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A Thousand Small Fires
An anarchist, feminist, queer podcast that uses better questions instead of easy answers.
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9. Ep:9 The State Is Not Your Friend
17:52||Season 1, Ep. 9The state isn't failing us. For many people, it's working exactly as intended.Anarchism has one of the clearest and most historically grounded critiques of state power — one that long predates the modern left's debates about reform vs. revolution. In this episode of A Thousand Small Fires, we sit with that critique seriously: What is the state, structurally? What does it exist to protect? And what does it mean to build political life outside of — or against — it?We look at the anarchist argument that the state is not a neutral container for democratic will, but a machine for enforcing hierarchy — of class, race, gender, and empire. We look at how state violence isn't a bug or an abuse of power, but its foundation. And we ask what it means to want something different, without falling back on a simpler state or a better government.This isn't an episode about chaos. It's about clarity.A Thousand Small Fires is an anarchist podcast exploring political ideas with rigour, care, and a refusal to simplify. New episodes drop every Monday.Further ReadingPyotr Kropotkin — The State: Its Historic Role (1896) — one of the foundational anarchist texts on how the modern state emerged through the destruction of mutual aid and self-governanceEmma Goldman — Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) — especially "The Individual, Society and the State"Murray Bookchin — The Ecology of Freedom (1982) — on hierarchy, domination, and the state as a social relationJames C. Scott — Seeing Like a State (1998) — how states make populations legible and controllable, often at enormous human costFrantz Fanon — The Wretched of the Earth (1961) — on colonial state violence and the limits of national liberationAngela Davis — Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) — the carceral state as a racialised institutionDavid Graeber — Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004) — short, accessible, and sharp on stateless societies and political imaginationPeter Gelderloos — Anarchy Works (2010) — practical examples of stateless organisation across historyEpisode Tagsanarchism, the state, state power, political theory, state violence, police, prison abolition, Emma Goldman, Kropotkin, James C. Scott, Frantz Fanon, hierarchy, mutual aid, abolition, political philosophy, feminist theory, decolonisation, radical politics, anti-capitalism, anarchist podcast
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8. Ep:8 Love, Hierarchy, and the Anarchist Case Against the Couple Form
18:29||Season 1, Ep. 8The anarchist tradition has spent a lot of time thinking about who controls the workplace, the land, the state. It has spent less time asking the same question about something closer and more uncomfortable: who controls the relationship?Marriage, as a legal form, is not primarily about love. It is about property — inheritance, tax liability, the state's authority to decide which love is real and which families are legitimate. Emma Goldman understood this in her essay Marriage and Love: that the institution takes genuine human longing and organises it into ownership. She refused it her whole life, and privately burned with the jealousy and need that the structures she opposed had built inside her. That gap — between the world we argue for and the people we already are — is the most honest place to argue from.Elizabeth Brake coined the term amatonormativity in 2012 to name the assumption that everyone is better off in an exclusive romantic couple — an assumption that structures law, economics, and inner life, and discriminates against almost everyone whose most important relationships don't fit the script. Andie Nordgren's relationship anarchy manifesto applies anarchist principles directly to intimate life: no ranking of people, no predetermined scripts, relationships designed consciously by the people inside them.This episode also looks beyond the Western anarchist tradition. Across South Asia, West Africa, and Latin America, the nuclear couple has never been the dominant unit of care. The Hausa tradition of reciprocal support names something Kropotkin was arguing — mutual dependence as social foundation — lived in the texture of intimate life without the European theoretical vocabulary.Topics: relationship anarchy, anarchism, amatonormativity, Emma Goldman, Andie Nordgren, Elizabeth Brake, free love, chosen family, care work, nuclear family, joint family, mutual aid, intimate politics, decolonisation.Further reading: — Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) — Voltairine de Cleyre, They Who Marry Do Ill (1907) — free at theanarchistlibrary.org — Elizabeth Brake, Minimizing Marriage (2012) — Andie Nordgren, The Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy (2006) — free at theanarchistlibrary.org — Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now (2019)7. Ep:7 Queer Liberation Was Never a Legal Project
21:13||Season 1, Ep. 7Queerness, in the anarchist frame, is not an identity category. It is a political position — the refusal of the compulsory, the normal, the assigned. The refusal to accept that the state should be in the business of certifying which love is real.This episode traces what happened when that refusal became a legal campaign. Stonewall 1969 was a riot led by trans women of colour and homeless queer youth. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera built STAR House from a truck in 1970 — a shelter for homeless trans kids, funded by their own sex work, governed horizontally. Rivera was booed at the 1973 gay liberation rally for being too radical.But the American story is only part of it. In India, the hijra community held court authority under the Mughal Empire for centuries — until the British Raj criminalised them with Section 377 in 1860, a colonial law imposed on 42 countries that had no equivalent at home. In Uganda, the laws used to persecute queer people today were introduced by British colonial administrators, not by African tradition. In Brazil, the travesti communities built mutual aid networks and political organisations against state violence decades before the mainstream movement noticed they existed.The laws criminalising queer life across the Global South are not ancient local traditions. They are colonial exports. And the communities that resisted them did so through exactly the practices this show keeps returning to: mutual aid, horizontal organising, building the world you need without asking permission.ACT UP's direct action cut the price of AZT. Bash Back kept asking the question the mainstream movement had stopped asking. The argument has never stopped being made — everywhere, in different forms, for a very long time.Topics: queer anarchism, Stonewall, Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, STAR House, ACT UP, marriage equality, Bash Back, Section 377, hijra, colonial law, Brazil, travestis, ASTRAL, food sovereignty, queer liberation, trans rights, decolonisation.Further reading:— Susan Stryker, Transgender History (2008)— Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007)— Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? (2003)— Enze Han & Joseph O'Mahoney, British Colonialism and the Criminalisation of Homosexuality (2018)— José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (2009)6. Ep: 6 The Women Who Built Anarchism
