By: Travis Wayne 

DRACUT – In Beaver Brook Village, organizing began with mold. 

Beaver Brook Village is a restored textile mill named for the waterway that bisects the town, over which the complex’s tower looms, upstream and across the Merrimack River from Lowell. Now an apartment complex, the renovated mill was originally celebrated for its 47 units of affordable housing, first renting at $1000 to $1500 when opened in 2000. 

The landlords – TMI Property Management – have doubled that rent in the time since. 

As of August 2025, a majority (55%) of Lowell tenants were “rent-burdened,” or spending over 30% of their income on rent and utilities. Yet when tenants began to organize together in early 2026, rent only existed as the backdrop of the campaign that organically emerged. Tenants were motivated by how changes in living conditions impacted themselves and their neighbors’ lives when they decided to fight for a better home together – starting with mold.

Spores of Discontent

Something was wrong with the roof. 

No one could tell at first. Moisture that led to total dilapidation was endemic but its only visible evidence was seen in one unit. The reason, over time, became clear:  management had replaced many units’ flooring with vinyl. Vinyl flooring, a landlord special, can be used to hide mold effectively. 

Mold infestations can be dangerous. To the healthy, mold in the home can lead to low-level chronic inflammatory illness, nasal and sinus issues, and brain fog. Conditions can worsen with continued exposure. Concerningly, mold exposure can most negatively affect people with asthma, the pregnant, children, and the immunocompromised – including elders, of which many lived at Beaver Brook Village. 

For those most vulnerable, mold spores producing new organismic colonies can become real threats to memories, to familial connections, to lives and lifetimes due to quality of life and health impacts. Landlords can neglect tenants with little legal consequence, utilizing loopholes with name changes or LLC trades, to save costs as tenants with few resources lose even more.

As renters at Beaver Brook Village began to speak to one another, it became clear the problem was not isolated to one unit. 

Some neighbors admitted water damage; others were standoffish to any neighbors who knocked on their door. One tenant, whose partner was allegedly denied accommodation by the landlord, indicated he’d install every piece of equipment and charge TMI Property Management back. 

Even though “that’s spending money on the landlord’s property,” the renter shut the door on the tenant organizer that neighbored them. They kept coming to talk. Through that patient work, tenants came to understand their  neighbor’s dissatisfaction with the landlord’s response. Simultaneously, the dissatisfied resident came to trust tenant organizers’ sincerity enough to attend Tenant Association meetings and research ADA requirements for the building together with their neighbors.

What Can Grow With Mold?

As mold grew in countless units, one neighbor’s interest in the potential of collective action also did.

Mike R attended a training in the Merrimack Valley by the local Emergency Tenant Organizing Committee (ETOC) in December 2025, run by the Housing Working Group of Boston DSA. Local ETOC organizers adapted materials from the Housing Justice Commission (HJC), who are credited with catalyzing the creation of ten new citywide tenant unions and over 500 trained tenant organizers. He credited the training with giving him the tools to build the Organizing Committee of the Beaver Brook Village Tenant Association (BBVTA). According to residents, while many HJC projects nationally link tenants to citywide autonomous tenant unions (ATUs) affiliated with the Autonomous Tenant Union Network (ATUN), BBVTA is supported by Boston DSA directly.

Flyers went up and were taken down by management over and over again, which provided the four initial Organizing Committee members with talking points against management.

Between the first and second meeting, BBVTA started to track the pattern of mold and moisture reports. They canvassed and held one-on-one conversations with their neighbors at their doors together. Multiple tenants in line reported similar conditions, so tenants were able to figure out a specific section of the roof was a potential source of mold. They had to take the issue of mold more systematically. 

According to Mike R in conversation with Working Mass, “we would all call the Board of Health to get an inspector on the landlord, as individuals, coordinated together.” This made the inspection process collective, too.

Within and Beyond Property Limits

The Organizing Committee agendized other discussion issues as the Beaver Brook Village Tenant Association meetings became larger spaces for tenants to talk about struggles they experienced in their homes. One of the first occasions for response to collective issues beyond mold was during a Nor’easter, which strangled the coast while stranding and endangering residents, particularly elders who relied on the sidewalk. For the first winter ever, residents could respond collectively:

During the first snowstorm, it shut down all the sidewalks, right? And they wouldn’t clear the sidewalks. After the landlord ignored the ticket I submitted, another tenant submitted another. Only once we coordinated did the landlord do something just an hour later.

Tenants that spoke with Working Mass emphasized that another major factor that infuriated them was the landlord charging fees for using communal space. The landlords charge $500 to use half the room for special events, for example, otherwise locking the common room space with authorization granted through the app of TMI Property Management itself. 

Both the whole community room and full kitchen were once free for the community. 

There was also a broader sense of instability among many tenants. Elders shared experiences from when the renovated mill was owned by its first landlords, who essentially foreclosed in 2012. Long-term tenants’ reports stood in stark contrast to the current ownership. The former owners emphasized then that “the tenants are not going to be affected whatsoever;” by the transition, but now, tenants’ ability to breathe and be stably housed is jeopardized by chronic mold infestation.

Tenants have plugged into broader struggles for housing justice in the region through BBVTA, as well. Beaver Brook Village tenants have begun discussing how to organize an eviction defense of the most vulnerable tenants in their region and have organized canvasses of their neighborhoods to win statewide rent control in 2026 – a campaign led by the Homes for All coalition.

BBVTA is not the first organized tenantry to take action on rent control. In other parts of the state, other Tenant Associations and unions have responded and acted for rent control in accordance with their memberships. For example, the citywide Easthampton Tenants Union (ETU) in Western Massachusetts organized through Spring 2026 for rent control only for its membership to vote to not support the legislative compromise that would add just cause protections in exchange for allowing landlords to raise rents in between individual tenancies, increasing the cap from 5% to 10%, and relegating it to opt-in from municipal bodies instead of the state itself.

The state’s Supreme Judicial Court swept in to end discussion on June 23. Even though 70% of Massachusetts residents favor rent control (or perhaps, because of that), the small number of unelected individuals that make up the court ruled that the ballot question was invalid. The Legislature, not the people who supported rent control and included the rising tenants’ movement, would decide. 

