Speakers + Discussion Group + Film Screening Schedule
SATURDAY 5/3 – SPEAKERS IN LOADING DOCK
1:00 – Andrew Lee – Author of Defying Displacement (2024), Lee has been involved with grassroots anti-displacement campaigns in San José, California. He currently lives in Philadelphia, where he continues to work on similar issues. He has written for Yes! Magazine, Teen Vogue, and The Progressive and serves as Managing Editor for The Anti-Racism Daily.
Cities around the world are in the midst of a profound transformation as the wealthy price out the remnants of the urban working class, especially people of color. Displacement is neither accidental or inevitable. It happens because a whole range of people and institutions profit handsomely. Defying Displacement, focused on the US but informed by global examples, investigates gentrification from the perspective of the people fighting it, members of communities whose survival is threatened by some of the most powerful institutions on the planet. Andrew Lee names the names and identifies the actual state and corporate forces that work together to enrich a very specific group of people: property developers and real estate investors who make a killing, politicians who watch their tax bases grow, banks that write profitable loans for new businesses and mortgages for new homeowners. Meanwhile, business districts are planned, tax abatements unveiled, redevelopment schemes dreamed up, corporate and university campuses expanded, and ordinary people are driven from their homes. The city has long served as the stage for political life and popular revolt. As mass displacement alters the composition of gentrifying cities, the avenues available for social change become unsettled as well, forcing us to reimagine our strategies for building a better world. Around the world communities are pushing the struggle against forced displacement in new directions, shutting down developments and evictions and bringing cities to a halt, fighting militarized police and the most powerful companies in the world. Activists and residents in struggle—dozens of whom are interviewed by Lee to inform his work—are charting the way forward to affordable and sustainable cities run by the people who inhabit them.
2:00 – Matthew Lyons – Longtime antifascist researcher and writer. Co-editor of Three Way Fight: Revolutionary Politics and Antifascism (PM Press, 2024) and author of Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire (PM Press, 2018).
Trump Authoritarianism and the Three Way Fight: Three way fight politics argues that fascism and the far right more broadly grow out of an oppressive capitalist order but are also in conflict with it in real ways, and that radicals need to combat both. The dynamics between the far right and conventional pro-capitalist forces and institutions are complex, shifting, and continually challenge us to rethink old categories and slogans. This presentation will use a three way fight approach to examine Donald Trump’s political project, the different sectors within the MAGA coalition, changes in Trump’s relationship with far right politics and with the business community, and how the second Trump administration’s drive toward dictatorship highlights both strengths and potential points of vulnerability within the regime and its support base.
3:00 – Andrew Zonneveld – Independent historian, freelance journalist, anarchist organizer, and master naturalist from DeKalb County, Georgia. Author of “All Will Be Equalized!” (2024).
From Afro-Indigenous communities of the Sea Islands and the Okefenokee Swamp, to inter-racial networks of anti-Confederate resistance during the Civil War, and post-war labor strikes by Black and white granite workers at Stone Mountain—Andrew Zonneveld’s new study of Georgia’s freedom movements recollects shared histories of oppressed peoples of African, Indigenous, and European descent who fought together against slavery and colonialism while building multi-racial communities of resistance in remote areas away from state or colonial authority.
4:00 – CAW Collective
– carla joy bergman is a transdisciplinary artist, podcaster, and writer – most notably, Joyful Militancy (2017) and Trust Kids! (2022).
– Shuli Branson is a writer, teacher, translator and podcaster. she wrote Practical Anarchism (2022) and edited Surviving the Future (2023).
– Dani Burlison is a writer, teacher and a member of the CAW Collective from Northern California who’s books include “Red Flag Warning: Mutual Aid and Survival in California’s Fire Country” and All of Me: Love, Anger and the Female Body,” among others.
– Vicky Osterweil is a writer, worker and agitator based in so-called Philadelphia, she is the author of In Defense of Looting (2020).
