A working glossary of the words this school uses in a particular way, or that it uses knowing they are fought over. It is not a dictionary. Where a term is standard across the left and already well defined elsewhere, the entry is short and points you to the Marxists Internet Archive Encyclopedia rather than repeating it. Where the school takes a position, or where the word itself is the argument, the entry says so.
Definitions are starting points for a room, not verdicts. If one of these is wrong, or flattens something that should stay open, that is exactly the kind of correction the school wants. Terms are cross-linked to each other and to the themes where they do their work. On the web version, hovering a linked term shows its definition without leaving the page.
Abolition
Not reform of prisons and police but their replacement: the argument that cages and armed patrols cannot be fixed because harm and control are what they are for, and that safety comes from housing, care, and income instead. Rooted in the unfinished abolition of slavery, which is why Du Bois called Reconstruction’s collapse the point where “abolition democracy” was abandoned. Contested on the left over pace and over what replaces the police tomorrow morning, not someday. See Anti-Blackness and Racial Capitalism and carcerality.
Alienation
Marx’s term for what waged work does to the worker: separated from the product, from the act of working, from other workers, and from their own capacities, so that the thing they make stands over them as something alien. A standard concept; the full treatment is at the Marxists Internet Archive. The school uses it plainly, without turning it into a mood.
Anti-Blackness
The specific structuring of the world against Black people, distinct from racism-in-general: a position at the bottom against which other groups are measured and sometimes allowed to rise. The school treats it as relational, not separate, from other racial systems, since the model minority was manufactured against Black claims and racial scripts were lifted from Black racialization. Argued over between those who read it as one racism among many and those who read it as the ground the others stand on. See Anti-Blackness and Racial Capitalism.
Antisemitism
Hatred of Jews, and not simply one prejudice among others: it is a conspiracy theory about hidden power, which is what lets it explain capitalism without touching capital, and it runs from the blood libel through the Protocols to “cultural Marxism” and the Great Replacement. This school insists on two things at once and holds them both: antisemitism is real, lethal, and structurally distinct, and the charge of antisemitism is sometimes used in bad faith to make criticism of a state unsayable. Where the line falls is live and unresolved among Jewish scholars, which is why the school carries the IHRA, Jerusalem Declaration, and Nexus definitions and tells the room none is the last word. See Religion, Reaction, and Supremacy.
Banking model of education
Paulo Freire’s name for teaching that treats students as empty accounts into which a teacher deposits information. He argued it is not a neutral method but one that trains people to accept a world done to them. Its opposite is a problem-posing education that starts from the learner’s own life. See conscientization and Critical Pedagogy.
Blood quantum
The colonial measurement of Indigenous identity by fraction of “Indian blood,” imposed by settler governments to shrink the number of people who count as Native and therefore the number owed land, treaty, and recognition. A bureaucratic technology for eliminating a people on paper. See elimination and Settler Colonialism.
The border
In Religion, Reaction, and Supremacy specifically, the school uses “the border” for the line a religious nationalism draws between who belongs and who is the foreigner explaining the wound. The claim of that theme is that in these movements religion is not the belief but the border: the doctrine matters less than the boundary it authorizes. Distinct from the literal border of deportability below, though the two rhyme.
Buddhist nationalism
The Sinhala Buddhist and Burmese Buddhist movements that turn the faith into a claim on the island or the nation and mark Muslims or Tamils as the threat. In this school it is the case that tests the whole theme: Buddhism is the tradition most readers assume is incapable of this, so if Sri Lanka and Myanmar happen anyway, the mechanism cannot be doctrinal. See Protestant Buddhism and Religion, Reaction, and Supremacy.
Capitalism
The school’s working definition is not “markets” or “greed” but a mode of production: a system in which a few own the means of making everything and most people, owning nothing to sell but their time, must work for them, and in which that arrangement is enforced as if it were nature. Everything else the school studies is a way of asking how that arrangement is held together and who pays for it. See How Capitalism Works.
Carcerality
The reach of prison logic beyond the prison: into schools, welfare offices, borders, hospitals, and data systems that surveil, sort, and confine without walls. The point is that the cage is a relation, not only a building. See abolition.
Christian nationalism
The movement to define a nation as Christian by birthright and to treat others as guests or threats. In its American form the school is careful with the dating: as a mass electoral movement it is a creature of the 1970s, but the Christian Zionist theology beneath it is older, with Blackstone petitioning for a Jewish homeland in 1891, before Herzl. See Religion, Reaction, and Supremacy.