But even as forces from above intervene, tenants’ own consciousness and practice of their political agency grows with each day. At Beaver Brook Village, whether on questions of disaster relief or winning back community space or winning rent control, thinking collectively about politics was only possible once the Association itself was born. Tenants have to know each other to talk about the world to intervene in the world. In the words of Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, founders of the country’s largest tenants’ union of dues-paying households: “under political agency, there is communal life.”

Pre-Majority Action to Save Lives 

In the labor movement, a pre-majority action (where less than 50% of the unit takes action) is rare compared to the slow process of building towards the milestone of 70% support in a union election. This is necessary to survive a fight with the boss with only 50%, and thus win an election free and clear. Labor unions solidify their victories through a bureaucratic process which eventually leads to a certified contract through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). 

That is not the case in the U.S. tenants’ movement. For tenants in struggle, victories are far less likely to be certified or go through any kind of officially-mediated process. Terms are determined in every arena instead of by a process decided from on high. 

Tenants are more likely than workers to take pre-majority action. Even though the movement has given birth to multiple strategies stressing different levels of majority support, each of which is predicated on points of leverage and unlocks different tactics, the most pronounced strategic differences within the national tenants’ movement’s institutions, the Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN) and the Tenant Union Federation (TUF), exist on questions of block-by-block and building-by-building organizing versus pressure campaigns on strategic landlords. Those differences loom larger than questions of majority support in the absence of any NLRB-like body adjudicating the union form.

Landlords’ strategic toolbox remains as unevenly consolidated as tenants. Some landlords under corporate ownership and slumlord vultures may have every dirty trick up their sleeve, but many landlords are wholly unfamiliar with the concept of the “tenants’ union” itself. They may adapt tactics used by other landlords; they may just as well not.

For example, in the LA Tenants Union, when facing an issue where landlords could attempt to localize to individual units, landlords offered the tenants of Los Mariachis individual deals out of their exploitive leases. L.A. tenant Irma Aguilar, then, said:

The owner wants to peel us off in small groups over time, rather than all at once.

TMI Property Management, meanwhile, did not utilize the strategy of individual unit divide-and-conquer. Instead, they absolved themselves of responsibility completely. When the inspector came in response to tenant pressure, TMI Property Management also attended the inspection – and attempted to to avoid responsibility of roof ownership. 

TMI Property Management punted responsibility to American Tower, which owned the roof ostensibly to provide wireless coverage. Since the case was “too complex to navigate sooner” as a result of the various managerial companies above tenants’ heads, TMI Property Management delayed three months, from February to May, citing American Tower as the reason for not complying with the inspection. Only under renewed pressure did the landlord agree to replace the roof.

The inspector wrote a letter to American Tower to pressure the company on behalf of tenants for the roof replacement, but provided an “unsatisfying answer” to requests to include mold testing in the inspection, according to tenant reports. One tenant expressed “cautious optimism,” while Mike R indicated in remarks to Working Mass that “as long as they’re operating in good faith, the Association is satisfied with keeping them accountable.”

Renting the “Dark Satanic Mills”

In some ways, Beaver Brook Village tenants share much in common with other tenants of textile mills scattered across rural and suburban New England. In neighboring Connecticut, in Putnam town where another one of the ruins of William Blake’s “dark satanic mills” has been renovated to house 82 units, the main force that eventually drove those Cargill Falls Mill tenants to rent strike was also environmental conditions. There, tests showed toxic lead and dust in 68 of 71 units tested that poisoned a toddler and led the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to investigate the site. 

As the Beaver Brook Village Tenant Association seeks to build from a pre-majority TA to a majority TA by engaging more and more neighbors in the collective process of organizing, they identified collectively the need to build a mutual aid strategy to slowly increase engagement across the apartment complex: “slow, respectful” spadework. According to Mike R:

We don’t want to become a service for people… but mutual aid, you know, gets trust. We are an organization that can deliver – and we need to prove that.

One Beaver Brook Village tenant, for example, faced unit damage she couldn’t afford to replace. The landlord agreed to repair her dishwasher, eventually following through, after other tenants encouraged her to report. The Organizing Committee also prioritized the development of reliable tech support for neighbors – desperately needed by elder tenants – offered in ‘office hours’ by volunteer residents. Tenants described how these office hours could cohere the beginning of a BBVTA grievance system.

BBVTA’s Organizing Committee has doubled in size since its first meeting half a year ago.

Even though tenant organizers at Beaver Brook Village have yet to cultivate the building-wide trust needed to sustain the kind of wildcat rent strike undertaken by the Cargill Tenants Union, BBVTA’s rise shows that many of industrial New England’s broken textile mills may be in a long evolution from sites of workplace struggle into sites of tenant struggle. 

How residents organize differently or similarly to the workers who once toiled in the rooms where residents now break bread, or between associations of residents of renovated mills separated by vast distances, remains in the hands of the tenants themselves to determine.

Travis Wayne is the managing editor of Working Mass, a member of the Greater Boston Tenants Union (GBTU), and a former organizer of the Triangle Tenant Union (TTU).

The post From Mold to Force: How Tenants of a Dracut Textile Mill Organized An Association appeared first on Working Mass.

A national program is helping chapters open headquarters using a participatory selection process. Twenty chapters in every region benefited, and the program will expand to a new round of grants.

The post Building the Party, One Office at a Time appeared first on Democratic Left.

by Jean Allen

Scratching At The Door Until It Opens And Running Outside And Rolling In The Grass is the first full length album of Rochester’s local folk supergroup, Georgie. Founded by Claire McClusky in 2022, the band consists of an activist and a group of musicians involved in other Rochesterian bands (the rock band Comfy, the acoustic folk Garden of Evil Doers and Bugcatcher, Rochester’s very own Pavement Kitchen, indie darling Shep Treasure, Star Bby which is definitely good but which I do not know enough about to know the genre of) and has become an organizing nucleus of Rochester’s DIY music community (which, I think, designates a punk sensibility applied to an aesthetically broad set of bands). Three elements of Georgie’s live shows bear stating. The first, in as segregated a city as Rochester is, as divided into micro-sub-communities as its music scene is, Georgie shows have been intentionally mutli-genre and multiracial. This has led to the second thing about Georgie, the increasingly large Georgieverse of collaborative bands and fans from various parts of Rochester’s radical community. The other is that the ‘folk’ label I gave Georgie obscures what’s fully going on here. 

