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.

  1. 3d ago ·  Bonus

    Sparks #3 Spain and Portugal’s housing revolt

    Maricarmen Abascal had lived in her Madrid flat for seventy years when an investment fund bought the building and raised her rent by more than 200 per cent. On 23 September she was evicted, and the people who tried to block it were cleared with tear gas. She died in hospital two weeks later. This Sparks follows what came next. A march and a camp in the Puerta del Sol. Emergency housing decrees thrown out by parliament. A snap election, and a general strike for housing called for 11 November. In Portugal, camps in Lisbon and Porto were cleared by police twice, and went back up. Then we go back to 1931, when the anarcho-syndicalist CNT led a rent strike across Barcelona, and neighbours carried evicted families’ furniture back up the stairs. The question it leaves is an old one: do you wait for the right law, or do you make a building impossible to empty? Facts as of 29 October 2026. The story is still moving. Content note: discusses an eviction and the death of an elderly woman, and police force against protesters. Nothing graphic. In this episode Maricarmen’s eviction, and the investment fund behind itProudhon’s line between a home and propertyThe march, the camp in Sol, and the decrees parliament threw outRent at nearly a young person’s whole wageA general strike called by tenants’ unionsHow this camp differs from 15-M in 2011Lisbon and Porto: camps cleared twice, and a popular assembly that stayedThe 1931 Barcelona rent strike and the Ferrer i Guàrdia neighbourhoodWait for the law, or empty the stairwell of bailiffs? Sources Al Jazeera, “Spanish unions call general strike over housing before snap election” (7 October 2026): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/7/spanish-unions-call-general-strike-over-housing-before-snap-electionWorking Mass / New Left Review, “Fifteen Years Later” (26 October 2026): https://working-mass.com/2026/10/26/fifteen-years-later/Euronews, “Lisbon police arrest 55 housing protesters and clear Rossio tent camp” (20 October 2026): https://euronews.com/2026/10/20/lisbon-police-arrest-55-housing-protesters-and-clear-rossio-tent-campEuronews, “Demonstrators wounded as police break up Lisbon and Porto housing protest camps” (25 October 2026): https://www.euronews.com/2026/10/25/demonstrators-wounded-as-police-break-up-lisbon-and-porto-housing-protest-campsWikipedia, “1931 Barcelona rent strike”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1931_Barcelona_rent_strike Episode Tags anarchism, housing, housing crisis, Spain, Portugal, Madrid, Lisbon, Porto, Barcelona, tenants union, Sindicato de Inquilinas, rent strike, evictions, general strike, Puerta del Sol, 15-M, CNT, anarcho-syndicalism, Proudhon, direct action, mutual aid, news, anarchist podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Sparks #3 Spain and Portugal’s housing revolt
  2. 6d ago

