Event Details

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 7TH 

12:30-1:15  

Forest Fight: Repression and Resistance in the Struggle to Stop Cop City 

Hannah Kass

This talk will present authoethnographic and documentary research as a criminalized Weelaunee forest defender in the struggle to Stop Cop City — a fight to defend over 300 acres of forest in DeKalb County, Georgia from destruction by the state and a range of multinational corporations for the development of a militarized police training facility. It will show how counterterrorism tactics aimed to legitimize the expansion of a police state and protect the infrastructure required to expand it in response to the abolitionist character of property transgressive tactics wielded by the movement – how commoning practices that challenged property relations also built alternatives to and chipped away at the carceral state, from within the forest and inside Georgia’s jails. And also how the repression the forest defenders endured functioned as a technology of enclosure — and how anti-repression, resistance, and solidarity characterized the movement as an abolitionist land struggle.

1:30-2:15  Naming the Moment: Revolutionary Strategy in a Time of Crisis 

The Emergency Brake Collective

Following Trump’s election in 2024, a group of comrades got together to engage in a process called “Naming the Moment” to study the current conjuncture and devise effective strategies for confronting our opponents. Coming out of this process, The Emergency Brake Collective produced a pamphlet called Naming the Moment: Revolutionary Strategy in a Time of Crisis.  Naming the Moment is not a political program or a manifesto. Instead, it is a discussion document to nurture collective deliberation about the current conjuncture. This event will provide an overview of the Naming the Moment process and an introduction to the Naming the Moment pamphlet with the aim of encouraging meaningful discussion both at the event and beyond. 

2:30-3:15  Radioactive Resistance

Rod

In this workshop, you will learn about the connecting struggles of nuclear colonialism in Diné Bikéyah, Wii’i Gdwiisa and so-called Massachusetts. We will engage with attendees by hosting a radioactive scavenger hunt. By the end of this workshop attendees will successfully learn how to utilize a Geiger counter, successfully identify radioactive materials and understand how to safely visit a place with high levels of radiation and contaminants. The workshop will end in an open invitation for a caravan to two local sites that are tied to the Manhattan Project and Uranium.

3:30-4:15  They Call it Conspiracy, We Call it Resistance: The Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit & the United Freedom Front

Leslie James Pickering

As the protest movements of the 1960s waned and the Reagan era took hold, a new generation of underground militants carried forward the fight against US empire and corporate war profiteering, getting their start right here in Boston. For over a decade, they waged campaigns of sabotage and expropriation, bombing government and corporate buildings, liberating funds from banks, and eluding capture even while topping the FBI’s Most Wanted list. While earlier and more privileged radicals have been widely chronicled, the most dangerous and effective actions came later, as state repression intensified, guerrilla resistance reached its peak, and the US government deployed unprecedented resources to defend itself. A new book compiling buried and unpublished writings of Ray Luc Levasseur chronicles the history of the Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit and the United Freedom Front, highlighting a peak era of guerrilla warfare in the heart of the US empire.

4:30-5:30  Anarchist Panther

Ashanti Alston 

A talk by Ashanti Alston—a beloved thinker in Black anarchism—celebrating the recent release of his first collection of writings. One of the enduring legacies of the Black Power Era is the turn by some revolutionaries toward a politics that questioned hierarchical leadership, patriarchy, and the role of the state in social transformation. This practice came to define a distinct form of anarchism rooted in the Black experience. Ashanti Omawali Alston helped nurture and define this turn through his experiences with the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army, and through social movement activity from the late 1960s to today. Anarchist Panther collects, for the first time, his thoughts that have influenced generations of radicals the world over.

SUNDAY
12:15-1:00  Settler Colonialism in New England: Understanding King Philip’s War and Indigenous Resistance

Cora Roelofs

This year marks the 350th anniversary of King Philip’s War, also known also known as the War for New England. This talk has been developed with input from Native history keepers to help assure that we all know what happened here and how it relates to the present. I have delivered it 3 times and it has been well-received. The presentation will highlight important factors and context for the war including the capitalist and imperialist objectives behind the “Pilgrims,” other settlers, and the violence and other mechanisms of settler-colonization. It also presents the reasons for the war, some of the major and symbolic events, Native survivance, and significant impacts following the war. Connections are made between these events and the present including current landback and other projects to reckon with its legacy such as the on-going efforts to change the Massachusetts flag.

1:15-2:00  Total Liberation is Vegan

kaylee

As anarchists we are in opposition to the capitalism, oppression, sexism, slavery, and abuse we have been conditioned to accept to maintain the status quo. Yet, some unknowingly continue to support these atrocities when they are being done to the animals used for our clothes, food, and other commodities. Why is this particular conditioning so hard for the average western anarchist to escape? How can we escape said conditioning of animal agriculture industries? Does this animal rights movement take away from other urgent movements (and other critiques)? Come find out 🙂

2:15-3:00  Writing Identity Through Anarchy 

Jess A.

This workshop will explore how identity intersects positively with anarchy and how to write from anarchistic thought through this lens. For example, the Mangonistas of the Mexican Revolution created a values system largely rooted in the indigenous values of Mexican culture. This workshop will help participants learn to evaluate and critique where and how their own cultural values might contribute to an anarchic system rotted in dignity and integrity and how varying cultural values can come together to achieve it. Participants will explore how to take a critical lens to their own personal history and cultural memory, how to formulate this into cohesive written frameworks for political writing and hopefully come away with a deeper understanding of themselves and the role heritage can play in building an equitable anarchy system for the future. 

3:15-4:00  Your First Year Of Mutual Aid: Lessons from Quincy Food Not Bombs   

Bucket

Quincy Food not Bombs got started just about 1 year ago at the Boston Anarchist Bookfair. Now they know a lot more and would like to give some of that knowledge back to the community. This will like to go over things like: How to wrangle up initial volunteers, what the initial planning phase looks like, helpful resources, what to expect at your first serve, essential supplies, and opportunities to grow as the organizational roots grow. This will be not only for the benefit of organizers new and old, but also to help synthesize the lessons we have learned and show that building mutual aid and community organizations is possible even if you’ve never done it before.

4:15-5:00  20 Years of Organizing an Anarchist Book Fair and an Art Laboratory

The New York City Anarchist Book Fair Collective presents two books: Incendiary Thoughts: Our Second Decade, published in collaboration with AK Press, and AnarkoArtLab published by Autonomedia. The first collects interviews, visuals, and articulations from the NYCABF’s second decade, while the second dives into the work of AnarkoArtLab, the performance collective born the same year as the book fair. These books, taking inspiration from what Ben Morea called “an accumulation of differences,” examine the role of the book fair in creating a momentary commons, an anarchist infrastructure of exchange and mutual association. In the center of global capitalism, in our hyper-gentrified city, this infrastructure is more important than ever. We must begin to move our bodies in a language of free and egalitarian movements—in movements of self-sufficiency and dances of infinite possibilities—just as our ancestors taught us. The revolution must come from inside and if not now, when?