A Thousand Small Fires

A thousand small fires

What would it look like to organise the world around care instead of profit? Not as a fantasy. As a serious, uncomfortable, unresolved question. A Thousand Small Fires is a podcast that takes anarchist, feminist, and queer thought seriously — not as a doctrine to follow, but as a lens for asking better questions. About work, food, love, land, the state, the prison, the family, the body. About who decides, on whose terms, and what gets built when people refuse to wait for permission. Each episode is around 15 minutes — long enough to go somewhere real, short enough to earn your attention. The show is philosophical in tone and open in frame. It holds contradictions rather than resolving them. It cites thinkers without hiding behind them. It uses history as evidence rather than as comfort. The anarchist tradition argues that hierarchy — in governments, workplaces, relationships, and intimate life — is not natural or inevitable. It was made, and it can be unmade. This show follows that argument wherever it goes, including into the places the mainstream left doesn't want to look. Topics across Season 1 include: mutual aid and what makes it different from charity; the care labour that the economy runs on and refuses to count; food, land, and the global struggle for food sovereignty; the women who built anarchism and were written out of its history; queer liberation as a refusal, not a request; love, relationship anarchy, and the politics of intimate life; prison abolition; settler colonialism; carceral feminism; and what it means to start building the world you want inside the one that exists. No fixed answers. Only better questions. New episodes every week. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Afleveringen

  1. 4 dgn geleden

    Ep: 6 The Women Who Built Anarchism

    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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    16 min.
  2. 15 jun

    Ep:5 Food, Land, and the Common Table — Part 2: The Seed in the Pavement

    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) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    17 min.
  3. 8 jun

    Ep:4 Food, Land, and the Common Table — Part 1: The Earth Is Not for Sale

    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) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    17 min.

Info

What would it look like to organise the world around care instead of profit? Not as a fantasy. As a serious, uncomfortable, unresolved question. A Thousand Small Fires is a podcast that takes anarchist, feminist, and queer thought seriously — not as a doctrine to follow, but as a lens for asking better questions. About work, food, love, land, the state, the prison, the family, the body. About who decides, on whose terms, and what gets built when people refuse to wait for permission. Each episode is around 15 minutes — long enough to go somewhere real, short enough to earn your attention. The show is philosophical in tone and open in frame. It holds contradictions rather than resolving them. It cites thinkers without hiding behind them. It uses history as evidence rather than as comfort. The anarchist tradition argues that hierarchy — in governments, workplaces, relationships, and intimate life — is not natural or inevitable. It was made, and it can be unmade. This show follows that argument wherever it goes, including into the places the mainstream left doesn't want to look. Topics across Season 1 include: mutual aid and what makes it different from charity; the care labour that the economy runs on and refuses to count; food, land, and the global struggle for food sovereignty; the women who built anarchism and were written out of its history; queer liberation as a refusal, not a request; love, relationship anarchy, and the politics of intimate life; prison abolition; settler colonialism; carceral feminism; and what it means to start building the world you want inside the one that exists. No fixed answers. Only better questions. New episodes every week. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.