In the months since I’ve officially joined the organization now known as Red Help ATX, I’ve learned lots from working with our local communities. I see these as valuable lessons that’ve further shaped and developed my commitment to the collective struggle. Hopefully these thoughts can encourage you to participate in similar ways in your own organizations. Regardless of their character, I find these can be applicable to all forms of community building. Going directly to people themselves to meet with, talk with, and learn from are some of the best ways to further this aspect of our cause.
While this may not come as a surprise, the impressions given when first meeting new folks sets the tone of the work we do. It’s a given, but being friendly, approachable, and further—being normal—helps to ground myself while building community. It can be easy to be detached from reality when the only engagement with others, comrades and working-class people alike, is done through online means. Internet brain-rot can obscure the reality that exists offline. In other words—touch grass. Marxism is a science that requires applied practice, we can’t develop our movement without applied practice.
Further, it’s important to come to terms with the material circumstances of the people who need support the most. We are all brought under the banner of the proletariat, some just experience the brutality of capitalism more acutely than others. This also expands more broadly to how I see myself taking part in the educate, agitate, and organize pipeline.
As someone who is younger, I’m relatively new to our cause. That being said, there are a lot of people online like me who have very little, if no experience whatsoever in the latter parts of that pipeline. It’s now obvious to me that were I in need of aid, I wouldn’t want to be proselytized to about the intricacies of the reserve army of labor as a mechanism utilized by the ruling class to dissuade worker agitation. Again, being normal and understanding that the vast majority of society, regardless of what country you come from, wants a roof over their head, food on their table, and to work for an honest living. It will make me come off way more approachable than rambling about theory—that can come later. We are communists in the work we do, but a person struggling to survive needs to eat today.
I found it’s important to show people who are in need of help that I care more about their safety and survival than I do luring them into a cult. If somebody asks, I’ll be more than happy to guide them along the path of radicalization, but not without helping them first.
Being friendly is great and all, but there’s much more that can be done with regards to direct assistance. This is where I found listening to the struggles of the people we help can inform our goals and strategies going forward. For example, one of the folks we met during our aid drops brought up publicly accessible restrooms. Another mentioned that a fountain to get clean drinkable water would go a long way to help. These are baseline amenities that the government should be providing for all people, but the funding necessary for these gets redirected to areas that attract financial investment. For us, these are ways to directly address genuine issues people are suffering from. While we are not yet at the stage of providing alternative solutions, these are problems we can address in our own capacity.
I must also bring up moral authority here, where a great deal of condescension arises from. As a tendency found in the liberal wing of the ruling class, moral authority works to alienate rather than address the concerns of the community. It is one of the many ways in which the anti-materialist nature of liberalism rears its head. This tendency leads to telling people what would be best for them as a way to assert superiority. Listening to concerns is how we arm ourselves with the material understanding of their conditions.
Further on this point, alienation experienced by all workers is heightened for the lumpenproletariat. The United States has historically created laws enforced by the arms of the public force in an outwardly hostile manner towards this societal order, as is with other marginalized groups. To the houseless, for example, the state acts in a qualitatively different way than how it acts towards the housed. Not just a liberal fronting operation with fascistic tendencies, but a fascist fronting operation with fascistic tendencies. Just look at the Supreme Courts’ overturning Grants Pass v. Johnson in June of this year that criminalized the unhoused for sleeping in public spaces that are ‘off-limits’ by the standards of the state. We’re already aware that houselessness has long been made illegal, but this ruling further exacerbates the problem. Destitution under capitalism—especially experienced by those without shelter—is incredibly traumatic.
What I’ve learned from our mutual aid work is to give agency whenever possible while working with our local community. This is because the systems of oppression that require a reserve army of labor to exist erodes most remaining capabilities of an individual to such a degree that they no longer feel as though they have control in their life. A lack of proper healthcare forcing people to self-medicate, employers refusing to hire based on purposefully unfavorable criteria, and now choice of where one can even sleep all proliferate this erosion. Our efforts are ways in which we can relieve, even if temporarily, the boot of consistent alienation.
With this work, as is all mutual aid, what I’ve learned can be applied to all forms of community building that aren’t just reserved for those most primed for radicalization. To me, red mutual aid is at the core of building dual-power structures. While what I’ve done in Red Help ATX is nowhere near the level of community building efforts of past groups like the Black Panther Party, I work within my capacity to push our group's cause. At the end of the day, one step forward is still a valuable step. As far as I can tell, mutual aid will continue to be a high priority in our organizing group, as it is one of many ways in which we engage in collective action to further the revolutionary cause.