Georgie’s live music has shown a consistent desire for experimentation, for pushing past the boundaries of some banjoes and fiddles into music that can emotionally meet the moment we are in. Songs that seem tame on the record become rock anthems in rooms filled with cheering fans, songs that are 5 minutes recorded can become 20 minute jam sessions, new instruments are added and experimented with, puppet shows are incorporated. This album is similarly expansive, with the production leaning towards an acoustic wall of sound at moments, while providing perfect clarity for the vocals at others.

McClusky writes Georgie lyrics through automatic writing, a method designed to avoid conscious intention, and that leads to songs that are deeply radical while being partially opaque. The choruses of Georgie songs are often a repeated simple phrase, like a thought the mind’s gotten hung up on and cannot fully process. For instance, “What’s Legal Now?”, the lyrics describe a person whose human ineffableness is reduced to nothing by the label of perpetrator, by people who look away from conflict or look to conflict in order to establish categories of human and non-human. The question “Did you know? I’m a crime? Did you know? How I died?”, ends with the band repeating “What does it mean to make a mistake” over and over, through into a next song that features a Silvia Federici sample, back to the chorus, back to the conclusion: 

“Teach shame. I hold it, I carry it every day, hold it inside my body, you know I don’t talk to nobody. But I left it on the table, where I couldn’t quite read your face. It’s not that I’m unable, I just choose to look the other way. Cause babe you make me wonder what it means to make a mistake, babe you make me wonder, why I can’t quite define rape”. 

This gets at, could be about, so many things. Interpersonal relations, international relations, the way our society treats homeless people to constant debasement to allow for their further dehumanization, the way we ourselves become smaller when we start accepting our society’s dehumanization of our peers. It could be about all of these things, and because of that it draws our attention to how all of these problems stem from the same issue.

The ineffable quality of Georgie’s lyrics are, to me, a tremendous advance over the tendency towards didacticism we’ve seen in radical music lately. There are any number of bands who speak-sing lyrics that could double as event slogans. As an example, take Mr.Dinkles’ newest song, Socialist Ditty, which repeats 

“You don’t need to be that rich, just give it to me, I can pay off my loans and my mouth to feed, cause you don’t even know what to do with it, just give it to me, cause you don’t need to be that rich!”

To be clear, this song is a bop and I’ve listened to it constantly since it’s come out. Further, from Joe Hill to Pete Seeger our movement is always going to need artists who provide us with agitation in the form of songs. But to give the humble opinion of a cultural dingdong, we should aim for higher horizons in radical art. The desire for art to act solely as agitation reduces art and reduces ourselves. We do not experience the world through the easy rationality that agitational didacticism cloaks itself with. I am a literal socialist pamphleteer and MY experience of life is not reducible to an aesthetic frustration with the way the rich dominate us. I’ll leave a pin in this, but I will say now that the problem of domination – of a ruling class which has infantilized us by disallowing us from making choices about the direction of our lives – has a blast radius. Domination transforms the dominator and dominated, dehumanizing both of us in ways that are often complicated and painful to fully uncurl. If radicals are going to make truthful art about our current condition they need to use the full range of emotion, the full spectrum of rhetorical affect. There is a desire right now for art or theory to be simple and surface-level, just expressing simple goals, but the world is not just a series of surfaces. Just as in this album, my brain repeats images I’ve seen, images or arguments that are incomprehensible or horrific, trying to understand them. I turn to theorists to structure my thinking of the world, I try to act in it. 

To listen to Scratching At The Door Until It Opens And Running Outside And Rolling In The Grass is to feel a sense of dread and a desire to understand that dread. The song where McClusky reads Bookchin talking about the intimidating and physically overwhelming structure of an institutionalized city turns to “Canyon”, a wail at a left that hasn’t gotten strong enough, hasn’t stayed principled enough, has given itself too easily to too many fights over nothing while the world burns up and bodies pile up: 

“I can’t take it anymore, I can’t look at us flailing on the floor, will you still love me when I kill our landlord? Won’t you be on the same side of the barricade? Won’t you help me pour sand in these machines? Let’s strike, the earth is still alive.” 

The failure of the radical left to intervene meaningfully in the last decade, despite the tremendous amount of work we have all done, despite a series of protest waves culminating in the largest protest wave the country has ever seen, coming to nothing, that’s not something people only process in a rational way. That a series of protest movements for Black lives has achieved nothing more than more cameras everywhere has given us all a new knowledge of the society we live in, a society where life is cheap and fights against each other are the only thing that will show meaningful change. This comes up in the conflicts shown in “What’s Legal Now?”, in the author’s desire to stop dreaming that “the world didn’t end” in “Lathe of Heaven”, and like everything else in the album it culminates in “Contamination”.

The swirling thoughts throughout the album all point towards “Contamination” – in “The Propaganda and the Pesticides”, Georgie sings the refrain which was once “Contamination”’s opening (you have to understand, I have to make my money, I have to be the man) while Shola raps about the wages we struggle for which make us enslaved. “Limits”, the first introduction to Canyon, quotes Bookchin describing the way the personal forces which dominate us are transformed by the cityscape into a seemingly impenetrable System of institutions. We see throughout the album the way our broken society makes broken individuals, and it can be easy to generalize this, to imagine we are totally dominated by faceless beings who we could never affect. But we know better.

“Call it what it is, it’s not a disease, it’s that motherfucker upstream, and I’ll find him and I’ll kill him. It’s your cigarettes and orange juice, cigarettes and orange juice, it’s your cigarettes and orange juice, that woman who takes care of you.”

