Click above to listen to It’s Going Down‘s interview with RED about our recent zine, “Anarchism and Revolutionary Strategy: Insurrectionary Councilism”! This was originally posted here on IGD, and their description is below. A special thanks to them for reaching out and making this happen!

IGD Presentation:

In this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we sat down with two members of the Radical Education Department or RED, based out of Philadelphia. In our discussion we talk exclusively about their new text published on IGD entitled, Insurrectionary Councilism, which proposes the creation of spaces that bring together various groups for the purpose of becoming better organized.

In our conversation, we cover a lot of ground, starting largely with a critique and conversation about Left Unity, as well as a look back on the “movement of movements” approach in the anti-globalization period as well as the horizontal structures of Occupy. We discuss some of the organizational needs of the current age, as well as what groups that exist now are already doing to put these ideas into practice.

While it would be impossible to say that this conversation arrived at any easy answers, this discussion in itself brought up some important tensions and questions. What forms do we need to take to be organized? How do we organize across our various groups? How do we relate, if at all, to Left groups like DSA? Are new organizational structures needed, like Federations, and what exactly would they do that current forms do not? 

We hope that this conversation sparks more, as well as experimentation over how we can better organize ourselves, and make our movement more powerful in the process.