The color line
Du Bois’s name for the organizing division of the modern world, “the problem of the twentieth century.” Not a metaphor for prejudice but a real boundary drawn through law, property, and labor that decides who is treated as fully human. See Anti-Blackness and Racial Capitalism.
Commodity
A thing produced not to be used but to be sold. Marx begins Capital here because the commodity is where the whole system’s strangeness is already visible. Standard term; see the Marxists Internet Archive. Related: surplus value.
Conscientization
Freire’s word (conscientização) for coming to read your own situation as made by people and therefore changeable, rather than given and endured. Not consciousness-raising done to a room but something a room does to itself. See banking model of education and Critical Pedagogy.
Degrowth
The argument that a habitable future requires rich economies to produce and consume less in absolute terms, planned and equitable, rather than trusting growth to green itself. Contested on the left by those who back an eco-modernist abundance instead; the school holds the disagreement open rather than settling it. See Ecology and the Climate Crisis.
Dependency theory
The account, from Latin American economists, of why poor countries stay poor: not because they are “behind” but because they were built into the world economy as suppliers of cheap labor and raw materials for the core. Development and underdevelopment as two ends of one process. See imperialism and Imperialism and the Global System.
Deportability
Nicholas De Genova’s term for the point of immigration enforcement: not mainly to deport everyone but to keep migrants deportable, and therefore quiet, cheap, and afraid to organize. The threat does more work than the act. See Immigration and the Making of Race.
Dialectics
A way of thinking in terms of contradiction, motion, and change over fixed categories: things understood by how they conflict with and turn into their opposites. Standard and much-argued; the Marxists Internet Archive has the long version. See Origins.
Dual power
A situation in which institutions built by a movement (councils, assemblies, unions) come to rival the existing state, holding real authority alongside it. A strategy and a moment, from 1917 forward, argued over ever since as promise or trap. See The State, Strategy, and Power.
Elimination
In settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe’s point that the driving logic is elimination for land, not exploitation of labor: the settler wants the ground, not the worker, so the native is to be removed, assimilated, or defined out of existence. “Invasion is a structure, not an event.” The frame most scholars now use for 1948 as well. See blood quantum and Settler Colonialism.
Ethnic outbidding
Neil DeVotta’s term for the engine of majoritarian nationalism: politicians competing to offer the dominant group ever more against the minority, each unable to be outflanked, so the whole field ratchets toward exclusion. Visible in Sri Lanka and in the other cases of Religion, Reaction, and Supremacy.
Food apartheid
Karen Washington’s reframing of “food desert”: the absence of good food in a neighborhood is not a natural emptiness but a made arrangement of race, land, and profit, with someone deciding which bodies get fed what. Food as a strand running through many themes rather than a topic of its own. See Health, Capitalism, and Whose Bodies Count.
Hegemony
Gramsci’s term for rule by consent as much as force: the way a ruling order makes its own interests feel like common sense, so that most people accept it without being made to. Standard concept; Marxists Internet Archive. See The State, Strategy, and Power.
Hindutva
The movement, coined by Savarkar in 1923, to define India as a Hindu nation and Muslims and Christians as foreign. The school flags that Savarkar was an atheist, which tells you the project is about the border and not the belief, and that he welcomed the “Zionist dream” the same year. See Religion, Reaction, and Supremacy.
Imperialism
Not just empire in the old sense but, following Lenin and later the dependency theorists, the stage at which capital must expand beyond its borders for markets, resources, and cheap labor, organizing the whole globe into a hierarchy of core and periphery. The condition the anti-colonial and national-liberation movements were answering. See dependency theory and Imperialism and the Global System.
Islamism
Political movements to order state and society by Islam, which the school reads as beginning from imperial defeat: al-Afghani answering European domination in the 1880s, the Muslim Brotherhood founded in 1928 in a canal town under British occupation. Not a descendant of Zionism but a contemporary of it, answering the same collapse. Distinct from Islam the faith, and the distinction is the whole point. See Religion, Reaction, and Supremacy.
Metabolic rift
Marx’s idea, revived by ecological Marxists, that capitalism opens a rift in the exchange between people and the rest of nature, taking from the soil and the atmosphere faster than they can be restored. The bridge between the critique of capital and the climate crisis. See Ecology and the Climate Crisis.
Mode of production
The way a society is organized to produce its life: who owns what, who works, and how the surplus is taken and shared. Capitalism, feudalism, and so on are modes of production. Standard term; Marxists Internet Archive. See capitalism.
