Name: Arise and Resist: Organizing for Peace and Justice Under Repression
Start: 2025-01-19T09:30:00-05:00
Location: Roxbury Community College Media Arts Center

Arise and Resist: Organizing for Peace and Justice Under Repression

The purpose of this conference is to bring together a mass movement and situate ourselves in our political reality of repression in the US, genocide in Palestine, expanding US-Israeli war in West Asia, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the impending US confrontation with China. We must work in alliance with each other to build a society based on solidarity, peace, and justice. Our work here in Massachusetts will be shaped by national and international developments. We are holding this conference before the inauguration so we can prepare for the crises we will face after January 20.
We aim to take meaningful steps toward creating a vigorous alliance of organizations, unions, houses of worship, and other groups and individuals who pursue peace, protection of the earth, the well-being of working families, gender, sexual and reproductive rights, economic justice, and indigenous sovereignty, and oppose U.S. imperialism, militarism, genocide, racism, and other forms of oppression.
Over the past 15+ months, we have watched a live-streamed holocaust in Gaza, the acceleration of the ethnic cleansing and annexation of Palestinian land in the West Bank, the decimation of Southern Lebanon, the bombings of Yemeni ports, and the invasion and further occupation of Syria. With the complicity of U.S. cultural, academic, and other public institutions, a frontal assault on our civil liberties has begun: many speaking up against genocide have lost jobs, and university students have been brutalized on campus, suspended, and expelled. In Congress, a pending bill would give the incoming Trump administration the power to arbitrarily revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofit organizations, another would crack down on criticism of Israel. The tightly interwoven national security and surveillance programs of the U.S. and Israel used to surveil and exterminate Palestinians are already being deployed against our people at the border or in urban ghettos.
These challenges will intensify once Trump takes office. His top priorities include the mass deportation of up to 11 million immigrants which will require police state methods and concentration camps. The “Muslim ban” is once again on the horizon. Project 2025, once translated into policy, threatens civil liberties, public funding for education, and the rights of sexual and gender minorities.
Trump’s commitment to the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels presents the climate movement with its greatest challenge yet to reverse the increasingly deadly attacks on life on Earth. The transfer of wealth from the working class to the capitalist oligarchy will accelerate through more tax cuts for corporations and the ultra-wealthy and the slashing of public funding for healthcare, public education, and housing. Attacks on academic freedom and dissenting media will only increase.
These threats call for a more coordinated and strategic anti-war and pro-justice effort. We will likely face more overt repression than in most of our lifetimes. Yet this new landscape presents new openings and opportunities to build a more effective and lasting movement to create the world we envision. This is our moment to redouble our commitment to solidarity and defend ourselves, protect vulnerable groups, reach the disengaged and discouraged and expand our organizing to build broader constituencies and develop flexible strategies needed to survive and succeed. We must seize these opportunities together. Now!
On January 19, we will hear from national and local speakers, go deep into issues in breakouts, brainstorm solutions, and peruse literature tables.
The conference will be in person only. Sponsored by Massachusetts Peace Action, Boston Democratic Socialists of America, Northshore for Palestine, and Our Revolution Massachusetts. Cosponsored by American Friends Service Committee, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine, CD8 for Palestine, Doctors against Genocide, Extinction Rebellion Boston, Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution, and Jewish Voice for Peace Boston (list in formation).
Massachusetts progressive organizations are invited to sponsor or cosponsor the conference, help plan it, or to set up literature tables; organizations sign up here to do so.