A Thousand Small Fires

What came from the state after Hurricane Katrina was not aid. It was armor. On August 29, 2005, the storm breached New Orleans's levee system in more than fifty places, killing more than eighteen hundred people across the Gulf Coast, while National Guard troops arrived under orders to shoot and kill and food and water took days longer to reach anyone.Malik Rahim, a former Black Panther, and three fellow organisers founded the Common Ground Collective six days after landfall, with no funding and no authorization from anyone above them. This episode doesn't look away from what the state's own agents did that same week either: the Danziger Bridge shootings, the Gretna bridge blockade, and white vigilante patrols in Algiers Point who shot at least eleven Black men. Common Ground's actual record, a free clinic that has logged sixty thousand patient visits, twenty-two thousand volunteers over six years, sits against Naomi Klein's account of the "disaster capitalism" that fired 7,500 teachers and demolished public housing HUD's own inspectors had called structurally sound.It closes with an honest complication: one of Common Ground's own founders became an FBI informant, and the pattern this show traced through COINTELPRO two episodes earlier reached even here, at the founding table.Further reading: Scott Crow, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective (PM Press, 2011) Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Metropolitan Books, 2007) A.C. Thompson, "Katrina's Hidden Race War," ProPublica/The Nation, 2008–2009 Democracy Now!, "Prominent Austin Activist Admits He Infiltrated RNC Protest Groups as FBI Informant" (January 6, 2009) Elena Poniatowska, Nothing, Nobody: The Voices of the Mexico City Earthquake (Temple University Press, 1995)Tags: Hurricane Katrina, Common Ground Collective, Malik Rahim, mutual aid, disaster capitalism, Naomi Klein, Danziger Bridge, Algiers Point, New Orleans, Mexico City earthquake, brigadistas, state failure, anarchismShow notes: Black Flags in the Flood: Katrina, Common Ground, and What the State Left to Drown. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 6Hurricane Katrina wasn't a natural disaster so much as a test the state failed on camera, in real time — the anarchists and one longtime Black Panther who built the rescue the government didn't, and what happened to New Orleans once the water receded.In this episode:Malik Rahim, Scott Crow, and the founding of Common Ground CollectiveThe Algiers Point vigilante shootings and Donnell HerringtonThe Danziger Bridge shootings and the Gretna bridge blockadeCommon Ground's free clinic, 22,000 volunteers, six years of workNaomi Klein, disaster capitalism, and the firing of 7,500 teachersThe demolition of New Orleans's "Big Four" public housingThe 1985 Mexico City earthquake and the topos who dug survivors out by handBrandon Darby's FBI informant betrayal, and what survived it anyway

On August 9, 2014, a Ferguson, Missouri police officer shot and killed an unarmed eighteen-year-old named Michael Brown and left his body in the street for four hours. What happened next did not come from a headquarters. A rapper helped found Hands Up United. Three young women formed Millennial Activists United days later, because the loudest microphones in the street kept finding their way to men. Nobody asked anybody's permission first.That organising sits alongside the founding of Black Lives Matter a year earlier by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, who insisted the movement was "leaderful, not leaderless." Ferguson organisers had already absorbed the lesson from COINTELPRO and the assassination of Fred Hampton, that a movement with no single leader has no throat for the state to reach for — the same structural instinct that shows up half a world away in Hong Kong's 2019 "Be Water" protests.What decentralisation doesn't solve gets an honest accounting too: a foundation that quietly bought a $6 million house, and a media apparatus that, when a leaderless movement declined to supply a face, simply invented one anyway.Further reading: Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement (Little, Brown, 2016) "Whose Streets?" (2017), directed by Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis Alicia Garza, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart (One World, 2020) Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021) Ming Sho Ho, "Solidarity and Implications of a Leaderless Movement," Communist and Post-Communist Studies (on Hong Kong's 2019 protests)Tags: Ferguson, Michael Brown, Black Lives Matter, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, decentralized organizing, leaderful movement, Hong Kong protests, Be Water, COINTELPRO, Mariame Kaba, We Charge Genocide, anarchismShow notes: Ferguson and the Streets. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 5Ferguson produced a horizontal, mutual-aid-driven uprising with no headquarters and no single leader, and then the press, the politicians, and eventually the market went looking for a face anyway. This is what happened when they found one.In this episode:Hands Up United, Millennial Activists United, and the Organization for Black StruggleWater, milk, and legal observers: how a leaderless response actually organises itselfAlicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and "leaderful, not leaderless"COINTELPRO, Fred Hampton, and why decentralisation is a strategy, not an accidentMariame Kaba, We Charge Genocide, and UN testimony that echoed a 1951 petitionHong Kong 2019 and the "Be Water" protestsThe Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation's $6 million houseDeRay Mckesson and the leader the media invented

In 1979, a man named Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin sat in a cell at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, serving a life sentence, and wrote a pamphlet arguing that Black liberation did not need a new state built in place of the old one. He called the alternative the Black Commune. He did not arrive at that idea through a European text. He arrived at it through SNCC, the Black Panther Party, and years of watching the American state hunt him personally.Ervin's argument runs through Kuwasi Balagoon, a Black Panther and Panther 21 defendant who called himself a New Afrikan anarchist and was also, openly, bisexual at a moment when almost no one in the armed Black liberation movement was saying that in public; through Ashanti Alston's insight that the Panthers' own slogan, "all power to the people," was already anarchistic before he ever read the theory; and into the present, at Cooperation Jackson, a federation of worker cooperatives built in Jackson, Mississippi on the same argument Ervin made forty-five years earlier.Two centuries earlier, at Quilombo dos Palmares, a self-governing Brazilian community survived six Portuguese military expeditions and lasted nearly ninety years. And there's the Haitian Revolution, the only nation in world history founded by a successful uprising of enslaved people, forced afterward to pay for the privilege of having won.Further reading: Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition (Pluto Press, 2021) Kuwasi Balagoon, A Soldier's Story: Revolutionary Writings by a New Afrikan Anarchist (Kersplebedeb/PM Press) William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi, As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (AK Press, 2018) BlackPast.org, "Palmares (ca. 1605-1694)" and "Haitian Revolution (1791-1804)" Cooperation Jackson — cooperationjackson.orgTags: Black anarchism, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Kuwasi Balagoon, Ashanti Alston, Black Panther Party, New Afrikan anarchism, Palmares, Zumbi, Haitian Revolution, Cooperation Jackson, Anarchist People of Colour, Black radical tradition, anarchismShow notes: Black Anarchism: The Tradition the White Left Keeps Forgetting. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 4The anarchist canon this show quotes most either ignored Black radical thought entirely or engaged with it only once it had been filtered through a European vocabulary — this one follows the radicals who built anti-authoritarian politics from lived experience of the state, and the self-governing communities that predate the theory by centuries.In this episode:Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin and Anarchism and the Black Revolution, written in a Marion, Illinois cellKuwasi Balagoon, the Black Liberation Army, and New Afrikan anarchismAshanti Alston and "Beyond Nationalism, But Not Without It"William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi's As Black as ResistanceThe Anarchist People of Colour conference and Pedro Ribeiro's "Senzala or Quilombo"Quilombo dos Palmares — ninety years of self-governance in BrazilThe Haitian Revolution and the 150-million-franc debt that followed itCooperation Jackson and the Jackson-Kush Plan, built today

In 1892, a twenty-two-year-old anarchist named Alexander Berkman walked into a steel magnate's office and shot him. He served fourteen years for it, and it was in that Pennsylvania prison, not a lecture hall, that one of the most significant American texts on homosexuality before the twentieth century's midpoint got written.Queer anarchism runs from Berkman's Prison Memoirs through Emma Goldman's public defence of Oscar Wilde, at a time when almost no public figure would touch it, into the Two-Spirit traditions that predate the word "anarchism" by centuries and the decolonial history of their erasure. José Esteban Muñoz's argument that queerness is a horizon, not yet here, sits alongside ACT UP's dual structure, built so a small affinity group could chain itself to a stock exchange balcony without the open floor ever knowing it was