Leftist theory is a civilizational replacement frame. The West is cast as a false center, the margins as the carriers of restoration, and the replacement (sublation) of that center as the path to a higher wholeness. At the base of this framework is the belief that humanity once lived in a simpler, more organic unity, often imagined by Marxists as primitive communism, an early condition before class division, hardened hierarchy, and large systems of domination fully took shape. That first unity is lower, simpler, and less developed, but it is still imagined as more whole than what came after. Then comes the break / ruptures. Domination enters history and turns living human relations into systems of separation, hierarchy, and control. In left theory, that rupture reaches its most expansive and world-shaping form in the West. Through empire, Christianity, colonialism, capitalism, whiteness, European power, bureaucracy, and technocratic administration, the West universalizes the break and gives it global form. This rupture produces alienation, meaning human beings become separated from what they produce, from one another, from nature, and finally from themselves. Human powers no longer appear as our own shared capacities. They return to us as external systems that rule over us. Alienation then hardens into reification. Reification means that living human relations come to appear as fixed, thing-like structures that seem natural, objective, and permanent. A social order people made begins to look as though it exists on its own and obeys laws no one made. Capital looks self-moving. Bureaucracy looks inevitable. Hierarchy looks normal. Empire looks civilizational. Human beings confront their own frozen powers as if they were an external reality. The margins matter because they are treated as the place where living force survives in damaged form, while the center is treated as a dead structure that lives by enclosing, organizing, and feeding on that force. The oppressed, excluded, colonized, racialized, and culturally peripheral become the bearers of the living remainder, the human substance the dominant order could never fully absorb or erase. What the center calls backward, broken, marginal, or impure is reinterpreted as the place where real vitality and restorative force still survive. The center presents itself as the source of order, intelligence, productivity, and legitimacy. In this framework, however, it is derivative rather than creative. It does not generate life from within. It captures energies that originate elsewhere, concentrates them, and presents that concentration as its own greatness. Its apparent fullness depends on the continued containment of forces that remain more alive at the edges than at the core. Praxis is the means of recovery. Praxis means conscious, transformative practice, action shaped by an understanding of the world and aimed at changing it. It is not only a matter of opposing the existing order. It is also the process through which people become aware of themselves as historical agents by acting to change the conditions that shaped them. Here it functions as de-reification, the undoing of the dead forms that have trapped living force inside them. De-reification shows that what looked natural was historical, what looked permanent was contingent, and what looked self-sustaining was actually feeding on captured life. Through struggle, consciousness, and collective action, value is reclaimed from the center, legitimacy is transferred outward, and the dominant order is exposed as hollow. Political action therefore takes on a deeper role than reform. Reform adjusts the existing order. Praxis, in this stronger sense, identifies where restorative force still survives, activates it, and lifts it out of the structures that enclosed it. As that happens, the old center weakens because the energies that sustained it no longer flow into it in the same way. The people acting against the system are changed in the process as well. They do not merely confront history. They become conscious participants in remaking it. This leads to sublation, which means overcoming a form while preserving and redirecting what was real within it. The old order is not simply destroyed. It is surpassed, stripped of its monopoly, and absorbed into a higher synthesis. The false center collapses, but the energies once trapped inside it are recovered and reassembled. The end point is framed as restoration rather than simple negation. The promise is that the world can be made whole again, but on a higher plane than before, with the gains of history retained while the forms of domination that organized them are overcome. The goal is therefore larger than reform. Reform leaves the center intact. This framework aims at replacement. The world was once whole in a lower form, then shattered through domination, then universalized in broken form by the West, and can now be made whole again only by displacing the false center and transferring historical energy to the margins. The promised end is a restored wholeness at a higher level, more conscious, more universal, and more complete than before. That is why, in this framework, replacement of the West is presented as redemption.

Opinion | My Students Can't Read here is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.” chronicle.com/article/my-stu…

One of the funniest things about people devoted to the idea a quality education can make childrens' brains take a quantum leap is they will then also make the AP kids read House on Mango street instead of Borges or Marquez and Things Fall Apart instead of literally anything else

Because Israel scared the fuck out of them, so they'd move to Israel?

I've probably seen this quote before but had forgotten it. Also shared by @C_Hendrick

This Howard U professor loathes white people, and derives joy from their pain. Her soul has rotted with racial resentment of whites. It's really not more complicated than that.

There is a lot of excitement at the moment about using AI to personalise learning resources, but I am not convinced. Yes, it is true many students are interested in Taylor Swift & Lionel Messi more than electricity, algebra or verbs. That does not mean we can teach electricity, algebra and verbs through the medium of Swift & Messi. substack.nomoremarking.com/p…

Well done to all who joined the amazing 4,000 strong anti-racist and anti-fascist mobilisation in Brighton today which stopped the 200 or so far right marching through our city - this sort of mass mobilisation shows how to stop the far right in their tracks @AntiRacismDay

A Berkeley history professor said he’s gone from assigning 100 pages of reading per week to 35. Another “said the earliest version of the…course he taught required seven full books, while his most recent iteration exclusively consisted of excerpts.” “We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught,” the first one said.