Again we are transposed between all the situations this can refer to. There’s the case worker’s misogyny, where any failure in someone’s health has to emerge from someone incorrectly performing gender, but there’s also the truth at the heart of this whole album and this whole society – that our domination by institutions is also a domination by particular people, who are empowered to make choices about our lives and whether we die. Cigarettes and orange juice is a deeply evocative image. It’s two things associated with poverty and food deserts – cigarettes in lieu of a meaningful meal, orange juice in lieu of fresh fruit and vegetables; but there is also something childish about this deadly combination. Orange juice, the thing advertised to us from childhood, cigarettes, the addictive and deadly symbol of adulthood sold to generations which couldn’t afford it. Our society offers all sorts of addictions and brain-killing pastimes in lieu of active participation in its direction, and that domination has made us all childish, a toxic and addictive smallness in lieu of child-like-ness. We cannot afford financial independence, we cannot move our society the way we want, and so we are left with these adolescent pleasures instead of the responsibility an ‘adult’ who has to make decisions for themselves is given. The song’s end flips the script, imagining us killing the capitalists with the same empty and cheap luxuries they kill us with. The album ends with a gleefully childlike song about swimming, depicting perhaps the kind of relaxation and freedom we will only find when we understand that the best way to take care of our loved ones is to upend our masters.

What strikes me throughout the album is a sensitivity to pain, a sensitivity to the ways we are transformed by pain, and a genuine curiosity about the world. Earlier on I compared this album to a variety of (also good) agitational bands which traffic in cocky pamphleteer writing. The cockiness in left art today does not speak to me because it feels just as much like a product of our infantilization as these cigarettes and orange juice. It’s the attitude of a newly awakened youth who realizes that their adults do not follow the rules they lay down, who then thinks that there are no rules whatsoever, that it is all a matter of will. We have a world to govern, or perhaps win, or perhaps defend, or perhaps just survive in, but none of these are easy tasks. We will need people who have been made deeply imperfect by the cruel, violent, and colonial society we live in to succeed in any of those efforts. The attitude of humbly sorting through our existence, parsing through our personal experience and the theories we adore, trying to understand how to strike while the earth is still alive, is something I wish more of the left took up. 

Scratching At The Door Until It Opens And Running Outside And Rolling In the Grass is a genuine advance in radical DIY music and Georgie is the best band to come out of Rochester since Machine Girl left the city a decade ago. It is at times tough and at times torrential but I would recommend it, and Georgie’s live shows, to any reader of this publication with an appreciation for folk music.

The post Articulating Revolution Through Art: A Review of Georgie’s Scratching At The Door Until It Opens And Running Outside And Rolling In The Grass first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

This is an opinion piece written collaboratively by the Immigrant Solidarity Working Group and was not voted on at a general membership meeting. Opinion pieces from sub-bodies do not reflect the opinions of all members and are not chapter approved statements.

It is with no stutter and no hesitation that Salt Lake DSA stands with the 15 defendants facing charges for anti-ICE organizing in Minneapolis. Their stance is part of a proud, long-standing tradition of resistance against law enforcement overreach in this country. Faced with the indiscriminate violence of this winter’s ICE/DHS activity in the Twin Cities, these neighbors banded together in an inspiring and powerful model. After these feral agents murdered two and celebrated their own impunity, the regime attempts to contort law and morality to punish their real enemy: our unwillingness to submit.

There is risk in taking a principled stance. It is in that spirit that we also condemn the charges faced by two former court clerks in Logan that allegedly helped individuals evade ICE agents at the courthouse. When faced with an opportunity to perform the moral, righteous act, these clerks took it—at their own personal risk. They acted against a vindictive and thoughtless regime intent on tearing apart families, and for that we salute them.

It is not enough to point out the blatant hypocrisy of the Trump regime, as it is not only painfully obvious, it is expected and routine. They decry the “weaponization” of the law while also rewarding loyalist felons with pardons. The hypocrisy and double-dealing are markers of a system in a permanent tailspin. Trump and his cronies find themselves in the criminal trough of our economic system, resorting to merely demanding submission and collecting bribes. They are rapidly running out of distractions, and soon, the lid will tighten yet further.

As the administration criminalizes dissent in America, we implore all Utahns: do not consider yourself exempt from this assault on your civil liberties. Stand with us, or stand beside us, but at least stand up and be seen in opposition to this continued erosion of freedoms. In this capitalist system, law is merely a weapon in the hands of the powerful, completely divorced from morality and righteousness. As a weapon of the powerful, once you stand crosswise to their goals, the law will be used to hammer you back into place. It is time for us to seize the hammer.

We know we stand firmly on the right side of history, because between solidarity and hate, we will always choose the former.  In time, we will win; the only question is, for how long will we all need to suffer until we can put an end to this madness? How many of us will be caught up in the gears? When the working class has unified to fight this fight together, we will no longer have to wonder. We will have already won.

The post Solidarity is Not a Crime first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.

Adopted June 15, 2026

Eryka Caldwell, a waitress and event planner in Brooklyn, is the most recent murder in the continuing onslaught against the trans community. Eryka was caring friend and sister who always saw the good in people, and loved “everything sappy & mushy”.

Juniper Blessing, a graduate of the New Mexico School for the Arts in Santa Fe, was murdered the week before Eryka. Juniper was a remarkable person, a gifted vocalist and is described as truly loving weather, intending to study Atmospheric and Climate Science at the University of Washington, along with Music and Philosophy. Videos of Juniper’s remarkable vocal work have been shared widely to honor her.

Their murders are an immense loss for us all.

The murders of Eryka and Juniper are not one-off events. They are sparks from the wildfire of hatred towering over us all. Turning Point USA chose to cancel their event at the University of Washington scheduled to take place just days after Juniper was murdered. This event would feature Chloe Cole, a right-wing detransitioner who actively opposes access to gender-affirming care and whose work has been described as ” [a] political touchstone for conservative groups pushing against transgender rights…”. Events like these serve as a wellspring for hatred and dehumanization, which tour across the country propagating violence.