    Ep:23 You Are Probably Already Doing Anarchism

    There's a pharmacy in a small Swedish town where a paper ticket machine keeps the line moving all day. Nobody enforces the order. Nobody breaks it either. That's not a Swedish habit. It's a human one, and it's where this episode starts: most of the cooperative structure that actually holds a day together was never built by a government and isn't enforced by one. From there it moves through Colin Ward's "seed beneath the snow" in Anarchy in Action, Peter Kropotkin's guilds and village communes in Mutual Aid, and David Graeber's case that most people already live like anarchists without ever calling it that. The evidence gets less European from there: West African esusu rotating savings pots carried into Caribbean mutual aid circles, the Filipino tradition of bayanihan house-carrying, the Sámi siida herding system that never fully stopped functioning under Swedish and Norwegian law, and queer chosen family built with no legal paperwork behind it at all. Where the disagreement never resolves gets equal time: Murray Bookchin thought naming this "anarchism" let people off the hook, a comfortable substitute for actually organising against the state. Colin Ward thought naming it was the whole point, removing the excuse that people can't be trusted to run things themselves. Further reading: Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action (Freedom Press, 1973) Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (William Heinemann, 1902) — available via theanarchistlibrary.org David Graeber, "Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You," 2000 — available via theanarchistlibrary.org Scott Branson, Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life (Or Books, 2022) Murray Bookchin, "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm" (AK Press, 1995) Tags: everyday anarchism, mutual aid, Colin Ward, Peter Kropotkin, David Graeber, esusu, bayanihan, Sámi siida, chosen family, Murray Bookchin, lifestyle anarchism, anarchism Show notes: You Are Probably Already Doing Anarchism A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 9 Most of the cooperative structure that actually holds a day together was never built by a government and isn't enforced by one — from a pharmacy queue in Sweden to rotating savings circles across four continents, this episode asks whether recognising anarchism already at work in ordinary life is a radicalising insight or a comfortable excuse to stop there. In this episode: A pharmacy ticket machine in Sweden and the informal order nobody enforcesColin Ward, Anarchy in Action, and the "seed beneath the snow"Peter Kropotkin's guilds, village communes, and Mutual AidDavid Graeber's essay "Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You"West African esusu and its Caribbean diaspora forms: partner, box hand, sou-souBayanihan, the Filipino tradition of communal house-carryingThe Sámi siida system and Scandinavian state registrationQueer chosen family as mutual aid with no legal recognitionMurray Bookchin's "lifestyle anarchism" critique of Colin Ward Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  3. Oct 26 ·  Bonus

    Sparks #2 Serbia’s students win

    At 11:52 on 1 November 2024, a newly renovated canopy fell at the railway station in Novi Sad and killed sixteen people. Students began blocking their own universities, and ran every faculty through a plenum: an open assembly where anyone can speak, the room votes, and nobody is in charge. This Sparks follows that model from Belgrade in 2006, through the Zagreb occupation of 2009 and the Tuzla plenums of 2014, to neighbourhood assemblies across Serbia. We look at the unions and farmers who joined, what the state threw at the students, and the strict rules the plenums wrote when they decided to stand for parliament. Then we set it against Otpor, the leaderless student movement that helped bring down Milošević in 2000 and was gone as a party four years later. On 25 October the Student List won a projected 140 of 250 seats on the highest turnout in decades. The students haven’t named a prime minister yet. Their victory speech started late because they couldn’t agree on who should give it. Results are preliminary projections as of 26 October 2026. Content note: discusses the deaths of sixteen people in the Novi Sad canopy collapse. Nothing graphic. In this episode The 11:52 silence, and the canopy that fell in Novi SadHow a plenum works, and why delegates can’t negotiateFrom Belgrade 2006 to Zagreb’s Occupation Cookbook and Tuzla’s plenumsZborovi: the neighbourhood assemblies that spread off campusUnions, farmers, the 15 March protest and the alleged sonic weaponVučić’s resignation and his run for prime ministerHow the plenums vetted 250 candidates, and the Student PlanOtpor: the last leaderless student movement to become a partyThe result, the irregularities, and a victory speech nobody could agree on givingCan a plenum hold on to its own MPs? Sources Al Jazeera, “Serbia’s Vucic concedes election defeat to student-led movement” (25 October 2026): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/25/serbia-voter-turnout-highest-in-decades-as-students-oppose-longtime-leaderThe National, “Serbia’s leader concedes defeat after 12 years in power” (26 October 2026): https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/2026/10/26/serbias-leader-concedes-defeat-after-12-years-in-power/ECPR The Loop, “From plenums to parliament: the rulebook behind Serbia’s Student List” (21 October 2026): https://theloop.ecpr.eu/from-plenums-to-parliament-the-rulebook-behind-serbias-student-list/European Western Balkans, “CRTA reports widespread violations of ballot secrecy and voting irregularities” (25 October 2026): https://europeanwesternbalkans.com/2026/10/25/crta-reports-widespread-violations-of-ballot-secrecy-and-voting-irregularities/transform!europe, “From Grief to Resistance: One Year On”: https://transform-network.net/blog/analysis/from-grief-to-resistance-one-year-on-how-students-sustained-serbias-broadest-protest-movement/ Episode Tags anarchism, Serbia, Serbian protests, student movement, student protests, Student List, plenum, direct democracy, horizontalism, leaderless movements, assemblies, zborovi, Novi Sad, Vučić, Serbian election, elections, Otpor, Occupation Cookbook, Balkans, news, anarchist podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Sparks #2 Serbia’s students win
  4. Oct 20

