Monthly Newsletter of the Rochester Chapter of Democratic Socialists of America

Welcome to the January issue of Rochester Red Star. In this issue, read about the proceedings of ROC DSA’s 2025 Chapter Convention, remarks on the County Legislature’s decision to opt out of the short-term rental registry, and words of hope for the coming year. You’ll also find details on upcoming events, and coverage of chapter activities over the past month.

Interested in contributing? Send submissions to bit.ly/SubmitRedStar, or get involved with our Communications Committee. Reach out to steering@rocdsa.org and join DSA today!

The post Rochester Red Star | January 2026 | (Issue 21) first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Come join our Socialist sing-along after the General meeting on January 7th! 

We build solidarity by singing songs that unite us and bring attention to issues within our communities. Currently Kira is in charge of the Socialist Sing-along, if you have suggestions reach out to her on Signal or by email at kirasorensen@gmail.com. Read on to learn about the songs we’ll be singing in January. 

Workingman Unite, written 1918 by E.S. Nelson and recorded 1977 by Joe Glazer

Workingman Unite was written in 1918 by IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) member E. S. Nelson. The IWW formed in 1905, and was the only American Union at the time that included immigrants, women, and African Americans. The IWW is still active across the globe. This particular recording was released in 1977 on the album I Will Win: Songs of the Wobblies by Joe Glazer (1918-2006). A member of the Textile Workers Union of America, Joe focused his music on workers’ songs including albums about coal mining, newspaper printing, steel and woodworking and eventually started his own record company.

Make America Great Again, Pussy Riot, 2016

In 2015 the Russian feminist protest band Pussy Riot released their first English song I can’t Breathe. This song was based on the police killing of Eric Garner in New York City. Pussy Riot released Make America Great Again in October 2016, before Trump’s first presidential election. Their music videos are banned in Russia where the group is listed as an extremist organization as of December 2025.

Imagine, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 1971

Released in 1971, Imagine rose to #3 of the Billboard Hot 100 and has climbed the charts several times since. The song was inspired by pieces in Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit (1964) and has been controversial because of its denunciation of religion, starting with “Imagine there’s no heaven”. It is considered by many to be one of the best songs of the 20th century.

by Kira Sorensen

Announcements 📜 Become a Sustaining Donor to EWOC Help us stay independent and continue to meet the organizing needs of workers in their fights for workplace democracy. Start your sustaining donation before December 31! The “Unite & Win” Podcast Launches in January EWOC will publish its first podcast, “Unite & Win,” starting January 13 in partnership with […]

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX is challenging the constitutionality of the NLRB in a lawsuit that could undermine the enforcement of national labor law.

The post Elon Musk and SpaceX attack the National Labor Relations Board appeared first on EWOC.

The author of this piece chose to remain anonymous.

This is a review and commentary on “A Queer Marxist Trans Feminism: Queer and Trans Social Reproduction” by Nat Raha, from Transgender Marxism. This review is from an agender perspective.

In the essay, Raha says that domestic social reproduction is a “feminine act.” In other words, they reify gender based on the particular gendered expression that occurs in the context of various societies where gendered signification is fungible, and ultimately arbitrary, based on which generation you’re in. In other words, the essay romanticizes a domesticated, sexist view of femininity, where feminine people do domestic work. I always disliked the word feminine, as it implies a traditional, binary sex, and never tries to overcome this binary to go beyond a representational view of gender.

Gender is fungible in every generation you’re in. Queerness itself is outside of time, responsible for all change – temporality, time itself, and the variable context of each generation is what constitutes the gendered expression of each era. Gendered expression does, as the book says, have its own emotional labor that one must go through for queer people. For queer people such as myself and my partner, not being recognized as queer is a sort of invisibility that can occur. Essays like this erase the experience of being agender. An agender view of these gendered phenomena is that like capitalism and its axiom of profit, gender is not extended anywhere in space. Heteronormativity is in contrast to queer gender, which takes traditional gender and performs it as straight people perform it, or it bends the expression.

But for me, gender expression is fungible. Archers in the past wore high heels; indigenous peoples and royalty such as pharaohs wore leggings and makeup. The makeup industry made makeup a feminine thing, as with other things that are bought and sold back to us through gendered expression of capital; we try to differentiate ourselves as the particular tries to differentiate itself but end up only creating a new universal. This is what occurs in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in the “Sense Certainty” and “Perception” sections. When you point to a thing, you get a universal of language. Language can only speak about things on a general level; it cannot capture the infinite difference of sense, and our ideas about gender are in fact immobile.