CAW is a worker-run cooperative project that collectivizes the work we are most passionate about, thereby providing financial stability for ourselves and for each other. By offering it at a pay-what-you-want subscription cost, we hope to build an accessible and consistent base of support that will allow us to spend less time working for owners’ profits and more time creating resistance, beauty, and joy. And we’re excited to have found a way that our “individual” work might be able to facilitate that stability in the lives of the people we admire and love! Billionaires own the TV networks, purchased and closed the local newspapers, polluted the internet with disinformation and hate, and most independent media has been captured, sold or recuperated. With worker-owned journals we won’t work for those bosses, or their profits, but also aren’t forced to be individuals competing in the “marketplace of ideas”. We can pursue the praxis of mutual aid and collective living while building stability for ourselves, each other and a resource for our community.
SATURDAY 5/3 – DISCUSSION TENT
1:45 – Housing – Hosted by the Binghamton Tenants Union.
2:45 – Trans Rights – Hosted by Renée Szematowicz, a doctoral candidate researching 18th century Trans history, Chief Steward with GSEU, and organizer with the Binghamton Tenants Union.
3:45 – Labor – Hosted by Shonnie.
4:45 – Wellness & Addiction – Hosted by Shanel Boyce (LMSW, LPN), Jessica Steele (Psychiatric and Addiction Medicine Registered Nurse), and Zak Peet (MA in Psychology, Riot Act Volunteer).
SUNDAY 5/4 – SPEAKERS IN LOADING DOCK
1:00 – Ruth Benn – The How To’s of Refusing to Pay Taxes for War (and other Bad Things) — A workshop/discussion led by Ruth Benn, co-author of the War Resisters League book War Tax Resistance: A Guide to Withholding Your Support from the Military. On the staff of War Resisters League from 1987-2000 and the Coordinator of National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee from 2003-2018, Ruth has been refusing to pay federal income taxes for war since 1979.
“If you don’t believe in it, why pay for it?” This is the title of a flyer that was sent to peace movement people encouraging their participation in war tax resistance activities at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). This title also expresses the primary reason why people have refused to pay taxes that contribute to war.
If you’ve been marching, lobbying, rallying, shouting to stop wars, genocide, deportations, spying, and all kinds of illegal government actions but faced April’s tax day with a lump in your throat, now’s the time to talk tax resistance.
Tax refusal can be summed up in the phrase “don’t pay.” The actual steps to get there can be simple or a little more complicated depending on one’s life situation, source(s) of income, motivations, and willingness to take risks. Learn how to get started, methods, potential consequences, resources, etc. Bring your questions!
2:00 – Raymond Tyler – A comics writer from Appalachian Georgia currently residing in Nyack, NY. He’s a longtime social justice and labor activist, bridging “history from below” with comics. Raymond’s most recent work includes the horror comic series Amputation Capital and Black Coal and Red Bandanas (PM Press, 2024).
In the early twentieth century, strikes and union battles were common in industrial centers throughout the US. But nothing compared to the class warfare of the West Virginia mine wars. The origins of this protracted rebellion were in the dictatorial rule of the coal companies over the proud, multiracial, immigrant and native-born miners of Appalachia.
3:00 – James Coughlin – Organizer with the Justice for Geraldine and Martin campaign in Buffalo.
The Justice for Geraldine and Martin Exoneration Campaign, is a volunteer-led, grassroots campaign, based in Buffalo, New York, organizing to exonerate former political prisoners Martin Sostre and Geraldine Robinson Pointer. In working with Ms. Pointer’s family to pressure the state, volunteers also are working to preserve this radical history by creating a local mural highlighting Sostre and Pointer, reclaiming 1412 Jefferson Avenue, Sostre’s former Afro-Asian Bookshop, currently, a city owned vacant lot left unused, to construct a guerilla garden, free little library, and community bulletin board. Funding has also been secured to pilot and launch the Geraldine Pointer and Martin Sostre Freedom School for this summer in Buffalo.
4:00 – Kevin Young – History professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is active in labor and climate organizing.
