Recordings from ACAB 2024
Here we share audio recordings of the presentations we had permission and capacity to record. The voices of audience members have been re-recorded where we didn’t have consent to use them. Check the download links below, or visit Archive.Org to play them. More audios coming soon.
Disabled Ecologies with Sunaura Taylor
Friday, June 28th, 2024
2:30-3:30pm @ Firestorm Books
Professor Sunaura Taylor will be presenting her book Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert, a powerful analysis and call to action that reveals disability as one of the defining features of environmental devastation and resistance.
Abortion Beyond the State with Jex Blackmore and Hydra Mutual Aid Fund
Friday, June 28th, 2024
4-5pm @ Firestorm Books
Government control of reproductive capacity has long persisted as a tool to subordinate birthing people, women, people of color, people living on lower incomes, and other marginalized groups. The Supreme Court’s harmful ruling in Dobbs made clear that both the State, its actors, and the non-profit industrial complex have failed the people, giving rise to the urgent necessity for the movement to defend itself through direct provisions to community. This workshop will provide context to the current crisis surrounding bodily autonomy and reproduction and share a roadmap for subverting state control by building networks of support to provide safe and effective abortion regardless of legality.
Punk—Dangerous Utopia: Revisiting the Relationship between Punk and Anarchism with CrimethInc
Friday, June 28th, 2024
4-5pm @ West Asheville Library
How did punk emerge out of the countercultures of the 1960s that it claimed to reject? Why did it play such a central role in the resurgence of anarchism around the world at the end of the 20th century? How did it prefigure the participatory media of the digital age? And what can its legacy teach today’s anti-capitalist and anti-fascist movements?
The No-State Solution: Histories and Realities with Mohammed Bamyeh
Saturday, June 29th, 2024
10:30 – 12pm @ Firestorm Books
Beginning with a sketch as to why the “obvious” solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have never materialized, this talk moves on to identify structures that makes solutions that appear “realistic” to be actually impossible in practical terms. It addresses histories of Palestinian self-organization and agency as well as larger Middle Eastern social histories to show the error of focusing on states and state-centered solutions—the idea being that modern states in the region have all an imposed nature, which each state being the enemy of a substantial part of the population it rules, and further how these states generate conflicts and wars by the very nature of their structure. The larger Middle Eastern context currently includes five major wars, countless smaller zones of hostilities or civil wars, and impending financial collapse of a few countries. The idea of the no-state solution is offered as an adjustment to the historical nature of social self-organization in the region.
Download Audio / Transcript / Youtube video link
An Anarchism of Despair with Shuli Branson and Cindy Barukh Milstein
Saturday, June 29th, 2024
1 – 2pm @ The Odd
After October 7, the upswell of Palestinian solidarity has been heartening. But in the mechanics of the movement itself, we have found ourselves stuck in outdated forms of protest, marching in circles, making demands that will never be heeded. It feels like each iteration of rebellion meets its end at the blatancy of power: we are shown again that those who govern won’t help us. And all this while watching a genocide in real time, feeling desperate and powerless. We have the energy and will, but not the means. What can we do, then, with this spike of liberatory urges? This discussion with Shuli Branson and Cindy Barukh Milstein will interrogate anarchism at this particular moment from the position of despair. Where does it meet its limits? Where does it show up to keep the energy going? Are we endlessly hitting our heads against the wall ? Or does our effort need to be seen in the long view? When faced with the impossibility of liberation and action, where do we go?
“All Will Be Equalized!”: Georgia’s Freedom Seekers of the Swamps, Backwoods, and Sea Islands with Andrew Zonneveld and Modibo Kadalie
Saturday, June 29th, 2024
4:30 – 5:30pm @ Firestorm Books
Andrew Zonneveld and Modibo Kadalie present a new book documenting 350 years of multi-racial solidarity through anti-slavery activity in Georgia.
Keynote: “Solidarity, Spirituality and Liberatory Promise on a Turtle’s Back” by Ashanti Alston
Saturday, June 29th, 2024
6-8pm @ Sly Grog
Trusting in solidarity, the mysterium of spirituality, and a promise from god knows where—a “where” that at this historical moment, might just be Palestine. What does it mean TO BE in the midst of all this right now? RIGHT NOW!
M. Ashanti Alston is a revolutionary Black nationalist, anarchist, abolitionist, speaker, writer, elder motivator. A long-time member of The Jericho Movement, he is presently an advisory board member of the National Jericho Movement and co-founding board member of the Center for Grassroots Organizing (Vermont land project). He continues giving talks and writing inspirational analyses concerning the dismantling of the myriad oppressive regimes in which we find ourselves enmeshed.
Ashanti is one of the few former members of the Black Panther Party who identifies as an anarchist in the tradition of ancestor Kwesi Balagoon (BPP & BLA). He developed abolitionist politics in the early years of Critical Resistance. He has helped save the life of a baby pig with animal liberationists, learned depth-queer politics from being challenged, and wants to see non-ego eldership partaking through sincerely loving the younger generations who truly want to ‘CARRY IT ON.”
Taking the State Out of the Body: Embodied Anti-Zionist Practice with Eliana Rubin (Sanctuary Embodied)
Sunday, June 30th, 2024
10:30am – 12pm @ The Odd
The fight for Palestine is a fight for all of our aliveness. We cannot afford to be numb. The ongoing colonization of Palestine and current genocide we are witnessing can feel unbearably devastating. And yet, we must keep feeling so that we can keep fighting. As Jews, our trauma has been weaponized as a moral cover for genocide. And as people in the belly of the imperialist beast of the U.S., the government counts on our numbness as we implicitly consent to billions of dollars being sent to the Israeli apartheid state every year. We must keep feeling. We must keep resisting. We must keep transforming. In this workshop we will: -Disentangle from Zionist propaganda -Root into anti-Zionist and anti-fascist histories of resistance -Workshop difficult conversations -Debrief organizing experiences -Create space for our collective grief -Co-create a transformative environment through popular education and applied practice.
From Activist to Terrorist with Jake Conroy
Sunday, June 30th, 2024
10:30am – 12pm @ Firestorm Books
Jake will talk about his involvement as an organizer with the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty Campaign (SHAC), a decentralized, uncompromising pressure campaign in the early 2000s, that took on some of the biggest pharmaceutical and financial institutions, and pushed them over like dominos. He will talk about how this led to the biggest FBI investigation of the time, as well as the repression they experienced from the US government and corporate investigators, as well as by the Bureau of Prisons while incarcerated. He will discuss being the target of a multi-agency terrorism investigation, what life is like inside the prison industrial complex, learning he was on a high-profile prisoners list, and navigating living a life branded as a terrorist in post-9/11 society.