Rochester is no stranger to this violence: this time last year, we were still reeling from the murder of Sam Nordquist, one more life lost to what seems like an inescapable waterfall of anti-trans hostility. We’re continuing to see rampant violence against trans people across the country, in particular trans people fleeing red states to our cities where they hope to be safe. But it is only by recognizing our collective strength and organizing together that we can keep all of us safe in the face of increasing repression.

“Seattle must serve as a refuge for our trans neighbors who are fleeing regions trying to erase their existence, which is why today’s news is so devastating and horrific,” Seattle Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck said in a statement on the murder of Juniper.

Until this murderous, genocidal intent is swept from our nation, we have a responsibility to organize and overturn the unjust systems that lead to this violence. There still exist threats to trans lives even in Seattle and Rochester which are both considered deep-blue cities. The entirety of New York State passed the Trans Safe Haven Act to protect gender affirming care and to protect trans lives. However, work continues at the federal level to strip away these protections. Work still continues to dehumanize trans lives and eradicate trans existence from our nation and from the world by any means available. That means we must continually work to uphold and protect trans lives, dignity, and freedom in the face of these attacks.

Trans people are simply trying to live their lives, gain acceptance and equal treatment. We must recognize in the trans experience a universal struggle against the patriarchal gender binary, and for human freedom. An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. No one is free until all of us are free.

ROC DSA is organizing working class people to fight for trans liberation and freedom from capitalism. You can join ROC DSA by signing up at dsausa.us/join. A better world is possible, and together we can build it

The post ROC DSA Statement on the Murders of Eryka Caldwell and Juniper Blessing first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

The River Valley Democratic Socialists of America is opposed to the widely-reported rent control compromise legislation being considered by the Massachusetts legislature. Based on positive polling and the power of the tenants movement, we believe we will win rent control on the ballot in November. The compromise proposed by some rental control advocates would raise […]

by Gregory Lebens-Higgins

The rapid mechanization of the world has inspired a wealth of fiction with the theme of machines acting without human impulse and beyond human intention. These depictions speak to the real fears of workers confronting their displacement by machines in an unfamiliar world. With the advance of computational intelligence, the threat of sentient machines overtaking humanity is a common feature of movies, including The Terminator (1984), The Matrix (1999), I, Robot (2004),and most recently, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2025).

Does this fear have grounding in reality? Will sentient machines reprogram themselves without the knowledge of their human creators, pursuing tasks for their own ends and actively interfering in human affairs? Or perhaps decide to eliminate humans entirely? Maybe we should just start worshipping our future overlords now to avoid later retribution?

Like the AI of fiction, capitalism seems to self-replicate, expanding and recreating itself on a global scale and sucking all exchange into commodification. Capitalists are propelled by competition to reach new markets and cheaper inputs or be put out of business. In those regions not yet infected by capital, the tools of economic and physical violence do the work of displacing people from their land and creating a propertyless laboring class that must depend on the capitalist system to survive, by selling its labor and purchasing necessities from the market. The surplus value of these transactions accumulates to a wealthy ruling class, structuring class relations:

“Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time, accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.’ And to expect any other division of the products from the capitalistic mode of production is the same as expecting the electrodes of a battery not to decompose acidulated water, not to liberate oxygen at the positive, hydrogen at the negative pole, so long as they are connected with the battery,” comments Engels (quoting Marx).

Competition results in winners and losers. Resources and power are centralized in a shrinking ruling class, while precarity metastasizes among a surplus population. “Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many,” says Marx. Even before AI, the incentive to reduce costs meant the replacement of workers by machinery.

Unlike AI, it is clear that capitalism does not have a mind of its own. The individual decisions that maintain the system are made by humans. Capitalism is not a natural state of affairs, but an economic system established by businessmen and bankers to perpetuate their social status. Capitalism does not exist for its own ends, but to profit and empower these capitalists.Challenges to the system, whether from labor solidarity or corporate regulation, are fended off by capitalists protecting their class interests.

The threat of AI exists not in its self-replication, but from a ruling class empowered with tools to discipline labor and increase surveillance (alongside its environmental impact). Computer programs, like traditional machines, do not have independent motivation but serve the interests of their creators. It is not robots who desire to dominate humanity, but Silicon Valley CEOs.

These CEOs hype up the potential of AI in order to encourage investment. The myth of a coming “Artificial General Intelligence” acts in service of the latest tech bubble. Sci-fi scenarios of AI overtaking humanity reinforce these expectations. Meanwhile, the shift in focus to the machines themselves, rather than their capitalist creators, shields the relationship from class analysis.

Those involved in the Luddite movement (1811 – 1817) are often thought of as irrational actors fighting against the inevitable turn of history. Their tactic of machine-breaking is depicted as opposition to all technological advancement. In fact, direct action only followed the exhaustion of legal attempts at redress against their displacement by machinery. Their fight was not against machines, but for survival.

Our understanding of society’s relationship with machines necessitates a class analysis. Who does the machine benefit? Is it designed to meet actual human needs, or primarily to extract additional surplus value? How can the working class take ownership of machines to repurpose them toward the elimination of drudgery? The confrontation is not one of humanity vs. machines, but of class struggle.

The post On Self-Replication in AI and Capitalism first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

The following remarks were delivered by councilmembers Mary Lupien, Stanley Martin, and Chiara “KeeKee” Smith in explanation of their votes against the proposed budget, which dedicates more than 25% ($160 million) to the Rochester Police Department.

Mary Lupien; East District: I view budgets as moral documents. The staff did a great job putting it together, it’s a lot of work. My not supporting the budget has nothing to do with the amount of work that was put in, it’s the policies and decisions that come from the top. This budget does not go fast enough or far enough, and it does not meet the moment. I recognize that we’re facing a difficult fiscal reality, and that resources are limited, and that hard choices had to be made. But if every department is being asked to tighten its belt, to reduce staffing, and do more more with less, why does that expectation seem to apply to everyone but the Rochester Police Department?

Every year the RPD gets their biggest budget ever. Which, to be honest, doesn’t even matter, because every year they overspend their budget, so they really just get unlimited money. We continue to budget for vacant police positions that have gone unfilled for years, even as other departments that provide direct services to residents are forced to make cuts. We know that nearly half [of] the police department is eligible to retire in the next five years. At some point we have to ask whether budgeting for these positions that we cannot fill, is the best use of our limited dollars.

