (free at material.red).