Because the only things which relate to the immobile motor in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti Oedipus are Oedipus, capital, and heteronormativity, it makes me wonder: is gender itself a sort of machinic normativity, reproduced by representational sameness? Whenever we try to say gender is a fixed idea, we are not recognizing that our concepts of gender flow as through a stream, or as through the flows of the mega-machine; whatever its dominant beauty standards deem is gender is bought or sold to us. Ultimately, this strain of Marxist feminism does not want to produce rhizomatic views of gender that are not based on binary dichotomies. They focus on an idea of a binary domesticated sexism, but nonetheless think femininity relates to a very narrow time in history’s view of domesticity and femininity. It’s a performative contradiction.

The essay suggests that there should be compensation for all the extra work that queer people do that is not caught up in the creation of surplus value for capitalists, like emotional labor and nurturing actions. Wouldn’t it be beneficial to call nurturing and mutual aid a human action, instead of further stigmatizing and entrenching rigid gender boundaries that make one think they need to repress their emotions to perform as a man or diminish their needs for the sake of others to perform as a woman? That’s an ass backwards view of gender, and gender itself is an identity which is formed under capitalism. It would be better to reject it for a view that does not even have a work/play divide. In Against His-Story, Against Leviathan, Fredy Perlman shows that work and play are a false dichotomy, a dichotomy that goes unaddressed by essay 5 of Transgender Marxism. It would instead claim emotional labor for “femmes” and reify gender essentialism amidst its claims to emancipation. Another performative contradiction.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of DSA Cleveland as a whole.

Sources/Further Reading:

• Transgender Marxism
• Perlman, Fredy. Against His-Story, Against Leviathan
• Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit
• Gilles, Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus

The post Critique of Transgender Marxism, Essay 5 appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

By Anthony D., Diane R., Ashley H., Dave N.

Compared to liberals and progressives, socialists have a unique perspective about the purpose of electoral politics and winning elected office. We understand that the mass social change we want cannot be accomplished unless millions of ordinary people are moved to fight for their own liberation in the class war against bosses and billionaires. To that end, the socialists we elect have a historic role to play in bringing this about by operating primarily as organizers who bring workers into the struggle alongside them.

Within the modern left, most electoral endorsements have been viewed strictly as a commitment to support candidates throughout their campaign: to fundraise, build up their communications infrastructure, and develop a field program to knock thousands of doors and talk to voters. If our endorsed candidates win, the level of support we offered during the campaign immediately drops off after Election Day and we move on to the next campaign. Very rarely, if ever, do we devise a plan during the endorsement process for how they will operate once in office and what they should prioritize. We send them off on their own into completely hostile legislatures designed and controlled by two political parties completely beholden to capital and hope that they alone can beg and bargain for reforms on behalf of the working class.

Over the last half century this individualistic approach has ultimately been unsuccessful in winning gains for the working class or in getting our class organized to fight. As DSA becomes more adept at winning elections in the vacuum created by a pro-genocide Democratic Party, our modern task as socialists is to think of Election Day as a checkpoint rather than as the finish line. In practice, this means orienting our endorsed candidates and elected officials towards the primary goals of making more socialists, building socialist organization, and leading as spokespersons of our independent party.

At the 2023 Metro Detroit DSA Membership Convention, our chapter’s highest decision-making body, members voted to take the first steps in this direction by launching the Socialists in Office Committee (SIOC) as a body in which elected chapter leadership would coordinate our organizing work with our endorsed elected officials, also known as Socialists in Office (SIOs). The resolution and amendment we passed called for an organizing-focused purpose and vision for the SIOC that prioritized creating our own party-like infrastructure so we could recruit and train socialist candidates from within our own ranks, who would think of themselves primarily as organizers of the working class, rather than purely as legislators. It was also a move towards building a working-class movement outside of electoral work by using our SIOs’ offices to reach, educate, and organize their constituents into class struggle and self-activity. Unfortunately, very little has been done to see this through since then.