Meanwhile, we continue to underinvest in violence prevention programs, like Advance Peace, that have already demonstrated success. Pathways to Peace, Advance Peace, and our other non-police interventions, in cooperation with the police department, have helped to significantly reduce violence. Yet we still treat these investments as secondary rather than essential.

And we also continue to underinvest in housing during a housing crisis. Every year that we postpone the investments that would help us repair underlying problems, the challenges grow harder to solve and the costs grow higher.

There are many positive elements in this budget, and I appreciate, again, the work that went into it. But I cannot support a budget that continues to prioritize maintaining the status quo, over making the investments necessary to meet the dire challenges in front of us. 

Stanley Martin, At-Large: So, I’d like to start by saying thank you to the administration, Director Warren, all the different departments that work together to put this budget together. And of course, a huge thank you to our staff, James, Jenn, Dacy, Adrien, Clerk Washington, everyone who helped to this work and who continues to take care of this city.

It’s not surprise what my vote will be tonight. It is going to be a no. As many of my colleagues before me have mentioned, I am deeply concerned with the amount of money we spend on policing. This year, we are spending $190 million on policing. That includes pensions, that includes positions that are vacant with no reasonable expectation to ever fill those positions. To me, it’s hard to understand how in one breath we’re saying we have a budget deficit, we’re struggling to make ends meet; and in the next breath we fund police at the highest amount they have ever been in the history of this city.

My no vote is also because I feel that this budget fails to take care of some of the people who keep us safe. We heard a lot of the issues around safety when it comes to security guards need for certain equipment to feel safe. When I walk into this room and I see security guards around, I feel extremely safe. I see how they de-escalate. And I would like for the folks who are on the front lines to be paid equitably in the same way other departments on the front lines are getting paid.

Finally, it is my deepest hope that within my time on this council, I will see a budget that equitably invests in alternative responses, rent supports, supports for people who simply can’t make ends meet because of inflation and all the other issues we’re seeing in this country. My no vote does not critique, again, any of the important work so many folks in this city are doing. But for me, this budget just fails to meet the majority of the needs of our community. 

Chiara “KeeKee” Smith, At-Large: Like my colleagues, I also want to acknowledge all the great work that everyone in this city does every day to make things run smoothly, especially the work that was done around the budget – Again, Jen, James, Dacy, Adrien, Clerk Washington, and the rest of the staff. Thank you guys so much for being available and for answering questions as needed. Budgets are more than numbers; as Mary said, they are moral documents. And they tell a story of what we value as a city. They show our residents who we invest in, what challenges we are willing to confront, and what kind of future we’re working to build. They are records that will tell stories of what we held important.

I have heard a consistent message from residents across our city. People want safe neighborhoods, but they also want stable housing. They want mental health support for those in crisis. They want opportunities for young people. They want clean neighborhoods. They want violence prevented before it starts. They want us to address the conditions that create crisis, not simply react when someone gets hurt.

When I was running for office, people were not asking for larger police budgets. They were asking why families were struggling to keep a roof over their heads. They were asking why young people lacked positive opportunities. They were asking why neighbors facing mental health challenges have nowhere to turn. They were asking why the same communities continue to carry the heaviest burdens of the city’s drug crisis, while being ignored when they asked for help.

I support public safety and I respect those who have chosen a career in law enforcement. But public safety is bigger than policing. Public safety is when a child has a safe place to sleep; when a family can afford to stay housed; when someone in crisis receives care and support. It begins when young people have access to hope. Residents have been clear – they want greater investment in prevention. They want stronger support for programs like violence prevention initiatives such as the PIC program, such as the Action Team, and trusted community organizations already doing the work of healing, the escalating conflict and supporting families before emergencies happen.

I am also concerned that this budget does not provide a clear path forward for Peace Village, or another meaningful alternative for our unhoused neighbors. Our communities are strained. Residents are frustrated. The people living there deserve dignity, and the surrounding neighborhoods deserve solutions.

As elected officials, our responsibility is not simply to fund systems. It is to listen to the people we serve, especially those whose voices are often overlooked. When I look at this budget through that lens, I cannot support it. I’m asking us to have a broader vision of public safety. One that includes housing, mental health prevention, intervention, and community. One that recognizes enforcement alone cannot solve challenges rooted in poverty, trauma, disinvestment, and a lack of opportunity. I respect those who may vote differently, and I remain committed to working with my colleagues to move Rochester forward. But my first obligation is to the residents who have trusted me with this role, and those whose needs are the greatest. For this reason I will be voting no on this budget. 

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The DSA difference means prioritizing people’s needs over the maintenance of class order and pursuit of profit. Investments in affordable housing, accessible food, and adequate mental health resources are investments in public safety. A better world is possible.

Make a difference with DSA. Join today: dsausa.us/join

The post Why Did Democratic Socialists Vote ‘No’ On Rochester’s Budget? first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

by Rich J.

In a small municipal park at the corner of South and Alexander, there is a statue of city namesake Nathaniel Rochester. The space itself is more of a neighborhood garden, a place where residents hang out, and the bronze statue of Nathaniel Rochester hangs out with you. He is seated, though his legs are a little too long for his body, resting on his cane, and smiling as if at a private joke. It’s a bronze you could imagine sidling up next to and listening to amusing stories of early, rapidly-growing Rochesterville. 

The built environment is our daily background. Our public spaces are places we pass through or hang out in, not regard with deep contemplation. But that very passivity is what makes public symbols so potent. They provide unassuming legitimation for the official history of a place and its extant structures of authority. Nowhere in Nathaniel Square Park will you find mention that Nathaniel Rochester built his town on land recently conquered from the Seneca, or that he did so with the coerced labor of slaves he brought here from Maryland. 

In the port city of Trieste, Italy, in 2019, citizens unveiled their own bronze statue depiction of a thoughtful-looking man. Gabriele D’Annunzio was a modernist poet, still highly regarded in Italian literary circles, and the statue captures that facet of the man. It shows him cross-legged, deeply concentrating on reading an open book, while leaning on a pile of still more books. It is exactly the kind of commemoration one would expect to see of a respected author. 