coming. And there's Simon Nkoli, who came out to his co-defendants inside a South African treason trial that carried the death penalty, and went on to help organise the first Pride march anywhere on the African continent.Where queer theory and anarchist theory pull apart gets named too: a canon built almost entirely by straight men who rarely theorised gender or sexuality at all, and a queer theory that can drift toward the personal at the expense of the structural. Neither tradition gets a pass.Further reading: José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NYU Press, 2009) Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke University Press, 2004) Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (Mother Earth Publishing, 1912; available free via Project Gutenberg) Terence Kissack, Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895-1917 (AK Press, 2008) South African History Online, Simon Nkoli — sahistory.org.zaTags: queer anarchism, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, José Esteban Muñoz, queer theory, Two-Spirit, Simon Nkoli, ACT UP, apartheid, Bash Back, queer futurity, LGBTQ history, anarchismShow notes: Queer Anarchists. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 3Queer anarchism has existed for well over a century under different names, a tradition both mainstream queer politics and the mostly white, mostly male anarchist canon have had a habit of forgetting was ever there, from a Pennsylvania prison cell to a treason trial in South Africa, asking where the two traditions actually meet.In this episode:Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs and its unlikely place in LGBTQ historyEmma Goldman's public defence of Oscar Wilde and "The Intermediate Sex"Two-Spirit traditions and the decolonial history of gender varianceJosé Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, and queer futurity's disagreement with Lee EdelmanMary Nardini Gang's "Toward the Queerest Insurrection"ACT UP's dual structure and the Sell Wellcome actionSimon Nkoli, the Delmas Treason Trial, and Africa's first Pride marchWhere queer theory and anarchist theory actually pull apart

In 1974, a psychologist named Herbert Freudenberger needed a word for what he was watching happen to himself and the other volunteers at a free clinic in New York: people who believed their work was too urgent to rest, wearing down until they were useless to the cause they cared about most. He called it burnout. Fifty years later the word is everywhere, mostly drained of its original edge.This episode turns inward, away from movements and toward the bodies inside them. It follows Audre Lorde's argument that "caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare," written while she was living with the cancer that would kill her, and traces the same idea through adrienne maree brown's Pleasure Activism, Tricia Hersey's Rest as Reparations, and ACT UP's political funerals, where grief itself became protest. It looks at Ella Baker's group-centered leadership, built specifically so a movement wouldn't depend on any single person's stamina to survive, and at Standing Rock, where thousands of people learned the same lesson at the scale of an entire encampment.It closes somewhere less tidy than a manifesto wants: rest gets sold back as a bath bomb, and the crises this show has spent two seasons naming are not on pause while anyone recovers. Both of those things are true at once.Further reading: Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: And Other Essays (Firebrand Books, 1988; Ixia Press reissue, 2017) adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (AK Press, 2019) Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto (Little, Brown Spark, 2022) Cher Weixia Chen and Paul C. Gorski, "Burnout in Social Justice and Human Rights Activists," Journal of Human Rights Practice, 2015 John L. Hammond, "Mística, meaning and popular education in the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement," Interface: a journal for and about social movements, 6(1), 2014Tags: burnout, activist burnout, grief, Audre Lorde, adrienne maree brown, Tricia Hersey, rest as resistance, transformative justice, Ella Baker, SNCC, ACT UP, political funerals, MST, mística, Buen Vivir, healing justice, anarchismShow notes: Burnout, Grief, and Staying in It A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 2Burnout ends more organising careers than any raid or arrest ever has, and this episode argues that's not incidental, it's a test of a movement's actual politics: the difference between caring enough to act and knowing when to rest, and what infrastructure, not willpower, actually makes staying possible.In this episode:Herbert Freudenberger and the 1974 origin of the word "burnout"Chen and Gorski's research into martyrdom culture in activist spacesAudre Lorde: "self-preservation... is an act of political warfare"adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism, and Emergent StrategyTricia Hersey, The Nap Ministry, and Rest as ReparationsACT UP's political funerals and the Ashes ActionCara Page, healing justice, and grief treated as organisingElla Baker's group-centered leadership and Standing RockMST's mística and Buen Vivir, written into two national constitutions

