The architecture of autistic order (2026)

From the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

When I first got involved in left politics in the early nineties, an older comrade asked me how I thought we’d get to socialism.

I drew a straight line with an arrow.

Socialism was at the end. That was the goal. The arrow might have to move around obstacles but it always pointed in the same direction. Simple. Logical. Honest.

He looked at me and said it wasn’t as easy as that.

I never said it was easy. I just answered the question as clearly as I could. But I knew in that moment I was speaking a different language. So I started adapting. Fitting in. Saying things the way people expected them to be said.

It always felt contrived. It always felt illogical.

The arrow is still pointing in the same direction.

For decades the clinical establishment has looked at the autistic mind and seen deficit. Restricted interests. Social dysfunction. A fragmented internal life.

That is not my experience.

My experience is order. Sometimes relentless order. A mind that looks for the underlying machinery of things, the patterns, the systems, the internal logic that holds everything together or exposes where it’s broken.

What gets called disorder is usually just a different kind of order. One that doesn’t fit the world capitalism built.

In a capitalist world, order is social and hierarchical. It runs on unwritten rules, reading the room, knowing your place. The rules shift depending on who’s speaking, one standard for the CEO, another for the worker on the floor.

For an autistic mind, that’s not order. That’s chaos with a dress code.

My internal logic doesn’t work like that. A rule is a rule. If a standard is valid it applies universally, not selectively, not based on status, not depending on who’s watching.

When I point out a double standard I’m not being difficult. I’m identifying a structural fault. Hypocrisy is a mechanical failure of the truth.

This is why dialectical materialism made immediate sense to me when I encountered it.

Not because it confirmed what I already believed. Because it gave me a framework that actually followed its own logic. It explained injustice through material conditions and power rather than vague appeals to human nature. It replaced the baffling question of why people behave the way they do with a structured analysis of how the system is weighted.

For a mind that struggles with the unspoken and the inconsistent, socialist theory functions as a decoder ring.

It doesn’t ask you to read between the lines. It puts the lines on the table.

The friction is real though.

Capitalism produces chaos, economic, social, psychological. And an autistic mind trying to find logical consistency in a system built on contradiction will burn out. The disability doesn’t come from inside. It comes from the collision between a systematic mind and a society that runs on inconsistency and calls it normal.

That collision is exhausting. I know that from forty years of trying to adapt to it.

What I’m arguing for isn’t a world that accommodates autistic people as a minority group with special needs.

I’m arguing for a world built on consistent principles. Where the rules mean what they say. Where resources are distributed according to logic rather than power. Where the architecture of society actually follows its own blueprints.

That’s not a neurodivergent fantasy. That’s socialism.

The arrow is still pointing in the same direction it always was.

I still think the diagram was right.

Pablo.

Agency and responsibility (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Controversy surrounded the 2026 BAFTA Film Awards, in which John Davidson, whose life with Tourette’s inspired the film I Swear, involuntarily vocalised a racial slur during the ceremony, thus generating predictable outrage. Social media rapidly framed the incident as an ‘outburst’, implying intent. The assumption of agency was immediate.

Yet Tourette’s syndrome involves involuntary vocalisations, particularly in cases involving coprolalia. Uttering socially taboo words is not a sign of personal belief but a neurological compulsion. Coprolalia occurs in approximately 10-15 percent of people with Tourette’s and involves the brain’s failure to suppress socially inappropriate utterances. The individual has no control over the content; the words that emerge are often those with the most shock value, precisely because the brain’s suppression mechanism has misfired.

Agency under capitalism

The episode offers a useful case study in how capitalist society understands, and misunderstands, responsibility. Capitalism rests heavily on the idea of individual responsibility. Workers are treated as autonomous units of labour power, assumed to be rational, self-regulating, and fully in control of their conduct. Discipline in speech and behaviour is expected as part of employability and public legitimacy.

Where agency is compromised, through illness, disability or neurological variation, this framework strains. Instead of adjusting its assumptions, society often reasserts them more harshly. The presumption of intent remains, even where medical explanation is well documented.

This reveals a contradiction. When an individual is able to conform, their conformity is praised as personal virtue. When they cannot, their difference is interpreted as moral failure.

The policing of speech

Modern capitalism places significant emphasis on regulated language. Public speech is increasingly scrutinised, not only in workplaces but in cultural life. While there are good reasons to challenge genuinely racist or abusive expressions, the framework often operates without regard to material context.

This is not an argument against challenging racist language. When someone with full agency chooses to use slurs, that reveals values and deserves opposition. The point is that agency itself must be established before moral judgment is applied. Treating involuntary and deliberate speech identically serves neither anti-racism nor disability justice.

The Davidson incident illustrates this tension. A word can be socially harmful in its historical weight and impact. But responsibility cannot be abstracted from agency. To treat involuntary neurological discharge as deliberate prejudice collapses an important distinction.

Capitalist society frequently commodifies ‘inspirational’ narratives of disability. Films, awards ceremonies and media profiles celebrate individuals overcoming adversity. Yet this celebration is conditional. It assumes that disability can be packaged into palatable form. When the unfiltered reality appears, tolerance evaporates. The disabled individual is accepted only so long as they remain manageable.