For the citizens of Rijeka, Croatia, however, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s legacy is not that of a renowned author. It’s that of a fascist occupier. Or, more accurately, if the citizens of Rijeka remember his name at all, they associate him with a fascist occupation. In the opening scenes of Croatian filmmaker Igor Bezinović’s Fiume o Morte!, which screened at the Little Theater earlier this year, he interviews passersby, and most people on the street don’t recognize the name Gabriele D’Annunzio. Determined to reframe the memory of D’Annunzio, Bezinovic sets out to humorously film a historical recreation of the man and his occupation.

In 1919, D’Annunzio led a few hundred demobilized Italian soldiers in a takeover of the disputed former Habsburg city then known as Fiume. Allied negotiators at Versailles had promised the port to the new Yugoslav state, to the chagrin of the city’s powerful Italian minority. The city’s Italians cheered D’Annunzio’s coup and celebrated him as a man of action who would force the Italian government to take on its nationalist responsibility to annex Fiume. For D’Annunzio and the coterie of young adventurers who gathered around him, however, Fiume was to be the revolutionary center of a utopian society of work and art and generative violence.

D’Annunzio was in the orbit of Italy’s fascist movement and, through his Fiume adventure, framed much of fascism’s aesthetics. Photographers thoroughly documented his 15-month occupation, and the imagery they produced was largely of shirtless young men posing heroically and brandishing weapons. This bravado performance of masculinity was an explicit critique of bourgeois liberalism, which they saw as effete and degenerate. Only strong men, willing to use force, could regenerate the insipid culture of the bourgeoisie.

The images of D’Annunzio and his followers are easy to mock. Bezinovic cheekily restages their historical photographs as filmed tableaux with amateur local actors. He casts a series of men to portray D’Annunzio himself mock-heroically in his uniform, giving speeches, throwing orgies, and working on his poetic constitution. The director’s only criteria for casting his seven D’Annunzios is that they be bald and middle-aged.  The effect is to enunciate the buffoonish character of the whole cocaine-fueled occupation. D’Annunzio’s self-conceived heroism dissolves into the ordinary, the boring, the common.

And here the subversive memory-making at the heart of Fiume o Morte succeeds in its goal. The fascists who followed D’Annunzio imagined themselves as supermen bending the world to their will. A few shells from an Italian battleship ended their whole Fiume adventure. Its participants went on to another project to bend the world to their will. A couple of meathooks in a town square ended their Italian fascist project. But, given the continued popularity of D’Annunzio, whose palace is a well-attended tourist attraction in Italy, it is evident that the fascists refuse to remember their failures. In Fiume o Morte!, with its unapologetic lowbrow approach, making art with and by normal Croatian people, Bezinovic makes an antifascist movie about fascist failure. D’Annunzio would have hated it. 

The post Fiume o Morte: Anti-Fascist Memory Making first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

The private jets, limousines, and tanned vacationers coursing through Atlantic Aviation’s exclusive lot mask a grim reality. Every Tuesday and Friday, the private company facilitates the transportation of residents detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in and out of Las Vegas. They sometimes come, and sometimes go, chained at the wrists, waist, and feet, shuffling single file between white caged-windowed buses and unmarked aircraft supplied by major commercial airlines.

The members of Las Vegas Democratic Socialists of America (LVDSA) demand that Atlantic Aviation terminate contracts with DHS and immediately end its participation in these flights. With support from the Habeas Flight Watch Network, LVDSA’s Abolish ICE Campaign is taking steps to ensure they do. LVDSA is conducting habeas flight watches and hosting a National Day of Protest against Atlantic Aviation on June 27th.

Located at Harry Reid International Airport, Atlantic Aviation reserves its runways and hangars for the luxury jet set. No doubt, the private company enjoyed a boost in positive press when Taylor Swift chose to park her private jet at Atlantic upon breezing into town to celebrate Travis Kelce’s Super Bowl LVII victory. Today, the company promises to whisk World Cup spectators to games in style, offering gourmet in-flight dining and wrap-around concierge services. Unsurprisingly, it does not flaunt its frequent flying of ICE victims among its first-class services.

While Atlantic Aviation caters to celebrities and sports pros to rake in profits, they are also fattening their bottom line on the injustices our neighbors suffer. People are rounded up based on their skin color, language, and clothing, exploited by the city’s shady 287(g) agreement, and targeted by Flock AI mass-surveillance technology. Denied due process, they are deliberately displaced in the expanding network of concentration camps and the routes that connect them. We are taking action for the victims, their families, and the attorneys who are unable to secure their clients’ habeas rights.

A team of flight watchers from LVDSA and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) meets outside Atlantic’s runways with cameras, documenting the arrival and departure of ICE victims. The goal is to capture footage of the individuals getting on and off buses and planes— their faces, clothing, and shoes—so that their families and lawyers might find them. A Habeas Flight Watch Network volunteer flight dispatcher keeps the team notified of the ETAs for Las Vegas-bound ICE flights, and, just like commercial flights, these schedules are subject to frustrating last-minute changes.

Friday, June 12th, is no exception. At 6:44 am, our Las Vegas flight watch team receives an ETA from the dispatch: today’s flight arrives from Fort Hood via Reno on a Canadair CRJ-200 operated by Air Wisconsin; it’s scheduled to land at 12:22 pm. We set up early in case the plane arrives ahead of schedule, which happens. Stationed outside the Atlantic Aviation fence with cameras and tripods, we learn the flight is delayed until 12:51, then 1:13. It is now over 100 degrees.

Buffy Taylor, a member of PSL, sighs and walks under a tiny tree in the lot’s perimeter for a sliver of shade.  She’d arrived on her bike, a duffel bag containing several ice-cold water bottles and her Canon T7 strapped over her shoulder. “I’ve been tracking and photographing planes for years as a hobby, and I figured I could help people find their family or friends and expose the illegal actions of the government,” she explains. “Put my skills to good use.” By the time the team receives their final status update – ETA 1:21 pm – their phones are overheating, and Taylor’s waters are hot to the touch.

