If you can’t explain what’s happening in the world, then someone else will explain it for you, and they’re not going to do it in your interest.

A lot of people feel overwhelmed right now with Trump publicly threatening the destruction of an entire civilization and watching racism, repression, and fear grow more open, and you can at least feel that something is deeply wrong. But most people don’t know how to talk about it. They just say, “This is crazy. It’s scary. It feels wrong.” That gap between what you feel and what you can explain is where our power is lost.

So, let’s talk about step one. which is not memorizing theory. Step one is building the language to describe your reality. Without the right language, your thoughts stay trapped as emotion.

Emotion isn’t bad. You need to feel. You should feel. But without structure for that emotion, it can be redirected, manipulated, or silenced, forced back down. Marx wrote that we have to start from real conditions, not ideas or abstractions, but what’s actually happening here in our material life.

So our question for ourselves is, can you describe what you’re witnessing clearly? Here’s how you do that.

Name what you see. Name the actions and the consequences. Displacement, bombing, occupation, censorship, policing. Train your eyes to see these patterns beyond just the initial moments. Then you need to learn the words that match that reality. Words like imperialism, exploitation, colonialism, alienation, class.

These aren’t necessarily big theory words, although there’s theory and concepts behind them. They are tools of your vocabulary. They help you describe the system that this has all been allowed under rather than just isolated events that are so crazy for happening out of nowhere.

Then you need to place yourself inside of it so it can become real to you. Where do you stand in this system? Are you a worker? Are you someone affected by the rising costs? Are you someone witnessing the violence funded by your government?

Marxists know this as understanding your relation to production and society. And lastly is to connect your feeling to the structure. Your anger, your grief, they’re a response to real conditions. Connecting your emotions to those conditions and causes will help you move on from feeling just lost and helpless. It gives you an understanding of why.

There’s a genuine cost here linguistically. People are taught to describe a horrific genocide as just conflict. Not thinking further. How am I involved in this? What does that mean? So we ask ourselves, what am I seeing? What is the system behind it? And where do I exist within that system?

This is a skill that follows into your personal life as well. If you can’t name what’s wrong with the world, you also struggle to name what’s wrong in your own life, why you’re feeling disconnected, why something feels off in a relationship. The same skill applies.

Being able to recognize and name what you’re experiencing, what’s causing it, and what you actually need. When you learn to articulate reality, you start to understand yourself. And once you understand yourself, you can fully decide what you want to change for you, for your neighbors, for the world.