Outrage as commodity

The rapid reaction online was not incidental. Social media platforms reward immediacy and emotional intensity. Speed outruns verification. The platforms profit from engagement regardless of accuracy. A nuanced explanation of Tourette’s generates less interaction than moral outrage. The economic incentive is towards simplification and condemnation, not towards understanding the material reality of neurological conditions.

Under these conditions, moral judgement becomes performative. Expressing indignation is easier than examining neurological evidence. The result is a form of ‘gotcha’ politics that prioritises signalling over understanding.

The paradox of inspiration

Davidson’s presence at the BAFTAs was itself a product of an inspiration narrative, his life ‘overcoming’ Tourette’s packaged as cultural uplift. But inspiration requires disability to be sanitised, controlled, presented as triumph over adversity.

The moment Tourette’s manifested as it actually does, involuntarily, inconveniently, in a way that cannot be neatly celebrated, the sympathy fractured. This reveals what capitalism often means by ‘acceptance’: the disabled must perform their difference in ways that affirm rather than challenge existing norms.

Responsibility reconsidered

A socialist analysis does not abandon the concept of harm. Words carry histories; their impact is real. But an equitable response requires proportionality and context. If an action is involuntary, then moral condemnation is misdirected.

The deeper issue is the rigidity of a society that demands uniform neurological performance in public life. When responsibility is defined without regard to material capacity, it ceases to be rational and becomes punitive.

The BAFTA incident reveals a system that confuses control with virtue and compliance with morality. It treats neurological difference as character defect and involuntary behaviour as moral choice. A materialist analysis rejects this confusion and demands that responsibility be matched to actual agency, not to capitalist fantasies of the self-regulating individual.

Pablo

Letter: A View from the Hospital Basement (2026)

Letter to the Editors from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A View from the Hospital Basement

To the Editors,

I write to you as a 53 year old working class logistics porter for NHS Scotland, and someone who has recently come to terms with a lifelong reality: I am autistic. Having spent my younger years in the frantic ‘activism’ of the far left, I find myself now, in the quiet of my fifties, looking at the world through a lens sharpened by both my diagnosis and the consistent logic of socialism.

For the autistic worker, capitalism is not merely an exploitative system; it is a sensory and social assault. The ‘wages system’ demands a specific type of human raw material, one that is flexible, socially performative, and capable of enduring the chaotic, profit driven environments of modern industry. If you cannot ‘mask’ your traits, if you cannot navigate the arbitrary social hierarchies of management, or if your nervous system recoils at the bright, loud, and disorganised nature of the capitalist workplace, you are branded ‘inefficient’.

In my eighteen years within the NHS, I have seen the machinery of the state attempt to patch up a broken population. We are a class of ‘repair men’ trying to fix the damage caused by a system that prioritizes the accumulation of capital over human well being. My job as a porter relies on lists, logic, and routine, elements that suit my autistic mind. Yet, the overarching system is one of irrationality. We see the ‘crisis’ in our hospitals not as a failure of funding, but as a failure of a system that treats health as a commodity and workers as mere expenses on a balance sheet.

The Socialist Party’s ‘Impossibilist’ stance, the refusal to advocate for the mere ‘crumbs’ of reform resonates deeply with the autistic need for systemic consistency. In my youth, I chased the ‘immediate demands’ of reformism, only to find that every hard won ‘right’ can be stripped away by the next budget or the next shift in the market. For my daughters, one who shares my neurodivergent wiring, I have no interest in fighting for a ‘better’ version of their exploitation.

A socialist society, one based on the common ownership of the means of life and production for use, is the only environment in which the neurodivergent person can truly thrive. Consider the logic:

First, the abolition of the ‘interview’ and the ‘personality test’. In a world of voluntary labour, the social ritual of ‘selling oneself’ to a master disappears. An autistic person’s focus and ‘special interests’ cease to be a commodity and become a direct contribution to the community.

Second, the end of sensory exploitation. Capitalism builds cheap, high stress environments because they are profitable. A society producing for human need would, for the first time, design spaces for human comfort, accounting for the diverse sensory needs of all its members.

Third, the removal of social hierarchy. My alexithymia and my struggle with social cues are only ‘disabilities’ because capitalism demands a specific type of social compliance to maintain the master servant relationship. In a society of equals, where no one has the power to command another’s labour, the ‘unwritten rules’ of the workplace vanish.

I have stopped apologising for the way I am wired. I have realised that my autistic brain, with its preference for facts over rhetoric and systems over leaders. We do not need charismatic leaders to tell us we are exploited; we need only to look at the ledgers of our lives.

Socialism offers a ‘case’ that does not shift with the political winds. It is a list of principles that holds up to the most rigorous logical scrutiny. For the worker in Scotland, for the porter in the basement, and for the autistic child yet to enter the fray, the message must remain clear: the system cannot be mended. It must be ended.

Yours for the Revolution,

Pablo Wilcox

Scotland