What is the psychological impact on the children for whom their agency over their own bodies is violently ripped away from them, whose bodies are disfigured against their will, and their identities and very humanity denied them by friends, family, and society? These mechanisms of social abuse lead many trans people to attempt suicide. Rather than treat us as victims of social violence, reactionaries proudly tout “41%”, referencing the trans suicide attempt rate. It is of course nonsense to assert that being trans makes us suicidal, rather than the issue of the above denial of our fundamental humanity, and denial of our access to life-saving medical care, and denial to community, love, support, and respect, that produces suicidal individuals. It’s social murder. But that is naturally the aim of these policies. The cruelty is the point. They want us dead. This is a deliberate policy of genocide, which we have written about before (Transition or Death, Total War and Trans Liberation, Death Before Detransition: In Solidarity with Jaia Cruz). This assertion is in no sense hyperbole or exaggeration. Trans people are under genocidal assault by the settler state.

The proponents of this policy are well aware of this, and consider this forcible imposition of their own values onto the bodies of children to be “protecting” them. Protecting them from what? From the freedom to choose, which naturally builds on the innate drive to resist infringements on that choice. If children are permitted agency over their own lives, then what guarantee is there that girls will grow up into submissive subservient women, obediently serving the interests of abusive patriarchal fathers, husbands, and the state? What guarantee is there that boys will grow up to take their place in the home, workplace, and state as the violent enforcers of the patriarchal order? If given a choice, children can choose anything, and as far as the settler-colonial system is concerned, that is unacceptably dangerous. These children will be ruthlessly punished for choosing “wrong”, and so in a twisted sense stripping away their freedom to choose certainly does “protect” them.

It should be stressed that this danger perceived by the transphobic reactionaries is in fact real. We are a threat. By simply existing out in the open, trans people, particularly trans women, threaten the continued enforcement of transmisogynistic violence which undergirds the very fabric of the cispatriarchal regime and consequently the material reproductive base of the settler colonial occupation of Turtle Island. We lay bare the crying contradictions of this societal death cult. We exemplify in action as well as in words that you really do have a choice, you don’t have to submit, you can live the life that you want for yourself, you can be the person that YOU want to be. By demanding respect for our humanity and our agency, we demand in the same breath respect for everyone’s humanity and everyone’s agency.

The existence of trans people then is an irreconcilable contradiction, a revolution in process against the hegemony of patriarchy. This as-yet-incomplete revolution forces compromises by the regime. It begins to accept our existence, but only in part, in incomplete form, and it demands at the same time compromise from us. The forms of these compromises are varied, ranging from “stealth” where our existence as trans people is accepted only so long as we remain invisible and indistinguishable from cis people, to “respect” for our “identities” wherein our humanity is treated as a relatively harmless aberration, a “delusion” to be tolerated and humored, or a “mental illness” to be pitied rather than a revolution to be feared. But the fear is there nonetheless. We’re depicted in the news media and mythologized in horror movies as grotesque brutish caricatures of women, bent on the predation and murder of “real” (cisgender) women. A cold gripping terror of trans women is woven into the very fabric of this society. We are the worst thing you can possibly be, repulsive to all decent upstanding people. At least, that’s how the bourgeois media likes to present us, as a cultural boogeyman to be reviled. And as the empire’s grip on power declines, as its legitimacy in the hearts of the people falters, the fear turns to panic, and it begins clawing back what little it gave us. The empire itself is terrified of us and killing our trans children because of it.

Trans people, particularly trans women, have always been at the forefront of the Queer liberation struggle. From the Stonewall riots to STAR’s collaboration with the Black Panthers, trans women have consistently been on the bleeding edge of militant struggle, cutting into the heart of the empire. Today the Communist movement finds itself disproportionately represented by trans women. Nearly every org has us, and some of our orgs are majority trans. And the reason is simple: we’re marked for death by a society which has never had a place for us and never truly will. When our very lives are forfeit, we have absolutely nothing left to lose but our chains. We’re drawn to Communism because the settler colony leaves us no choice: revolt or die. Make no mistake, this assault will continue and it will escalate. The support by Communists for the Palestinian liberation struggle will be pointed to as evidence of “transgender terrorism”, necessitating additional crackdowns, surveillance, imprisonment, and disappearing. Cutting off trans children from lifesaving healthcare is accompanied by banning the discussion of trans issues among all children. We face punishment, arrest, and even death for simply talking to kids about this. They will begin to consider us unfit parents and those of us who have kids will face the reality of the state’s willingness to kidnap them in order to break the generational continuity of our revolutionary resistance. Don’t believe us? Disabled people already routinely face this, and are being pushed ever further into the margins of society where they can be left to die with nobody watching. 

