Join members of the Beehive Collective for a special presentation, discussion storytelling, and movement art. The Beehive Collective has been active for over 25 years making art and engaging in popular education to challenge corporate colonialism. They are best known for creating intricately detailed pen and ink murals in collaboration with directly impacted communities over the course of many years. These graphics, rich with nature metaphors, become the centrepiece of educational campaigns aimed at cross-pollinating movements for social, economic, and environmental justice. One of these graphics, "The True Cost of Coal" has been adapted into a rhyming kids book.
Lynn Lewis, Benjamin Heim Shepard
The theme of the 2025 Howard Zinn Book Fair, “Fight Supremacy: Actions Against Authoritarianism”, looks to the past for insight into how we can effectively organize today. We draw inspiration from abolitionists, Indigenous resistance movements, organized labor, the Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, and LGBTQ+ Rights Movements, Occupy Wall Street, and the countless groups and individuals who continue to take to the streets in defiance of autocracy. With this in mind, Lynn Lewis and Benjamin Shepard propose a panel on ways to remember and connect movements, in order to learn from the past to inform our current and future organizing and movement building work. Oral history is a method to trace through lines between movements, ever-evolving from labor to civil rights, to housing and healthcare, to AIDS and queer, autonomous movements. We will share our work, rooted in activism and oral history, and engage participants to imagine what an oral history process would look like in their work. Building on his new book On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting: Oral Histories, Strategies and Conflicts, Shepard explores conflict and resolution as the lifeblood of social movements. How, and with whom, do we find lasting friendship, support, and joy in a world in need of so much repair
Antonio Roman-Acala,Kanoa Dinwoodie, Feral Heart Farm
Krysten Leach, Namu Farms
Nadia Barhoum, Thurayya Seeds
Navina Khanna, HEAL food alliance
Gavin Raders, Planting Justice
Vanessa, farm manager at SF’s Alemany Farm
Oriented in part by the forthcoming book by Antonio Roman-Alcalá on contemporary food movements in California, this session will include both the author and leaders from movements included in the book. The focus of the discussion will be strategies for organizing around food, farming, and reconnecting to the natural world, in the context of a rising fascist state and the fascism-enabling role of mainstream liberal politics. Against conventional reformist politics, newer food and farm movements — led by BIPOC and informed by radical lineages from Black, Indigenous, Marxist, anarchist, and intersectional perspectives — are advancing a radical North Star politics that moves beyond the existing social order, while pragmatically engaging both markets and state arenas. Come here about some of these strategies and share your own.
Aisha Mansour, Palestinian Youth Movement
Peter Olney, Organizing Director ILWU (retired)
Sam Levens, Inland Boatmen's Union
Gifford Hartman, Labor Studies Laney College
Building power for workers always involves building their agency and commitment. Such power is enhanced by a sophisticated understanding of production systems and logistics supply chains. This workshop will bring to bear the experiences of veteran organizers to identify choke points and key points of leverage that can enable workers to win. Historically, workers have used that power to stop arms from being sent to warzones, such as in 1981 when ILWU militants refused to send bomb parts to El Salvador or recently when millions of Italian workers and students went on strike, in solidarity with Gaza, to prevent weapons from being shipped to Israel.
Paul Messersmith-Glavin, Danielle Filippo, Steve Moriarty, Stephanie Mendez
With the donation of the Maximum Rock n Roll music library to Rutgers University archive, a grass roots youth culture espousing DIY counterculture and punk ethos entering perimenopause and aging out of relevance internationally, the punk movement which challenged the music industry since the 1970’s has matured, but not faded away. Print magazines, like Razor Cake and hundreds of podcasts have revived the message. Festivals like Punk in The Park with shows featuring reformed bands like, Dead Kennedys, TSOL, and Black Flag draw three generations of punk music fans hungry to carry on resistance against the Patriarchy. Musicians instrumental in the DIY punk music scene with decades of experience are writing about the old days as a fame work for younger generations to organize bands and communities focused on social justice, inclusion and anti-fascist work. The discussion featured editors from Razor Cakes, Gilman Street Collective in Berkeley, musician turned authors from Tribe 8, Bottle Rockets, Mudhoney and The Gits. The panel will discuss how music created inspiration and charged the revolutionary spirit of youth culture during the past five decades.
An honest and vulnerable discussion about the realities of prison resistance. Oftentimes we romanticize prison. The reality is that resisting inside has very serious consequences, including the lasting trauma when you leave. This talk, based on my book, is about all the things that often get left out when we talk about life inside. Not just how bad it can get for us, but for our families and our free world selves, but also what is needed to help those reconnecting with the free world or still stuck inside.
Dani Burlison and Margaret Elysia Garcia
The editors of “Red Flag Warning: Mutual Aid and Survival in California’s Fire Country” (AK Press, 6/2025), Dani Burlison and Margaret Elysia Garcia will discuss the book and different approaches to mutual aid covered in the book, including protecting undocumented folks, centering traditional ecological knowledge, highlighting work by formerly incarcerated firefighters, class justice, mental health, rural environmental justice, and more! After our brief conversation/presentation, we will open to a participatory dialogue with attendees to share more ideas and collaborations.
Tiny Gray-Garcia, Muteado Silencio, Aunti Frances Moore
Session will include an author talk, workshop, and dialogue about POOR Magazine's newest book, UnTourBook. This new genre “guide Book” is full of truth about genocide as well as poetry, prayer, stories and art on indigenous resistance to settler colonial erasure, poLice terror, homelessness and the many acts of indigenous/Black/Brown-led resistance from Turtle Island to Palestine and all across Mama Earth. The UnTours across Occupied Turtle Island ( which the book is named after ) was launched in 2016 to reveal the truth about so many acts of settler colonial terror, rape, enslavement removal and murder, Terrifying acts like missionaries and settlers like Juniperro Serra was responsible for under his reign in the California Mission system.
