PARTISAN!

Brunhilda Olding reflects on Trans Day of Remembrance and agitates for a Communist road forward.

The current estimate of deaths for the 2024 observance period by the Trans Day of Remembrance Project is 305. If this extrapolation is accurate this would be the lowest number of reports since 2016. In some ways this year may be one where we need to mourn less. Yet this is only chiselling away at the top of the iceberg. How many Palestinians slaughtered by the current Zionist offensive were our siblings? How many trans workers lie rotting in the fields of Sudan? How many have been murdered or assaulted in back-alley streets? How many have taken their own life without ever being able to reach out to the world?

It seems that the brief advance in acceptance and rights that were secured for trans people is already being undermined as the neoliberal framework cracks under its own weight. In the United States both parties have bent to the point of throwing Trans people under the bus for cheap political points as the reactionary media drums up a culture war to disrupt the attempt to form a class one. In the United Kingdom the Labour Party looks set to implement the Cass Review, a naked assault against Trans youth and workers. Reactionaries of every stripe and hue decry Trans people as perverts and molesters hellbent on destroying western civilisation.

Here in Australia, we have Albanese rescind Queers from the census in a shamefaced display of the bigotry that lurks at the heart of Laborite ideology. This desperate attempt to consolidate the social order comes at the same time as crackdowns against the illusionary democratic rights granted by the ‘Australian’ state to its citizens to illuminate their displeasure against the actions of the government, and the nakedly corporatist attempt to secure control over the CFMEU. The crucial role of the capitalist state as the maintainer of the capitalist social order, requires that it tries and upholds the bourgeois social order. A crucial pillar of neoliberal capitalism is the heterosexual family form, and as acceptance of Trans people rise one of the key financial backbones of the capitalist order is increasingly undermined.

The liberal offensive has forced us to shift into defensive posturing while forcing the framing of the debate onto the terms that allows for the liberal framework to maintain its strength. For all the many flaws of the Spartacist League their article in their British Newspaper Workers Hammer #252 called quite bluntly ‘Let Trans Kids Decide’ hits the nail on the head on how the liberals understand and argue around this issue. A defensive posture around the illusory framework of bourgeois rights cannot and never will lead to liberation. This strategy rests on the false principle that the easing of life in bourgeois society will lead towards our liberation. As important and often life-saving as it is to smooth the barriers to getting on hormones, or the right self-declaration is, they are not enough. By remaining within the bourgeois framework, and implicitly defending the liberal strategy we are unable to pivot towards effective class based methods of organising.

This is at best an illusion that drains our energy and weakens our ability to organise, and at worst is an actively damaging strategy. The various socialist sects which try to trail the moment with their demands for Trans rights reveal the bankruptcy of the current socialist movement. The fight for Trans rights, is not in of itself a fight for socialism, yet the fight for Trans Liberation is, and our strategy must operate as such. This is not however to call for the erasure of the nature of the Trans struggle or the subordination of Trans comrades to a cisgender-dominated Central Committee in one of the myriads of sects running around the Australian or indeed international left.

The strategy of Trans workers must be unerringly revolutionary, resolutely militant, and uncompromisingly democratic. Any attempts to defer our fight to others or self-proclaimed leaders will simply see us lose.

Yet we will win liberation, not only ours, but that of the entire working class. The world today may roar that all is horrible, it may point to the slaughters unravelling across the world and proclaim that things will only get worse. That the hope for liberation has failed. The world seems to proclaim to us death to hope, death to love, death to faith, and death to you. That this is the future, the world will only get worse from here.

Yet we say back to the world. You are simply the present.

Comrades, in the face of this present we cannot simply reuse the slogans and cries of the past. We mourn the dead, and we will continue to do so every day of our lives, and we have fought like hell for the living. But this is no longer enough.

We must mourn for the dead, and we must revolt for the living. We must raise our standards of revolution on every barricade and proclaim to the world that we will not take this any longer. The working class must unite, and it must fight for the total liberation of humanity. Liberation from capitalism, liberation from the bourgeois sexual and gender norms, liberation from racism, and oppression.

We must have revolution within our lifetime, we must crush the fascists, capitalists, and liberals that stand against us.

Mourn for the Dead! Revolt for the Living!

Queer Liberation is class struggle!

Workers and Queers unite for liberation!

Forward to Communism!