Every time you use a free app, search for something, or let a website remember who you are, you generate more information than the service actually needs to function. That extra information used to be treated as waste. It became, instead, the entire business model.The internet, and now the systems we call artificial intelligence, are not neutral tools that happened to get built — they're a second enclosure of the commons, continuing in a different material. From there it moves through Shoshana Zuboff's concept of behavioural surplus, Kate Crawford's account of the lithium, water, and labour hidden behind "the cloud," and a TIME investigation that found OpenAI's content-moderation pipeline ran partly through Kenyan workers paid as little as $1.32 an hour, into Joy Buolamwini's research on racial bias in facial recognition and a wrongful arrest in Detroit, and Meredith Whittaker's argument that AI isn't separate from the surveillance business model — it's an expansion of it.Where the alternative is already being built gets equal time: the hacker ethic that predates anarchist theory by decades, a rural South African cooperative that beat NYC Mesh to community-owned internet by two years, and a driver-owned rideshare app proving the current arrangement was a choice, not a law of nature.Further reading: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2019) Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI (Yale University Press, 2021) Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Doubleday, 1984) James Boyle, "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain," Law & Contemporary Problems, 2003 — available via Duke Law, law.duke.edu Joy Buolamwini, Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines (Random House, 2023) Billy Perrigo, "OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour," TIME, January 18, 2023 The Drivers Cooperative — drivers.coop Zenzeleni Networks — zenzeleni.netTags: surveillance capitalism, AI ethics, algorithmic bias, digital enclosure, facial recognition, data labor, platform cooperativism, mesh networks, Shoshana Zuboff, Kate Crawford, Joy Buolamwini, Meredith Whittaker, GNU, free software, Cambridge Analytica, predictive policing, anarchismShow notes: The Algorithm Is Not Neutral A Thousand Small Fires — Season 2, Episode 1A small number of companies control the infrastructure that decides what billions of people see, buy, and are believed to be — how that happened, what it actually costs the people invisible inside the supply chain, and where people are already building outside its walls.In this episode:James Boyle's "second enclosure" and the enclosure thread this show picked up in season oneShoshana Zuboff, behavioural surplus, and instrumentarian powerKate Crawford's Atlas of AI — the lithium, the water, the labour behind "the cloud"OpenAI, Sama, and Kenyan data labellers paid $1.32 an hourMeredith Whittaker, the AI Now Institute, and AI as surveillance advertising's expansionCambridge Analytica and the infrastructure that made it possibleJoy Buolamwini, Gender Shades, and the wrongful arrest of Robert WilliamsThe hacker ethic, GNU/Linux, and Wikipedia — anarchist practice before anarchist theoryZenzeleni Networks, NYC Mesh, and the Drivers Cooperative

In July 1915, a woman named Luisa Capetillo was arrested in Havana for wearing trousers in public. She didn't apologize. She told the judge she always wore pants, and the charges were dropped. It's the only part of her life most people have heard, if they've heard anything at all.For a decade before that arrest, and years after it, Capetillo worked as a lectora, reading newspapers, novels, and anarchist theory aloud to cigar and tobacco workers who couldn't read for themselves, on factory floors across Puerto Rico, Cuba, Florida, and New York. She wrote one of the most direct early arguments in the Spanish-speaking world for women's liberation as part of the revolution, not an issue to deal with afterward. And she organized: in 1916 she helped lead a sugar strike that pulled out over forty thousand workers across Puerto Rico, still one of the largest labor actions in the island's history.This episode covers her childhood in Arecibo, the practice of the lectora and why factory owners fought to ban it, her writing on marriage and free love, the 1916 strike, a political compromise in 1919 that's worth sitting with rather than smoothing over, and the farm school she built at the end of her life on the theory that reading and organizing were never really separate.There's a harder question underneath it too: why a woman who organized forty thousand workers into her country's largest strike is harder to find in the history of anarchism than men who wrote considerably less and organized considerably fewer people.Further reading: Norma Valle-Ferrer, Luisa Capetillo, Pioneer Puerto Rican Feminist (Peter Lang, 2006; originally published in Spanish as Luisa Capetillo: Historia de una mujer proscrita, 1990) Luisa Capetillo, A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks Out / Mi opinión sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer, ed. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez (Arte Público Press, 2004)Tags: Luisa Capetillo, anarchism, feminism, Puerto Rico history, labor history, women's history, tobacco workers, lectora, general strike, free love, Caribbean historyShow notes:The reader, the trousers, the tobacco floor A Thousand Small FiresLuisa Capetillo read anarchist theory aloud to tobacco workers who couldn't read for themselves, wrote one of the earliest direct arguments for women's liberation in the Spanish-speaking world, and organized forty thousand sugar workers into Puerto Rico's largest strike. This episode is an attempt to give her the ten minutes most anarchist histories didn't.In this episode:The Havana arrest, and the line that got the charges droppedWhat a lectora was, and why factory owners tried to ban themEnsayos Libertarios and her arguments on marriage and free loveOrganizing across Puerto Rico, Cuba, Florida, and New YorkThe 1916 sugar strike, and the arrest that followed it in Ceiba and ViequesThe 1919 Socialist Workers Party campaign, and what it cost her principlesThe farm school, and her death in 1922Why she's missing from most histories of anarchism, and what that absence has in common with Voltairine de Cleyre and Lucy Parsons

On May 5, 1920, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested on a streetcar outside Boston, carrying loaded pistols and lying to police about where they'd been. Three weeks earlier, two men had been shot dead in a payroll robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Sacco and Vanzetti had nothing to do with it. They were anarchists trying to protect their community, two days after a friend held in secret federal custody fell to his death from a fourteenth-floor window.That's not a footnote. It's the reason the case became what it became: a shoemaker and a fish peddler convicted less on evidence than on their politics, their nationality, and their fear, then executed seven years later, after a confession from the actual robber was thrown out and a governor's own advisory panel found the rigged trial fair.This episode is about the two men underneath the trial everyone half-remembers. Where they came from. What they believed. The militant anarchist movement around them, which included real bombings alongside real innocence. And what got said, in the last weeks of their lives, in the letters they wrote to each other and to the people trying to save them.It also sits with the harder question: what do you do with a case where the men on trial were framed, but the movement they belonged to wasn't uniformly peaceful? Honesty doesn't land cleanly on either side of that story.Further reading: Bruce Watson, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind (Pantheon, 2007) Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton University Press, 1991) The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, ed. Marion Frankfurter and Gardner Jackson (Viking Press, 1928) Massachusetts state archive on the case — mass.gov/info-details/sacco-vanzetti-who-were-sacco-vanzettiTags: Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchism, Red Scare, Palmer Raids, Luigi Galleani, Andrea Salsedo, wrongful conviction, labor history, Italian immigration, 1920s America, Judge Webster Thayer, capital punishment, Haymarket, Governor Michael Dukakis, direct action, state violence, anarchist historyShow notes:The shoemaker, the fish peddler, and the car nobody got to drive A Thousand Small FiresSacco and Vanzetti were arrested for a robbery and murder they didn't commit, on a night they were actually trying to protect their friends from the Palmer Raids. This episode traces the two men's lives before the arrest, the trial that convicted them anyway, and the seven years of appeals that ended in execution.In this episode:The arrest that had nothing to do with the robberyAndrea Salsedo's death and the Palmer RaidsSacco and Vanzetti's lives before 1920 — a shoe factory, a fish cart, and the 1916 Plymouth Cordage strikeThe trial, Judge Webster Thayer, and the confession that was thrown outSeven years of appeals, and the Lowell Committee's verdictThe letters — a furious one to the Defense Committee, a tender one to a fourteen-year-old boyWhat the Galleanisti's real bombings mean for how this story gets toldGovernor Dukakis's 1977 proclamation, fifty years later