At our 2025 Convention, members passed an amendment to the SIO Committee consensus resolution that created a unique and experimental ‘Geographic Working Group’ as a space for rank-and-file DSA members residing within State Representative Dylan Wegela and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s overlapping districts to regularly meet with and organize alongside them. Our SIOs are surrounded on a daily basis by politicians ranging from corporate Democrats to fascist Republicans who serve the same ruling class, so we imagined this group as the socialist antidote and support system. The idea was to experiment with a new concept of how to operate in office and carve a path towards our political independence. The amendment included the clause below, which initiated both this article and a verbal summary of it given by group members at the December 2025 General Meeting.

The Geographic Working Group will issue a report at both the six month (December 2025) and twelve month (June 2026) mark to:

• provide an update on progress towards our goals and explain any roadblocks to accomplishing them
• offer an analysis and critique to consider whether it should be replicated by future similar bodies or other SIO Committees around the country
• normalize open reporting on the progress of this and other unique experiments in the chapter — all of which can be expected to have misses and fails, which are acceptable so long as the lessons learned are defined and shared with membership similar to past electoral campaigns

Since Dylan Wegela was endorsed by the chapter while in office in 2024, he has been requesting help to launch bottom-up organizing projects in his district with support from Metro Detroit DSA members. Calling back to his experience of leading rank-and-file Arizona public school teachers in a statewide strike in 2018, this approach is meant to bring his constituents into permanent mobilization beyond a typical re-election campaign cycle. The idea was to put them in touch with socialist organizers and strategy, building towards a long-lasting base for socialist politics and worker self-organization in his district. Because of his limited staff capacity, this vision needed help from DSA members.

Dylan’s predominantly working class district (Garden City, Westland, Inkster, Romulus) is geographically distant from the main concentration of where chapter members live and is a 30–40-minute drive from Detroit and Hamtramck, the city where we hold our monthly General Meetings. In 2022, when the Electoral Committee declined to move Dylan’s endorsement request forward, to instead focus on Rashida, one of the main reasons was that just five dues-paying members lived in his district. Since membership bumps in response to both Trump’s re-election and Zohran’s primary win as well as intentional recruitment by both Dylan and this group, there are now 40 dues-paying members in his district.

We believed that if we did the work to create a regular, local, in-person meeting space within Dylan’s district and conducted careful outreach and onboarding, that many of the new members in the district would be more likely to show up and organize with a group located closer to them. Texting through the list of members in Dylan’s district produced around 10–15 onboarding calls. Almost everyone we talked to expressed some amount of demoralization over Trump’s reelection and a desire to build more local connections with socialists. Many felt compelled to finally get active because of Zohran’s primary victory in June. Throughout our meetings, we’ve also heard:

• Folks have been more likely to participate in DSA through this group since it’s very close to them and they get to meet their socialist neighbors. The group offers DSA members a way to connect with their neighbors and talk about shared concerns. The smaller group setting has been an easier way to interact with each other and start to build community and social connections.
• Folks have come into DSA already socialist-leaning and gone to their first DSA meeting but were overwhelmed with how much was going on. This group felt like an easier point of engagement with DSA.
• The group has felt like a welcoming space for DSA members to bring their friends and significant others.

As of the December 2025 General Meeting, the group has met eight times with an average attendance of around 12 people, usually composed of DSA members, non-DSA members brought along by members, and constituents that Dylan recruits through door-knocking, social media, or coffee hours. We meet in person every two weeks, and the Signal group chat that people are invited to after attending a meeting is at 33 members. Only six of those members had participated in DSA prior to joining this group and three people have been moved to join DSA through participation in it. Dylan joins every meeting, calling the group “a refreshing reminder that none of us are in the struggle alone,” and says, “We’re seeking to answer an essential question for our movement: Now that we hold office, how do we use it to organize the working class and grow our mass movement?”

The group’s meetings run for two hours and start with someone reiterating our political purpose (Dylan and Rashida need a mass movement behind them and this group can help develop socialist organizers and potential future socialist candidates to make that happen) and experimental concept (this is how SIOs should use their elected office). Each attendee then introduces themselves and shares why they’re a socialist or what brought them to the meeting, followed by a 30-minute political discussion based on a reading (distributed in advance) on basic socialist theory, organizational democracy, or electoral organizing strategy. These political discussions are based around easy-to-read, short Jacobin articles and have acted as a way to onboard new members and non-members alike who are new to socialism and organizing. They’ve also allowed us to talk about the broader goals of socialist organizing and our theory of social change beyond just supporting our SIOs.