Guillermina Castellanos, Rachel West, Francisco Herrera -Fundacion Caminante
This bi-lingual panel will address the unjust criminalization of sex workers, immigrants and domestic workers and racist immigration laws that separate children from their mothers or primary caregivers. Organizing for money and resources for mothers, not detention, deportation or imprisonment. What we are up against and what gains we have made.
TBD
TBD
Kevin Van Meter and Robert Ovetz
Café, nonprofit, and public and private sector workers across the United States are on the move—refusing current regimes of work, fighting bosses and organizing unions, speaking about their working lives and demanding workplace democracy. Our workshop will examine two recent workers inquires with café and nonprofit workers in the US. Robert Ovetz will recount his inquiry into the nonprofit industry in his forthcoming Rebels for the System: NGOs, Capitalism and the Labor Movement (Haymarket, 2026). Kevin Van Meter will report on his recently coauthored “Class Composition in the Café Sector” (Notes from Below, 2025) and speak about his forthcoming Reading Struggles: Working-Class Self-Activity from Detroit to Turin and Back Again (AK Press). In this workshop participants will have the opportunity to practice a workers’ inquiry to understand the position of their work in the current capitalist economy to develop new tactics and strategies to build our power. The workshop teaches how workers’ inquiry can help circulate workers’ struggles and build working-class power to take on fascism.
Cayden Mak, Max Elbaum, Maya Schenwar
The media system in general is at a crossroads: being pulled apart by private equity, ravaged by austerity, and squeezed by algorithmic suppression and AI slop, it’s harder than ever to thrive as a media maker these days. But the mission of the media also feels more urgent because of those pressures, and independent media is an important bulwark against the rising tide of authoritarianism. But merely being “independent” is not enough. Our shared commitment to building movement media is about building the informational and narrative power our movements need to strategize, struggle, and win against the far Right ascendant. In this intimate discussion between Max, Maya, and Cayden, we look to the past and look ahead: at the history of media consolidation; historic attempts to build alternative structures; and the challenges and opportunities we face as we strive to block authoritarian consolidation and build people power in our time and place.
Cayden Mak, Max Elbaum, Maya Schenwar
The media system in general is at a crossroads: being pulled apart by private equity, ravaged by austerity, and squeezed by algorithmic suppression and AI slop, it’s harder than ever to thrive as a media maker these days. But the mission of the media also feels more urgent because of those pressures, and independent media is an important bulwark against the rising tide of authoritarianism. But merely being “independent” is not enough. Our shared commitment to building movement media is about building the informational and narrative power our movements need to strategize, struggle, and win against the far Right ascendant. In this intimate discussion between Max, Maya, and Cayden, we look to the past and look ahead: at the history of media consolidation; historic attempts to build alternative structures; and the challenges and opportunities we face as we strive to block authoritarian consolidation and build people power in our time and place.
Eric Mann
A talk based on his work with CORE, SDS, the United Auto Workers, and the Labor/Community Strategy Center and his books Katrina’s Legacy—U.S. genocidal climate crimes from New Orleans to the Third World and Playbook for Progressives: The 16 Qualities of the Successful Organizer.
Garrett Felber, Molly Porzig, Bryant Arroyo
Discussing the necessity of cross-wall organizing to revolutionary struggle. This panel will use the life and legacy of anarchist political prisoner and jailhouse lawyer Martin Sostre, to discuss the ongoing challenges faced by incarcerated organizers and their comrades outside, as well as tools, tactics, and strategies for abolitionists today.
Eddie YuenPresentation of some recently rediscovered posters, photos and handbills of social movements from the 1960s - 1990s. Prior to the “elite capture” of so-called identity politics, many social movements offered a genuine intersection of solidarity-based struggles.
Josh Fernandez and Jerrod Shanahan
To celebrate the publication of Every Fire Need a Little Bit of Help: A Decade of Rebellion, Reaction, and Morbid Symptoms (PM Press, 2025), author Jarrod Shanahan will appear in discussion with Josh Fernandez, author of The Hands that Crafted the Bomb: The Making of a Lifelong Antifascist (PM Press, 2024). Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help collects a decade of reflections on recent US struggles—Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the George Floyd Rebellion—alongside accounts of the rise of Trumpism, the alt-right, an apocalyptic shift in popular culture, to paint a dense and complex portrait of a decade of protracted social crisis. Jarrod Shanahan reports from the ground. On the streets in 2014, from the depths of the Rikers Island penal complex, inside the alt-right underground and the carnival of Trump rallies, and in the line of fire in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020, among other scenes that Shanahan accessed not as a credentialed observer but an active participant: prisoner, infiltrator, activist. The resulting essays outline the pitfalls and opportunities facing those seeking to reverse the suicidal course of capitalist society and build a liberated world.
Carol Costa, Roger Harris, Gerry Condon, David Paul, Rick Sterling, Marilyn Langois
The Task Force on the Americas, a 39-year-old human rights activist organization, reports back on the positive examples of Latin American countries and grassroots movements offering a vision of a better world, resisting US imperialism .
Jonathon Rosenblum, Bia LaCombe, more TBAConcept: How do working people use electoral politics to build movements and maintain their independence from big business and its money. We will draw on the experience of 2014-2024 when Seattle had an independent socialist city council person.
Jonathon Rosenblum, Bia LaCombe, & TBA
How do working people use electoral politics to build movements and maintain their independence from big business and its money. We will draw on the experience of 2014-2024 when Seattle had an independent socialist city council person.
