Ethnosocialism: Unity Without Erasure, Socialism Without Tyranny
BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
In an age marked by deepening inequality, cultural fragmentation, and the exhaustion of imported political models, a new vocabulary of social organisation is emerging from the Global South—particularly from Africa. One such concept is Ethnosocialism.
Often misunderstood at first glance, ethnosocialism is not ethnic dominance wrapped in ideology, nor is it socialism stripped of cultural meaning. It is, rather, a civilisational synthesis: the unification of diverse ethnic communities into a shared socio-economic and governing project, organised through collective participation and mutual accountability.
To understand ethnosocialism, we must first return to the meaning of Ethno.
1. Ethno: Belonging, Not Blood
The term ethno refers to a people bound together by shared culture, shared practices, shared memory, and shared modes of life. It was never intended as blood fetishism, racial purity, or exclusionary identity. Ethno signifies belonging—the natural social gravity that draws human beings into coherent communities through language, custom, history, and lived experience.
The term ethno does not refer exclusively to ethnicity as bloodline or race; rather, it denotes any shared organising identity through which people cohere—whether cultural, territorial, vocational, ideological, or even digital—such that an ethno may arise wherever humans gather around common purpose, meaning, and collective interest, including in non-ethnic spaces like online communities, where ethnopublics form without shared ancestry but through shared goals.
From this foundation arises ethnoism: a form of collectivism rooted in social cohesion. Here, individual self-interest is not erased or crushed, but harmonised within the collective interest of the people. Ethno affirms community without negating individuality. It recognises that people flourish not in isolation, but in meaningful social structures that give identity, responsibility, and purpose.
Crucially, ethno is not merely cultural. It is a nationhood principle—the idea that a people can affirm themselves collectively while preserving the dignity, agency, and aspirations of the individual. This balance is what may be called collective-individualism: neither the suffocation of the self under rigid collectivism, nor the chaos of radical individualism, but equilibrium between the two.
2. Socialism: Organisation, Not Dogma
To this civil foundation we add Socialism, derived from sociàre—to combine, to share, to bind together. In its truest sense, socialism is not a rigid ideology or historical script. It is organisation: the social regulation of production, distribution, exchange, property, and natural resources by the people themselves, for their collective survival and advancement.
Socialism asks a simple but radical question: Who should control the economy that sustains society? Ethnosocialism answers: the people—collectively, participatorily, and transparently.
Socialism, when stripped of authoritarian distortions, is not about State tyranny or economic uniformity. It is about ensuring that the material foundations of life—land, food, housing, energy, labour, and infrastructure—are governed in the public interest rather than monopolised by elites.
3. The Fusion: What Is Ethnosocialism?
When Ethno and Socialism are fused, they give birth to Ethnosocialism.
Ethnosocialism is not an imported theory. It is socio-economic nationalism grounded in peoplehood. It recognises that societies are not abstract populations but living communities shaped by history, culture, and identity. It therefore organises economic life around the collective needs of real people, not around profit maximisation or ideological purity.
At its core, ethnosocialism is the public ownership of land, resources, and productive infrastructure, combined with the collective regulation of economic life by the nation itself. In simple terms:
The economy is owned by the people, managed by the people, and governed by the people who manage production.
Yet ethnosocialism is not mono-ethnic rule. It is precisely the opposite of ethnic supremacy.
4. Unity Without Domination
Unlike ethnocentric systems that elevate one ethnic group above others, ethnosocialism is defined by the unity of multiple ethnic groups pursuing shared socio-economic customs and shared governance. It is a framework in which diverse communities—often fragmented by colonial manipulation—are brought into a coherent national structure without being erased or subordinated.
Ethnosocialism rejects the false choice between cultural erasure and ethnic fragmentation. It insists that plurality can coexist with unity, and that solidarity is strongest when built on mutual recognition rather than forced homogeneity.
5. Commicracy: Power Through Commissioning, Not Command
What distinguishes ethnosocialism structurally is its mode of governance: Commicracy.
Commicracy is governance by commissioning-rule, not top-down command. Power is not concentrated in distant bureaucracies or elite institutions. Instead, authority is mediated through commissioned bodies, Advisory bodies, and participatory structures that operate horizontally and reciprocally.
In a commicratic system, governance is not something done to the people but something done with them. Decision-making authority flows from the collective will, and responsibility flows back to the collective. This creates power-reciprocity—a continuous feedback loop between governors and governed.
Within ethnosocialism, commicracy ensures that socialism does not become statist domination, and that ethnic unity does not become majoritarian tyranny. It’s commissioning-rule is the institutional mechanism that transforms unity into shared responsibility.
6. Ethnocorporatism: Economic Justice, Not Economic Romanticism
Ethnocorporatism answers a question capitalism never resolved: How do human beings organise work without turning labour into exploitation or survival into competition?
Ethnocorporatism is the institutional mechanism through which this reorganisation occurs. It is neither capitalism nor State-socialism, but a third civilisational form rooted in collective ownership, functional organisation, and populocratic participation.
At its most accessible level, ethnosocialism is a system in which the means of production, distribution, and exchange are placed under collective control, and economic decisions are made not in elite boardrooms, but through institutionalised populocratic processes. This is not economic romanticism. It is economic justice.
Ethnosocialism recognises that no society can be free when survival itself is commodified, when access to life’s necessities is mediated by wealth, or when economic power is divorced from social accountability. It therefore restructures its ethnocorporatist economy to serve life, dignity, and continuity—not accumulation for its own sake.
Conclusion: A Civilisational Proposition
Ethnosocialism offers the world a civilisational proposition: that unity does not require uniformity, that collective ownership does not require authoritarianism, and that true socialism must be rooted in real people, real cultures, and real participation.
In a fractured world searching for models beyond exhausted capitalism and failed bureaucratic socialism, ethnosocialism presents a path forward—grounded, participatory, and profoundly human.
It is not a return to the past. It is a reclaiming of coherence for the future.
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