We spend the rest of our meetings working on organizing plans, as a means to develop group members who have never organized into experienced leaders. Our projects are in various stages and led by different members:

• Collected signatures for the Michigan For The Many campaign, the three chapter-endorsed statewide ballot initiatives, including at the October No Kings rally in Livonia and the November Santa Land parade in Westland. Notably, none of the nonprofits leading the ballot initiatives had established a presence in this area. Signature collection at events has been used as a conversation opener to talk to people about socialism and DSA, give them one of our DSA palm cards, and try to recruit to our group.
• Started power mapping of Dylan’s district so we can learn about local political dynamics, as a counter to the typical “insider politics” preferred by establishment political operatives.
• Launched a public donation drive in response to the government shutdown and SNAP benefit suspension, to funnel donations to local food pantries.
• Planned a group budget for the year to fund food, drinks, and a private meeting space. The budget allows more transparency to the chapter for our plans and helped us to deliberate on our priorities, like meeting in person, every two weeks, at a quiet, private space with plenty of room to expand, and offering food to entice more folks to attend.
• Organizing tenants at a 300-unit apartment complex in Inkster. This was initiated by Dylan, with a town hall attended by 50 tenants, after he learned many of them were living in really bad conditions and did outreach to the whole building by mailing them surveys about it paid for with office funds. Organizing is temporarily on hold, due to political dynamics with Inkster City Council members who collaborated with Dylan on the event. They preferred to wait until the spring to do an outdoor community engagement event before building the tenant organizing group.
• Building towards a public event led by Dylan, Rashida, and Westland/Wayne and Dearborn teachers as a way to facilitate communication among multiple teacher unions and help DSA members in those unions to organize with their coworkers. SIOs, public school teachers, and local DSA members organizing together are some of the key components towards the long-term goal of establishing a local socialist political machine.

Group members have shared responsibilities for running the meetings, with some members facilitating our political discussion by preparing discussion questions beforehand and others taking turns to take notes and chair. Distributing the work teaches through experience, including experience in making group democratic decisions.

Diane, from Romulus, says the group is “investing our time and efforts directly in the communities we live in, building our grassroots movement while building our DSA chapter as a whole.” In October, Diane spent 19 days in the hospital. “This group stepped up to support me in my recovery, creating a GoFundMe. This is community in action,” said Diane, adding, “Being a part of this group made me see how change can take place in my own community and I have discovered my own voice in creating the changes I hope to see.”

We plan to continue expanding this group as a training ground to create more socialist organizers in an area where our chapter has not previously had an established presence. For workers to take over and transform society, we need to be everywhere we can to produce more organizers and force the hand of capital in legislatures and workplaces. Socialist organizers developed through this group can confidently go out into their neighborhoods, unions, and workplaces and lead other workers.

Socialist in Office: Training New Socialist Organizers in Dylan Wegela’s District was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Democratic Socialists of America is a big-tent, multi-tendency organization, representing diverse strains of thought from across the political left. However, one thing that unites socialists of all tendencies is the centrality of the work of Nineteenth Century philosopher, journalist, and historian Karl Marx.

In order to change the world, we must take the right actions. In order to take the right actions, we must properly understand the world as it is. And, in order to properly understand the world as it is, we must ask the right questions. Marxism, when properly understood, is a framework for accomplishing this.

But… do we properly understand Marxism? That is what we’ll begin exploring today.

This article is the first in a series of short overviews covering key concepts in Marxist thought. Each is meant to distill down a complex idea and explain it in the simple terms possible. To start, let’s begin a concept that is at the core of Marxist philosophy; one which seems complicated at first, but is actually very simple: the idea of dialectics.

Dialectics: Change Through Tension

Dialectics is an ancient philosophical framework used to understand how change happens. Rather than seeing the world as fixed or static, dialectical thinking treats reality as a process — something constantly developing over time.

At the core of dialectics is the idea that change emerges from tension and contradiction. Nothing exists in perfect balance forever. Every situation contains opposing forces that push against one another, and it is this struggle that drives movement and transformation.