How we can muster the political strength to neutralize polluters is one of the most important questions humanity has ever faced. Although the US climate movement is not currently winning, it has achieved important partial victories that illuminate the vulnerabilities of the fossil fuel industry. I will focus on how the movement has targeted the industry’s enablers, including financial institutions, regulatory agencies, and purchasers of fossil fuels. I argue that the growing resistance to dirty energy projects has jeopardized investor confidence, leading the industry to lash out in increasingly desperate ways. The most powerful movements in US history succeeded in similar ways. In addition to analyzing the recent climate and Indigenous movements, my presentation will draw lessons from four classic victories: the abolition of slavery, battles for workers’ rights in the 1930s, Black freedom struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, and the fight for clean air. Those movements inflicted costs on economic elites through strikes, boycotts, and other mass disruption. Gains in the electoral and legislative realms were usually the byproducts of great upsurges in the fields, factories, and streets.
The presentation draws from my recent book, Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won (PM Press, 2024).
SUNDAY 5/4 – DISCUSSION TENT
1:45 – Ableism Ain’t Anarchist – Hosted by Katie Tastrom, activist and author of ‘A People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice (2024), Cyree Jarelle Johnson (he/him), a rootworker, diviner and poet, and Andrew McCarthy (he/him), an anarchist student, bookseller, and barista.
2:45 – Radical Spaces – Hosted by Riot Act, a volunteer-run bookstore in Binghamton.
3:45 – ICE and Prisons – Hosted by JUST, a community organization dedicated to dismantling mass incarceration and mass policing in the Southern Tier.
SUNDAY 5/4 – 7:00 – Film Screening + Discussion Hosted by Binghamton University Students for Justice in Palestine:
Resistance – Why? (1971)
Ghassan Kanafani, Sadiq Jalal El-Azm, Nabil Shaath and other personalities share their vision of the Palestinian revolution, tracing its history back to the early 20th century. These testimonies describe the numerous strikes and popular protests that took place in Palestine under the Ottoman occupation, followed by the British colonization and the settlement of the Jewish state in 1948. They enumerate the objectives of the struggle, emphasizing the necessity for a free and democratic Palestine, defended through armed or non-armed struggle by all its citizens of various affiliations.
Resistance, Why? is a documentary produced in English –and thus destined to an international public– calling for openness, justice, the right to auto-determination, and for the Palestinian people to fight against occupation, zionism and imperialism.
Comments
Well I guess this could be a…
anon (not verified) Sun, 04/27/2025 - 08:57
Well I guess this could be a test on whether such event can take place under the Trump regime... at least without having people deported to Salvador or something. Happened a year ago apparently without problems, but different context now.
Mascs?
anon (not verified) Sun, 04/27/2025 - 12:45
Mascs?
They had better
anon (not verified) Sun, 04/27/2025 - 20:14
In reply to Mascs? by anon (not verified)
Any @ bookfair that doesn't mask up and social distance and check that people are up to date on their covid paperwork should be put to death for their complicity in gaytrans genocide unironically.
20:14 is certainly not masc,…
anon (not verified) Sun, 04/27/2025 - 20:18
In reply to They had better by anon (not verified)
20:14 is certainly not masc, that's clear. So delicate!
no one tell them there's…
anon (not verified) Sun, 04/27/2025 - 21:20
In reply to 20:14 is certainly not masc,… by anon (not verified)
no one tell them there's COVID in farts. kicker: clothing helps only partially
covid in semen too. but no…
anon (not verified) Thu, 05/01/2025 - 01:39
In reply to no one tell them there's… by anon (not verified)
covid in semen too. but no ones canceling post bookfair orgies
Your linking of the anal and…
anon (not verified) Thu, 05/01/2025 - 07:22
In reply to covid in semen too. but no… by anon (not verified)
Your linking of the anal and phallic drives, in the context of books, and cancelling, says a lot
No one talked about anuses…
anon (not verified) Thu, 05/01/2025 - 07:36
In reply to Your linking of the anal and… by anon (not verified)
No one talked about anuses here... it's just you being focused on them for some reason.
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