A Thousand Small Fires

The founding constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World, written in 1905, contains a phrase that has stayed in anarchist and labour movements for over a century: building the new society in the shell of the old.It is not a metaphor for waiting. It is a description of what you do right now, today, inside the world as it exists. You do not wait for the conditions to be right. You build, in the present, the relationships and institutions and ways of being together that you want to characterise the future.This episode is about prefigurative politics — the most practical and the most demanding idea in the entire season. It asks what the twentieth century taught us about what happens when the means don't match the ends. It looks at what the Black Panther Party built with their survival programs, what the Zapatistas have sustained for thirty years in Chiapas, what the workers at Mondragón in the Basque Country built from a failing factory in 1956, and what thirty workers in a factory in Thessaloniki did in 2011 when their bosses walked away: voted 97.5% to keep running it themselves, changed production to ecological soap, and have been making it ever since — while the Greek state has repeatedly tried to evict them.It also asks the question prefigurative politics has never fully answered: how do you scale horizontal structures without reproducing the hierarchy you were trying to escape? And is scaling even the right goal?Further reading: Cindy Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations (AK Press, 2010) Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! (Pluto Press, 2008) Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy (AK Press, 2017) Schools for Chiapas — schoolsforchiapas.org Vio.Me worker cooperative — viome.orgTags: prefigurative politics, mutual aid, horizontal organisation, IWW, Black Panther Party, survival programs, Zapatistas, Mondragón, cooperatives, Vio.Me, worker self-management, dual power, anarchism, Emma Goldman, Spain 1936, Russian soviets, Sarvodaya, UbuntuShow notes:Building the world inside the shell of the old one A Thousand Small Fires — Episode 13Prefigurative politics means building the world you want to live in now, inside the world that already exists. This episode traces what that looks like in practice — from the Panthers' free breakfast programme to a factory in Greece where workers voted to keep making soap after their bosses left.In this episode:The IWW phrase and what it actually demandsEmma Goldman on means and ends — and what Russia 1917 and Spain 1936 demonstratedThe Black Panther Party's survival programs — more than 35 programmes, twenty thousand children fed dailyThe Zapatista autonomous communities in Chiapas — thirty years of self-governanceMondragón — the world's largest worker cooperative federation, with all its complicationsVio.Me, Thessaloniki — thirty workers, a vote, and ecological soapThe scaling problem: how do you grow horizontal structures without hierarchy reforming inside them?A question to carry: What are you already building — and what would it look like if you named it as prefigurative politics?

You have been hurt by someone close to you. You are standing in front of a choice nobody prepared you for. You can call the police, and maybe they help or maybe they arrest you too, deport your partner, or make things worse in ways you couldn't predict. Or you don't call. And you carry it alone.This is the situation millions of people face inside a system that spent decades calling itself feminist.Carceral feminism is the name for what happened when the mainstream feminist anti-violence movement aligned itself with the criminal justice system, mandatory arrest laws, longer sentences, more policing and called it protection. This episode traces how it happened: from the genuinely radical battered women's movement of the 1970s, through the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, to the documented reality that mandatory arrest policies increased arrests of women and did not reduce domestic violence rates.It asks who the carceral turn protected, and who it abandoned. Drawing on the work of Beth Richie, INCITE!, and the Color of Violence conference that brought two thousand people to UC Santa Cruz in 2000, it names the feminist alternative: community accountability, transformative justice, and the organisations already doing this work without adequate resources or recognition.It also looks beyond the US, at Ni Una Menos in Argentina and the feminist movement in Kenya that took to the streets in 2024 — and at what it means to build feminist politics in a context where the state is not a potential ally but a known source of harm.Further reading: Elizabeth Bernstein, "Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism," Signs (2010) Beth E. Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation (NYU Press, 2012) Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, Beth Richie, Abolition. Feminism. Now. (Haymarket, 2022) INCITE! Color of Violence anthology (South End Press, 2006) Victoria Law, "Against Carceral Feminism," Jacobin (2014) — free to read online Survived and Punished — survivedandpunished.org Audre Lorde Project — alp.orgTags: carceral feminism, feminist anti-violence movement, VAWA, Violence Against Women Act, mandatory arrest, Beth Richie, INCITE, Elizabeth Bernstein, transformative justice, community accountability, Ni Una Menos, Kenya EndFemicideKE, Black feminism, abolitionist feminism, gender violence, state violence, anarchismShow notes:Feminism that calls the police A Thousand Small Fires — Episode 12The mainstream feminist anti-violence movement spent three decades building a system that protected some survivors by making things worse for others. This episode asks how that happened, who paid the price, and what a feminism that starts from the most marginalised looks like instead.In this episode:Elizabeth Bernstein and the origins of carceral feminismThe battered women's movement of the 1970s and how it lost its radical politicsThe Violence Against Women Act 1994 — what it funded and what it producedMandatory arrest laws and the documented increase in women's arrestsBeth Richie and gender entrapment of Black womenThe Color of Violence conference 2000 and the founding of INCITE!The Audre Lorde Project and Survived and Punished — the alternatives already runningNi Una Menos and Kenya's EndFemicideKE — feminist politics built differentlyA question to carry: What would a feminism that starts from the most marginalised look like — not as a correction to what came before, but as the actual starting point?