A dialectical process is often explained using three terms: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

The thesis is an existing condition or dominant way of doing things. Over time, problems or limitations naturally come up. The contradictions between the ideals of the thesis, and the problems that surface when the thesis it tested by reality, eventually give rise to an opposing force — the antithesis — which challenges the thesis.

The conflict between thesis and antithesis does not simply end with one defeating the other. Instead, their interaction produces something new: the synthesis.

The synthesis resolves some of the conflict by incorporating elements of both the thesis and the antithesis, while also transforming them. Importantly, the synthesis is not a final endpoint. It becomes a new thesis, containing its own internal contradictions, and the process begins again.

Why the Dialectical Method Matters

The dialectical model of thinking emphasizes that progress is not smooth or linear. Change happens through struggle, breaks, and leaps. Old forms give way to new ones, but traces of the old remain within the new. History, ideas, and social systems all develop in this uneven, dynamic way.

Dialectics can be applied beyond philosophy. We can see it in nature, where opposing forces like stability and disruption shape ecosystems. We see it in society, where cooperation and conflict exist side by side. We even see it in everyday life, when problems force us to rethink assumptions and adapt. By focusing on contradiction and motion, dialectics helps us understand the world not as a collection of finished things, but as an ongoing process of becoming; always shaped by tension, struggle, and change.

This mode of thinking is central to Marxism; as we’ll explore in the next chapter, while Marx didn’t invent the dialectical method, his great innovation was applying that model to history and the world around us. This is what’s called “dialectical materialism,” a core idea in Marxist theory.

Bruce Nissen

Why is Trumpism so popular in our country? In the past, even in times of conservative resurgence, the right-wing politicians and governments have not so openly flaunted basic rules of constitutional governance as has Trump (Think Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, etc.).

A recent review in The Nation magazine by Kim Phillips-Fein of Melinda Cooper’s book Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance addresses this question in a manner I had never considered before (November 2025 edition of The Nation). Phillips-Fein argues that more-or-less extreme inequality has always been with us in the U.S. In the 20th century that inequality was produced by major industrial corporations which were collectively controlled by shareholders that included pension funds, banks, and wealthy individuals. This has changed in today’s economy: such stakeholders have been supplanted by private equity funds, financial firms, family trusts, and tech firms owned by a few wealthy founders.

These new rulers are no longer accountable to bureaucratic middle managers or, for the most part, a larger pool of external shareholders. Instead, the new powerhouses are “families” (either biological or ideological) which are freer from normal constraints by outside forces. Private equity, venture capital, family trusts, and the like are much more likely to pursue politically aggressive goals of an extreme libertarian or culturally conservative nature.

For example, look at Trump’s cabinet. Betsy deVos (Dept. of Education), Steven Minuchin (Treasury), Sonny Perdue (Dept. of Agriculture), hedge fund operative Scott Bessent (Treasury Secretary), investment banker Howard Lutnick (Dept. of Commerce) all populate or have populated Trump’s cabinet. These are names of families who are owners of private capital; they are not operatives or bureaucrats serving ruling class family interests as a whole.

An underlying shift in the nature of American capitalism has produced a new, more open and markedly brutal form of federal governance, according to this perspective. Earlier relatively frictionless dominance of corporations by shareholder interests is to some degree supplanted by family rule enforced by gloves-off brute force.

As Phillips-Fein puts it:

For Trump, the United States is just one large, privately held corporation, controlled and dominated by a few people who perceive themselves as being able to do what they want. No stockholders, no activist shareholders, no debates or discussion, no annual meetings, no publicly released reports, no room for dissent or deliberations — just a tiny group of owners who enrich themselves while the rest of us stand on the sidelines.

This may explain why Trump rules as he does, but it does not explain his popularity. Here we need to note that Trump is not all that popular — his approval rating for the way he runs the economy is down in the 30+% range. In addition to standard explanations for what support Trump does have in the white segment of the U.S. working class (racism, fear of immigration and immigrants), Phillips-Fein also cites fragmentation of workers and the decline of previous unifying forces within the class, such as unions.

If this explanation for Trumpism is accurate, we are in for heightened struggle against the working class in the foreseeable future. I hope that the DSA and allied anti-fascist forces have grown and will continue to grow rapidly enough to defeat this coming threat. Labor unions, tenant unions, debtor’s associations or debtor’s unions, independent media, and more will be needed. We have our work cut out for us, and the DSA should be at the center of the resistance.