Mutual aid
Cooperation for survival organized by people themselves, outside and often against the state and the market: from Kropotkin’s argument that it is as natural as competition, to the disaster kitchens and defense funds of the present. Not charity, which flows down a hierarchy, but solidarity, which builds one sideways. See prefiguration and Anarchism, Mutual Aid, and Prefiguration.
The Nakba
Arabic for “the catastrophe”: the expulsion and flight of roughly 750,000 Palestinians during the establishment of Israel in 1948, and the ongoing condition that followed. Named as such because the school does not route around what happened to the people who were there. See Imperialism and the Global System and Religion, Reaction, and Supremacy.
Popular education
Teaching built from the knowledge people already carry from their lives and work, aimed at collective action rather than individual credentials. The tradition this whole school sits inside, from Highlander to Freire. See Critical Pedagogy.
Praxis
Reflection and action on the world in order to change it, held together so that neither thought without doing nor doing without thought. For Freire and for Marx, the point is not to interpret but to transform, and praxis is the word for doing both at once. See Origins.
Prefiguration
Building the world you want inside the one you have, so that the means already carry the ends: an assembly run the way a free society would run, a co-op owned the way all work might be. The strength and the risk are the same, that the island of the future can become a substitute for changing the mainland. See mutual aid and Anarchism, Mutual Aid, and Prefiguration.
Primitive accumulation
Marx’s name for the violence that founded capitalism and keeps refounding it: the enclosure of common land, colonial plunder, and enslavement that separated people from the means of life so they had to sell their labor. Silvia Federici and others show it was never a one-time origin but an ongoing method, run especially on women and the colonized. See How Capitalism Works and Gender, Reproduction, and the Household.
Protestant Buddhism
Gananath Obeyesekere’s term for the reformed, text-centered, lay-driven Buddhism that Anagarika Dharmapala built in colonial Ceylon, borrowing the forms of the Protestant missionaries it defined itself against. The seedbed of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, and the reason the movement is modern rather than ancient. See Buddhist nationalism.
Racial capitalism
Cedric Robinson’s argument, against the idea that capitalism came first and racism was added: that capitalism developed as a racial order, extracting more from some people by marking them as worth less. Race is not a distraction from class but one of the ways class is enforced. Contested over how much explanatory weight “racial” versus “capitalism” should carry. See Anti-Blackness and Racial Capitalism.
Reproductive labor
The unpaid or underpaid work of keeping people alive and able to work: cooking, cleaning, raising children, tending the sick and old, mostly done by women. Social-reproduction theory argues capitalism depends on this work while refusing to count it, which is why the household is a site of struggle and not a refuge from it. See Gender, Reproduction, and the Household.
Settler colonialism
Colonialism that comes to stay, replacing the native population on their land rather than merely ruling and extracting from it. Its logic is elimination, and its structure outlives any single act of conquest. Distinct from the franchise colonialism of, say, the British in India, though the two overlap. See Settler Colonialism, Land, and Indigenous Sovereignty.
Social reproduction
The wider system that reproduces the workforce and the social order day to day and generation to generation, of which reproductive labor is the core. Social-reproduction theory (Bhattacharya, Federici, Vogel) uses it to fold gender into the analysis of capital rather than treating it as a separate question. See Gender, Reproduction, and the Household.
Surplus value
The value workers produce beyond what they are paid, kept by the owner. For Marx this is where profit comes from and where exploitation is exact rather than moral: it is a quantity, not an insult. Standard term; Marxists Internet Archive. See commodity.
Zionism
The movement, from the 1880s and 1890s, for a Jewish state as an answer to European antisemitism. The school insists on an asymmetry it refuses to flatten: Zionism began, unlike the other majoritarian nationalisms in its theme, as the project of a hunted minority trying to escape annihilation, and it became a majoritarian formation by relocating and dispossessing the people already living in Palestine. Both halves of that sentence are load-bearing, and the argument over it is one Jews have been having among themselves for over a century. See the Nakba and Religion, Reaction, and Supremacy.
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. This glossary covers the school’s own working vocabulary and leans on the Marxists Internet Archive for the standard canon rather than duplicating it. Known gaps: the anarchist and Indigenous-sovereignty vocabularies are thinner here than they are in their themes, and several contested terms are given one definition where they deserve two. Corrections, and especially arguments that an entry has taken a side it should have left open, are the most useful thing you can send.