Polish (1980-) and Algerian (1989-) activists demanded social, political, and economic justice against coercive, corrupt, one-party police-states. Both authoritarian states responded with mass arrests, torture, and martial law, but Algeria collapsed in civil war while Poland transformed peacefully into a liberal democracy. “Structural variables” such as cultural values, material integration, or political inclusion fail to explain why highly motivated and radicalized Catholic Poles and Muslim Algerians, each militantly resistant to state coercion in the past, responded so differently to dehumanizing states of exception. I argue that the endurance of Poland’s labor-centralization regime and dissolution of Algeria’s client-centralization regime objectively structured the different activist evaluations of martial law in each country. Despite similar immediate suffering under Algerian and Polish martial law, the “objective” divergence in the retention of social resources generated discrete subjective meaning of the state of exception to beleaguered activists. Hence: (1) systems of citizen-subjectivity based on state-provided social resources best predicts peaceful/violent outcomes; and (2) these systems of state incorporation of workers or clients foster evaluative legacies over time that still shape protest strategies beneath the level of regime behavior. We must interpret activist interpretation by aligning objective social resources to subjective readings of state actions. The method will access the interpretive nexus of past and future actions against present conditions. Comparison shows discrete citizen-subjectivities under Polish and Algerian authoritarianism. Poland centralized its citizen-subjects through labor-intensive production sites: factories, mines, and shipyards; Algeria in capital-intensive extraction-distribution networks: party, bureaucracy, and lineage. Because Poland’s worker-centralization regime differentiated social resources from state solvency – the emergency state remained captive to labor-intensive factory-production – social activists retained the resources that once allowed them to compel sovereign concessions. Algeria’s client-centralization regime unified citizens’ social resources and state’s finances in the nexus of patron-client exchange, thus collapsing citizen subjectivity under state fiscal crisis. The two martial law situations confronted, then, Polish citizen-subjects and Algerian citizen-objects, similar in immediate dehumanization but separate in mediated subjectivities. Interpretation parses systemic and subjective deprivation. Under tyrannical exception Polish strikes appeared as futile as Algerian client alienation, but their subjective evaluations diverged. Poles read martial law as the sign of a vanquished dictatorship against a unified opposition; Algerians as the termination of political standing in a refined absolutist regime. The interpretive mode to grasp these “readings” is an historical Verstehen that divides experience into evaluative and immediate forms, depicting them as combined effect of material and ideological demands.