This is nothing new. The AIDS epidemic was left to run rampant, deliberately exacerbated, research was blocked, and trans and queer people began to waste away and disappear, because they were afraid of us, because they wanted us dead, and those deaths set the revolutionary movement back by a whole generation. The genocide against us destroyed and continues to destroy countless lives and their accumulated experiences, knowledge, culture, and traditions of resistance. But this tendency towards genocide, and the tendency to target children, goes back even further—it is baked into the structure of settler colonial society. The empire’s genocidal hunger for control over this land faced militant resistance by the Indigenous nations for centuries, until finally the policy to “kill the Indian to save the man” was implemented. The state kidnapped children from their Native parents, forcing them into brutal reeducation camps disguised as “residential schools.”

Native children were abused and tortured into adopting the colonizer’s language, religion, and culture. Their spiritual and philosophical understanding of the world was beaten out of them. Their hair was cut short, their clothes were destroyed and replaced with what the colonizer deemed acceptable. Any “confusion” about gender roles (which the Indigenous nations had very different views on), was violently stamped out. Their very names were stolen from them, replaced with names suitable for “Christian” society, and unspeakable sexual violence was inflicted on them as a disciplinary measure. In breaking the Indigenous cultural continuity, the traditions and experiences of resistance were shattered. Traditional communal practices and modes of organization were erased, and the very language of resistance was lost (a process referred today as epistemicide).

This is why they are targeting trans kids first. Not because there’s any “reasonable scientifically-grounded” argument for blocking lifesaving healthcare for children, not because children are “threatened” by trans education, or by sex education, but because the empire itself is threatened by our tradition of resistance. It is terrified that we are forming part of the leadership of the revolutionary struggle that will overthrow it, and it is seeking to erase our history, culture, and knowledge through both exterminatory and “cultural” genocide. Similarly, the targeting and extermination of Palestinian children by the zionist occupation is far from an accident, but a deliberate measure to break the continuity of resistance, to stave off the revolution for generations to come. 

The Black, Indigenous, trans, and queer revolutionaries of yesterday were crushed by coordinated campaigns of genocidal propaganda, state terrorism, assassination, and biological warfare. Palestine faces the brunt of the current wave of the genocidal onslaught, (as of this writing the occupation is killing 150 Palestinians a day) but the violence won’t stop with them. The fate of colonized peoples everywhere, from Palestine to Turtle Island, is bound together by the violence of settler colonialism; and as a group fundamentally incompatible with the settler regime, the fate of trans people too is bound up with theirs, as is the fate of disabled people. We aren’t in this struggle alone! It is the solemn duty of the Communist movement to center and uplift the struggles of the most oppressed, to center the Black liberation struggle, the Indigenous/Palestinian liberation struggle, the Queer liberation struggle, the trans liberation struggle, the disability liberation struggle, the women’s liberation struggle. These forces can and will be united, they must be for all of us to survive. These are the forces of the revolutionary proletariat, whom Communists must weld together into a united class capable of leading the Revolution. Together, we will take the future into our own hands, by force, and carry forward the banner of humanity, marching hand-in-hand over the flaming wreckage of this most ruthless and destructive of empires, towards a shining future of peace and equality for all.

It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it. Let’s get to work.

So what’s the difference? Does it matter? Can we do Red Aid today? If so, what does it do? What is its effect? Can its purpose and form be the same as it was in 1969 (or Berlin in 1920)? There’s a lot of logistics and survival programs out there right now, being run by self-identified Communists in the U.S. and Canada. What are we to make of them? This debate has gone back and forth over the past decade. As always, it is most helpful to define our terms before we make any decisions.

What is Red Aid?

Red Aid differs from mutual aid in a few critical respects. Mutual aid is a way of organizing a community to meet its own needs; it is a kind of labor exchange where members contribute what they are able and take what they need. In a certain sense, it is an attempt to establish the political economy of communism in miniature. While mutual aid is often run by small(ish) anarchist circles, there’s no necessity that it be organized by the politically advanced or class conscious elements at all.

