A Thousand Small Fires

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)

The 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)

Imagine 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)

In 1886, four men were hanged in Chicago. Not for what they did — for what they believed. That is where this episode starts: not with a definition of anarchism, but with why the idea has always been treated as a crime.This is the framework episode. What anarchism actually argues — that hierarchy is not natural or inevitable, that it was made, and can be unmade. Proudhon on property as theft. Kropotkin on cooperation as evolution. Bakunin and Marx on whether the state can ever wither away. Prefigurative politics: the means are already the end.The show's first promise: not to tell you anarchism is right, but to show you why it asks better questions than the alternatives.Topics: anarchist theory, Haymarket affair, mutual aid, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Bakunin, hierarchy, prefigurative politics, direct action.Further reading: — Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) — Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (1984) — Mark Bray, Anarchism: What It Is and What It Isn't (2019) — David Graeber, The Democracy Project (2013) — Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! (2008)

What would it feel like to live in a world organised around care instead of profit? Not as a fantasy. As a serious, uncomfortable, unresolved question.This is the trailer for A Thousand Small Fires — an anarchist, feminist, queer podcast that uses better questions instead of easy answers. Around 15 minutes per episode. Philosophical in tone. Open in frame. Theory with a pulse.Season 1 begins with three episodes dropping at once — on anarchism, mutual aid, and care labour. After that, weekly.No fixed answers. Only better questions.Further reading: — Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) — Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) — Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974)