from Cutting Class
Over the next few days, we’ll be publishing pieces to highlight the work of some of the groups participating in the Cutting Class counterinfo network. We hope this will provide some clarity on where our crews are coming from and how that affects the way we have organized this project.
We also hope that these interview questions can provide a template for other autonomous groups to distill a collective understanding of their context and projects. If your crew finds these questions useful, write up a summary of your conversations and send them our way as a form of introduction! Cutting Class can be your platform, and we’d love to publish an interview with your crew and start collaborating—not just around CC but also with any other projects that these introductions might incite!
Today’s featured organization is RED (Radical Education Department), an autonomous collective based in Philadelphia.
Introduce your crew: what projects are some you working on, how long have you been around, where are you based, etc etc.
RED—the Radical Education Department—is based in Philadelphia and is made up of undergraduate and graduate students, contingent faculty, and full-time faculty. We grew out of “Nova Resistance,” which was a collective that we hastily formed to plan a direct action in the spring of 2017 at Villanova University. We disrupted a talk by the eugenicist fake academic Charles Murray, who was invited on campus by a Koch front-group called the Matthew J. Ryan center. We stormed the front of the event with a banner, chanted and yelled to disrupt the talk, and then (when we were taken out by security) created an impromptu, radical teach-in directly outside the event space’s windows.
Footage of our direct action is embedded above. We also prepared a statement about the event that can be read here, as well as a broader intervention aimed at reframing the “free speech” debate (click here to read).
From there, the core of Nova Resistance decided to look beyond resistance on a single campus. We formed RED to help build and connect revolutionary struggles across various educational sites, as well as to add to the efforts of those developing tools to integrate antifascist resistance into a broader, positive project of socio-economic transformation (our initial manifesto can be read here).
Our research and writing fights back against the liberal and conservative ideologies that demonize radical struggle, and we’re aiming to cultivate connections between campus groups in order to spark broad, radical, multi-campus actions in the future. That kind of project—involving revolutionary, federated students, teachers, and campus workers—can be a powerful tool, especially when merged with off-campus movements.