16:00||Season 1, Ep. 6Anarchism has a feminist core. Not added later, not bolted on — there from the beginning. This episode is about three women who built the tradition and were largely written out of its history.Emma Goldman: deported from the United States in 1919 after decades of organising, lecturing, and writing, arriving in the Soviet Union expecting a revolution and finding a state. Voltairine de Cleyre: the woman Emma Goldman called the most gifted anarchist America had ever produced, largely unknown today, who coined the term "anarchism without adjectives" and was shot by a former student and declined to press charges. Lucy Parsons: born into slavery around 1851, who helped lead 80,000 workers in the Chicago general strike of 1886, co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World, and whose papers were seized by the Chicago Police Department the day she died.Three women. Three different forms of punishment for the same crime. The punishment is not an accident — it is the argument.Topics: Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Lucy Parsons, anarcha-feminism, anarchism without adjectives, Haymarket, IWW, women in anarchism, radical history, deported.Further reading:— Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (1911)— Paul Avrich, An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre (1978)— Eugenia C. DeLamotte, ed., Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre (2005)— Carolyn Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons: An American Revolutionary (1976)— Emma Goldman, Living My Life (1931)Tags: anarchism, feminist history, Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Lucy Parsons, anarcha-feminism, radical women, IWW, Haymarket, women's history, political history, anarchist podcast5. Ep:5 Food, Land, and the Common Table — Part 2: The Seed in the Pavement
16:38||Season 1, Ep. 5In the United States, you can buy a cheeseburger on almost any corner in South Central Los Angeles. Finding a fresh tomato requires a forty-five-minute drive. That is not geography. That is food apartheid — a term coined by food justice advocate Karen Washington that names the agent rather than naturalising the condition.This episode brings the food sovereignty argument into the cities of the Global North. Liz Christy and the Green Guerillas turning a rubble-filled lot in New York into the first community garden in 1973. Food Not Bombs — founded in 1980, over a thousand arrests in San Francisco for feeding people in public. Ron Finley planting vegetables outside his house in South Central and being cited by the city of Los Angeles for gardening without a permit.The anarchist argument running through all of it: the problem is never scarcity. It is distribution. And the seed in the pavement is already the argument, made in soil.Topics: food apartheid, guerrilla gardening, Food Not Bombs, Karen Washington, Liz Christy, Ron Finley, prefigurative politics, mutual aid, community gardens, direct action.Further reading:— Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (2020)— Richard Reynolds, On Guerrilla Gardening (2008)— Robert Gottlieb & Anupama Joshi, Food Justice (2010)— Wendell Berry, Bringing It to the Table (2009)4. Ep:4 Food, Land, and the Common Table — Part 1: The Earth Is Not for Sale
17:18||Season 1, Ep. 4The most fundamental question in anarchist politics is not about the state or the prison. It is about food. Because the question of who controls the means of subsistence — who owns the land, who owns the seed, who decides what gets grown and who gets to eat — is the question underneath every other question. If you cannot feed yourself outside the terms set by someone who owns the earth you stand on, you will accept almost any condition they impose. Hunger is the oldest coercion. Enclosure is the oldest expropriation.This episode centres the Global South, because that is where the argument about food and land has always been fought most clearly and at the greatest cost. The Zapatistas rising on January 1, 1994 — not against the government, but against NAFTA, which they called a death sentence for the milpa, the ancient polyculture Maya communities had cultivated for thousands of years. The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra in Brazil — the largest social movement in Latin America, which has won land titles for more than 400,000 families through direct occupation since 1979. The Dalit women of Telangana who built community seed banks to break their dependency on landlords and patent-holders. And Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers of 1649: the earth is a common treasury.The concept that ties it all together: food sovereignty, coined by La Via Campesina at the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome.Topics: food sovereignty, Zapatistas, MST Brazil, seed banks, Deccan Development Society, Winstanley, Diggers, La Via Campesina, enclosure, anarchism, NAFTA, milpa, Silvia Federici.Further reading: — Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (2004) — Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom and Other Writings (1652, ed. Christopher Hill, 1973) — Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved (2007) — Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done (2017) — La Via Campesina, La Via Campesina: Globalising Hope (2013)3. Ep:3 The Work Nobody Counts
15:03||Season 1, Ep. 3Imagine that everyone doing unpaid care work decided to stop. Not strike — just stop. The economy would not slow down. It would collapse within days.This episode is about the labour that capitalism runs on and refuses to name. Cooking, childcare, emotional support, tending the sick and old — not domestic life separate from political life, but the economy underneath the economy. Silvia Federici's argument: the housewifisation of women was not a natural development. It was enforced.Sometimes violently. The witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were, in her reading, a mechanism of social control.Also: the Wages for Housework campaign of 1972, its founders and its internal feminist debate. Arlie Hochschild on the second shift and the global care chain. And the anarchist question underneath all of it: what would a society look like if care were its central organising value?Topics: care work, Silvia Federici, anarcha-feminism, Wages for Housework, Arlie Hochschild, global care chain, reproductive labour, capitalism, feminist theory.Further reading: — Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (2004) — Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero (2012) — Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift (1989) — Arlie Hochschild & Barbara Ehrenreich (eds.), Global Woman (2002) — Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics (2017)