There is a map on the wall of a government building somewhere. On that map, land has lines drawn through it. Those lines rest on a legal fiction: that the land was nobody's before the settlers arrived. Terra nullius. It was not true. The settlers knew it was not true. The fiction was not a mistake. It was a method.This episode is about settler colonialism as a structural analysis rather than a historical grievance. Drawing on Patrick Wolfe's foundational distinction between extractive and settler colonialism, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's history of dispossession in the United States, and Glen Coulthard's critique of recognition politics, it traces how the logic of elimination — of land, of language, of governance — operates not as a past event but as an ongoing structure embedded in the legal and political order of settler states.From the Doctrine of Discovery and Johnson v. M'Intosh, still active precedent in US courts, to the Dawes Act's transfer of ninety million acres from Indigenous nations to white settlers, to the boarding school systems on both sides of the Canadian border, to the Land Back movement and the question of what decolonisation actually requires, the episode refuses to treat any of this as settled.It also names what most anglophone discussions of settler colonialism leave out: Palestine, where the same logic is operating right now. New Caledonia, where France continues to manage Kanak sovereignty through referendums designed to fail. The structure is not North American. It is global.The philosophical question the episode holds: can you oppose the state while benefiting from the land it stole? There is no clean answer. That is the point.Further reading: Patrick Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native," Journal of Genocide Research (2006) — free to access Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014) Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014) Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (2017) Klee Benally, No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred (2023) Yellowhead Institute Land Back report (2019) — free at yellowheadinstitute.org Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor" (2012) — free to accessTags: settler colonialism, decolonisation, Land Back, Indigenous sovereignty, Patrick Wolfe, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Glen Coulthard, Doctrine of Discovery, terra nullius, Dawes Act, residential schools, boarding schools, Zapatistas, Palestine, New Caledonia, Kanak, anarchism, grounded normativity, Klee Benally, anarcho-indigenismA question to carry: What does it mean to take dispossession seriously — not as a historical fact, but as something still happening, on land you are standing on right now?

Someone you know was hurt. And afterward, the world had one piece of advice: report it. Press charges. Let the system handle it. What almost nobody asked was what that person actually needed. What would help. What would make it feel like it had been taken seriously.That question is at the centre of the case for prison abolition. Not because abolitionists don't take violence seriously, but because the prison was never designed to answer it. It was designed to disappear the problem, to make the person who caused it invisible, while leaving the conditions that produced the violence completely intact.This episode traces the prison from its origins in the 1820s, when Quaker reformers built the first penitentiary in Philadelphia and inadvertently drove prisoners insane, through the convict leasing system that replaced slavery in all but name, to the mass incarceration system that currently holds more people than any other country on earth. It asks what Angela Davis means when she says the prison performs an ideological function. What Mariame Kaba means when she describes abolition as a dual project. And what transformative justice actually looks like in practice, for survivors who need something now, before the world is different.The hardest question the episode holds: what do we owe the person who was hurt and wants a response today? There is no clean answer. That is the point.Further reading:Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021)Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Beth Richie, Erica Meiners, Abolition. Feminism. Now. (2022)Creative Interventions Toolkit — free at creative-interventions.orgRuth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag (2007)Tags: prison abolition, abolition, carceral system, Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, transformative justice, community accountability, convict leasing, 13th Amendment, INCITE, mass incarceration, penitentiary, prison industrial complex, Critical Resistance, anarchism, survivor centred justiceShow notes:Prison abolition and the question nobody wants to answerA Thousand Small Fires — Episode 10The prison was not designed to answer what we do about violence. It was designed to disappear the person who caused it. This episode traces the history of incarceration from its Quaker origins through convict leasing to mass incarceration, and asks what abolition actually offers instead.In this episode:The invention of the penitentiary in 1820s Philadelphia, and why it failed immediatelyThe 13th Amendment exception, the Black Codes, and the convict leasing system that followed slaveryAngela Davis on the ideological function of the prisonMariame Kaba on abolition as a dual project: dismantling and buildingTransformative justice and community accountability in practiceWhat we owe survivors who need something nowThinkers and sources mentioned:Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021)INCITE! Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans People of Color Against ViolenceCreative Interventions, OaklandA question to carry:What does accountability actually require — and does the system we have come anywhere close to it?

The 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

The 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)

Queerness, 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)

Anarchism 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 podcast

In 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)