Red Aid, in contrast, is an explicitly communist strategy. Red Aid has to be run by a Communist organization. Although it can incorporate a labor exchange element as part of its overall strategy of organizing, there doesn’t need to be any such element for it to accomplish its primary goals. Red Aid can very easily be a unilateral form of aid directly from a Communist organization to a community. Unlike mutual aid programs, Red Aid is not performed primarily with community self-sufficiency as a goal. It doesn’t “develop dual power” or challenge the state system of distribution directly. Red Aid also differs from charity in that its goal isn’t merely to provide material necessities to make a difference in underserved communities by meeting their needs.

So what are the aims of a Red Aid logistics program, then? They are fourfold:

1. To create deep and authentic links with the lowest strata of the working class, that section which is least susceptible to the bribery of the labor aristocracy;
2. To identify and develop potential Communists from among that strata;
3. To learn the immediate needs of the class and then, using these three aims, to
4. Address those needs through mass meetings and other organs of working-class power; to organize the working classes and make them aware of their own existence as a class; to elevate class-consciousness and open a front of class struggle against the enemy.

This strategy can only be fully pursued by an entirely-constituted, working, militant, Communist political party. The movement in the U.S. and Canada isn’t yet at that stage, despite the claims made by the various reactionary organizations that they are a Communist Party. Why is it it the case that only a fully-constituted Communist Party can make full use of this strategy? Because the Communist Party:

1. Acts as a check and control on local party organizations and ensures they do not engage in reformist opportunism, tailism, or chauvinism;
2. Coordinates the areas of struggle of its local organizations to act in a unified way and ensure that all actions against the enemy are taken at the time most effective to keep the enemy off-balance and maximize the strength of the blow;
3. Collects and distributes resources and directs group labor so that these Red Aid programs can be well-funded and well-run;
4. Provides ideological training and uniformity to new members who enter the Party organization through Red Aid recruitment.

Despite this, even at our present stage, sufficiently large and developed local Communist organizations can effectively pursue a strategy of Red Aid, so long as it is coupled with an extremely robust political development program.

Logistics work requires consistency; it must occur on a regular, weekly basis to make inroads with the lowest strata of the working class. An aid program or station cannot be spotty or held at arbitrary times or places. Logistics workers must be reliable and dependable. Because of this requirement, there is a very steep minimum labor commitment necessary to keep a logistics station running.

For instance: three cadre-level members must be present for and prepare a food service each week at a minimum. Given two hours of preparation on, say, a Friday, and a four hour food service period on Saturday, that amounts to 6 x 3 or 18 labor-hours each week. An organization must either have an extremely committed and militant membership or a very large pool of cadre to draw on to maintain this kind of schedule. For instance, a one week on, one week off schedule requires at minimum six dedicated comrades who can reliably provide six hours of work every other week.

In small organizations, this degree of labor would leave little time for the critical work of internal political development and study, let alone other organizing actions such as publicly-facing development programs, marches, engaging with other organizations in the same locality or region, fundraising for arrested organizers, formation of community self-defense groups, etc.

Thus, while Red Aid can have an important effect on the movement overall, a local organization should not pursue it simply for the sake of “doing something.” There is a pressing feeling, especially from those of us with petit-bourgeois backgrounds, that we have to be “doing something” (cult of action!) and that “doing” should feel like going out into the streets to foment revolution right now. This ultra-left position is reinforced by the essentially rightist deviations of the already-existing U.S. and Canada-wide “Marxist” organizations.

In fact, however, you should realistically assess whether your organization has the capacity to meaningfully engage in logistics work. Typically this requires:

1. A membership of at least 10 cadre-level members;
2. Access to at least $100/week of materials for food service or other aid supplies;
3. A solid cadre-development program already in place.

If your organization does not already meet these requirements, it would strongly benefit from a period of development as a study group to strengthen it (see the USU handbook of the same name).

Building Logistics to Build the Party

We are still in the period or stage before a unified Communist Party has been formed in the U.S.-Canadian-Mexican bloc. We are the inheritors of a tradition of 2nd-internationalist social chauvinism that goes back to the late 19th century. The large organizations that claim the legacy of communism in this bloc are those that routinely engage in anti-democratic practices, shield abusers, cheat their memberships of money, and produce no meaningful contribution toward the revolutionary consciousness of the mass of people.

Thus, the overwhelming need for the Communist of today is to unite with other Communists and produce the Decolonial Marxist-Leninist Party. Regional leagues like the All-Empire Worker’s League have already begun to undertake that task. Local organizations that engage in Red Aid must do so with the understanding that their mission is to form one of the constituent elements of a convention organizing all Communist local organizations in the U.S.-led imperialist bloc into a single, decolonial, Marxist-Leninist party.