As with other Las Vegas ICE-related activity, the arrival of the ICE plane is quiet and understated. Our team learns it has touched down on Atlantic Aviation’s Runway 19, the same one used to welcome visiting celebrities. Moments later, a dull gray aircraft, serial number N455AW, devoid of any colors or logos except a tiny US flag, rolls toward us before turning slightly to let a taxiing private jet by. We can’t believe our luck– we now have a clear view of the plane’s stairway, the white prison bus, and the stretch of pavement between them.

When its doors open, four men in neon vests spring to action, neatly setting about 20 bright orange bundles in a row on the ground.  “Prison jump suits?” I ask Taylor.

“Nope, their personal belongings.”

Uncertain whether people are held prisoner on the plane, on the bus, or both, and seeing no movement from either, we focus on the four yellow-vested staff bustling about, bounding up and down the airplane stairs. Are they Atlantic ground crew? ICE agents? They eventually form an assembly line between the bus door and the plane’s stairway. Finally, the victims step off the bus, stooped and resigned, shackled at the wrists and feet, a long chain linking them at the waist.

Taylor abandons her tripod and darts around on foot, zooming in on captives, as I dictate a physical description of each man boarding the plane after he is frisked from head to toe. Twenty-two in all, mostly young, 20s and 30s, though one man appears to be old, perhaps in his 70s. Once the last has boarded, a pilot inspects the plane’s exterior as the caged-windowed bus slowly drives off the tarmac. We wonder about the victims, whether they’ve eaten or used the bathroom, and what they must be thinking.

As we spot the white bus exiting Atlantic’s parking lot, Taylor sprints, zigzagging through parked cars, and snaps photos of the bus’s driver and license plate. “It’s astonishing how many people have to be complicit for this to happen,” observes Audrey Hines, a co-steward for LVDSA’s Abolish ICE Campaign.

Not all habeas flight watches are this successful. Some sessions have yielded pictures of the plane or bus—still helpful—but no people. Other times, planes and utility vehicles have arrived unexpectedly, suddenly blocking the view. Organizers leave hot and exhausted, but determined to catch useful images on the next one. “Each new flight watch has the potential to help even one person, help one family be reunited, so it is so worth it,” says Hines.

“Even if we don’t have the best shot, we keep trying— you kind of feel like a spy,” adds 19-year-old Mikey LaFrambois, a lead organizer in UNLV’s Young Democratic Socialists of America.

Hopefully, these ICE flight watches won’t last too long. On Saturday, June 27th, at 6 pm, LVDSA is joining the National Day of Protest against Atlantic Aviation and other airlines abetting ICE activity. We are hosting a protest outside Atlantic Aviation, in a united demand that they cancel their contracts with DHS and the federal government. We stand in solidarity with cities around the country that are speaking up. We salute Dallas, a World Cup host city whose organizers and faith leaders are taking Atlantic Aviation to task for courting wealthy ticket holders while preying on the powerless. As Rev. Neil Thomas, lead pastor of Cathedral of Hope, noted on June 10, 2026:

As people arrive for the World Cup and other major events, we will proudly showcase our city as a place of hospitality and opportunity. Yet, at the very same time, through these very same airports, on these very same streets, within sight of celebrations, immigrant members of our community are being removed from their homes and families. This contradiction forces us to ask difficult but necessary questions about who we are as a city.

Atlantic Aviation caters to the indulgences and excesses of billionaires while actively participating in and profiting from the crimes against our neighbors. All professional athletes, celebrities, and customers using Atlantic Aviation’s services are part of the problem. Pilots transporting victims of ICE arrests, ground staff loading cargo —all are agents in perpetuating this nightmare.

In solidarity with local immigrant rights efforts, we urge readers to demand that Atlantic Aviation terminate these inhumane flights. This company will be held accountable for its actions.

 

By Jill Glass, LVDSA Abolish ICE Campaign Co-Steward

Images by Buffy Taylor @buffysphotographs 

 

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References

American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada. (2026, April 8). ACLU of Nevada files notice of appeal to continue challenge of LVMPD 287(g) agreement with ICE. https://www.aclunv.org/press-releases/aclu-of-nevada-files-notice-of-appeal-to-continue-challenge-of-lvmpd-287g-agreement-with-ice/

American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin. (2026, April 2). Racial profiling rampant after Supreme Court ruling. https://www.aclu-wi.org/news/racial-profiling-rampant-after-supreme-court-ruling/

Atlantic Aviation. (2026, June). World Cup. https://www.atlanticaviation.com/world-cup/

Balas, R. (2026, January 17). Inside Taylor Swift’s $54M Dassault Falcon 7X: 2026 Eras Tour & flight tracking controversy. The Flying Engineer. https://theflyingengineer.com/taylor-swifts-private-jet-inside-look/

Immigration Policy Tracking Project. (2025, April 8). Reported: ICE contracts with commercial airlines to facilitate deportation flights. https://immpolicytracking.org/policies/reported-ice-contracts-with-commercial-airlines-to-facilitate-deportation-flights/

Instagram. (2025). Post by @habeasflightwatch [Instagram post]. https://www.instagram.com/p/DYXLGP7AI7E/

Lexington Alarm. (2026). Habeas Flight Watch. https://lexingtonalarm.org/habeas-flight-watch/

Schilken, C. (2024, February 9). Will Taylor Swift be able to park a private jet for Super Bowl? Vegas airports are full. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/sports/story/2024-02-09/super-bowl-private-jets-parking-las-vegas-airports-49ers-chiefs-taylor-swift

Velotta, R. N. (2016, May 18). Jet Suite to offer luxury travel between California and Las Vegas. Las Vegas Review-Journal. https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/jet-suite-to-offer-luxury-travel-between-california-and-las-vegas/

ICE takes 240 from Clark County jail under new pact; ACLU fights deal. (2026, March 11). Las Vegas Review-Journal. https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/ice-takes-240-from-clark-county-jail-under-new-pact-aclu-fights-deal-372339