The Radical Education Department is an autonomous collective dedicated to the construction of a radical internationalist Left through the training and federation of its cultural warriors. We assert these principles to be the worthiest of being put to the test of collective mobilization:

1. Despite their insidious claims to independent neutrality, cultural and educational institutions serve to reproduce socio-economic hierarchies and constitute crucial battlefields for the perpetuation or transformation of relations of power.
2. The dominant educational system indoctrinates and dominates by
   • mis-educating the general public and imposing disempowering worldviews;
   • transforming individuals into vocational cogs in the capitalist apparatus;
   • stratifying the population through institutionalized class warfare, which is often rendered invisible via myths of meritocracy;
   • providing credentials and intellectual cover for worldwide capitalist oppression, as well as its technocratic, fascist, and racist apologists;
   • providing research and development for the lucrative business of war and ecological destruction;
   • privatizing knowledge and subjecting it to a competitive exchange economy; and
   • purposely misdirecting intellectual labor power or hitching it to the wagon of academic bureaucracies and market imperatives.

It is therefore necessary to re-educate ourselves regarding its sordid histories, social functions, and contemporary struggles.

3. Wresting control over knowledge production from the corporate elite entails transforming extant institutions, producing counter-institutions, and engaging in radical modes of guerilla education and cultural training both within and beyond academic walls.
4. Struggles against the exploitation, bureaucratization, and vocationalization of academic labor are at the forefront of the battle over knowledge power.
5. Against the private property regimes imposed on knowledge production by capital and its bureaucratic administrators, the radicalization of education requires socializing and collectivizing both the process of producing knowledge and its products.
6. Transforming extant cultural and educational institutions necessitates direct actions that contest the policed hierarchies operative within them, not falling prey to the ideological traps set by fascists and their liberal apologists, if these be so-called civil discourse, fair and balanced debates, free speech or other such shibboleths for power.
7. Whereas the military-industrial-academic complex has militant capitalist elites lavishly funding research and development efforts for global warfare, reactionary think tanks and pseudo-intellectual ideologues, research collaboratives of and for the radical Left create communities of alternative education that seek to benefit all by providing verifiable–rather than ideological–accounts of history and social life around the globe, as well as mobilizing knowledge for egalitarian and emancipatory ends.
8. Part of the project of radical education is learning and teaching the long and deep histories of left struggles around the world, including those around education, particularly because these battles have often been banished from the historical record.
9. Recognizing the reactionaries’ strategy of divide and conquer, the project of radicalizing education works to federate across struggles, including across the geographic and ideological span of the global Left, which positions itself, by definition, against capitalism.
10. These tactics must be mobilized for the overall strategy of constructing and strengthening an egalitarian, anticolonial, ecological, anti-patriarchal and internationalist Left.

We issue this RED alert as a wake-up call to the necessity of collectively re-educating ourselves and taking action to create another world, which is not only possible, but absolutely necessary!

– RD & ED,
Founding Members of the Radical Education Department