    Ep:22 Prison Solidarity and the Anarchist Black Cross

    In 1906, two men recently released from a Tsarist prison started collecting boots, linen, and clothing for comrades still being marched into Siberian exile. Harry Weinstein and B. Yelin had no organization behind them yet, no funding, no headquarters. They had a list of names of people who were cold, and a decision that those people were not going to be forgotten just because the state had put them somewhere designed to make forgetting easy. From that first list of names, the Anarchist Black Cross's story reaches Nestor Makhno's Ukraine and Bolshevik repression, then Giuseppe Pinelli, an ABC member killed after three days of police interrogation in Milan, and Kotoku Shusui, executed in Japan in 1911 despite an urgent appeal London anarchists sent within weeks of his arrest. From there it carries through Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin's 1979 proposal, written from a federal prison cell, that eventually became the Anarchist Black Cross Federation; Angela Davis, who was never an anarchist but faced the same state claim this episode is about; and Mariame Kaba's work with criminalised survivors in Chicago today. In the present, Mapuche political prisoners in Chile and Anarchist Black Cross Belarus are still doing exactly what Weinstein and Yelin started in 1906: tracking names, raising money, refusing to let a government's prisoners become a government's secret. Further reading: Matthew Hart, "Yelensky's Fable: A History of the Anarchist Black Cross" — available via libcom.org Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021) Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition (Pluto Press, 2021) Kate Sharpley Library, "Urgent Appeal" (Freedom Group, London, 1910) — katesharpleylibrary.net Global Nonviolent Action Database, "Mapuche prisoners hunger strike for law reform, Chile, 2010" — nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu Tags: Anarchist Black Cross, prison solidarity, Białystok, Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Giuseppe Pinelli, Kotoku Shusui, High Treason Incident, Mapuche prisoners, Chile, ABC Belarus, Ojore Lutalo, abolition, anarchism Show notes: Prison Solidarity and the Anarchist Black Cross A Thousand Small Fires — Season 2, Episode 8 The Anarchist Black Cross started in 1906 as two men in Białystok collecting boots and letters for comrades marched into Siberian exile, and it's still running today — through fascist Italy, a failed appeal in Japan, a Marin County courtroom, and present-day Chile and Belarus, asking what solidarity actually costs the people who practice it. In this episode: Harry Weinstein, B. Yelin, and the founding of the Anarchist Black Cross in 1906The 1919 renaming, Nestor Makhno's Ukraine, and Bolshevik repressionGiuseppe Pinelli, the Piazza Fontana bombing, and Italy's strategy of tensionThe Kotoku Shusui case and the London appeal that couldn't stop an executionLorenzo Kom'boa Ervin's 1979 proposal and the Anarchist Black Cross FederationAngela Davis, the Soledad Brothers, and the Marin County courthouse takeoverMariame Kaba, Survived and Punished, and criminalised survivorsMapuche political prisoners and the 2010 Chilean hunger strikeAnarchist Black Cross Belarus and the Black Nightingales Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  5. Oct 19 ·  Bonus

    Sparks #1: France’s school strike

    Sparks is a new short format from A Thousand Small Fires: one story from the news, and the history it rhymes with. We’re starting with France. Since mid-September, high-school students have been blockading their own schools over problems they’d been told to put up with for years. Teachers who leave and never get replaced. Classes of thirty-six. Prefab classrooms with no running water, and rooms at forty degrees in a heatwave. Teachers’ unions went on strike with them, and on 17 October pupils marched alongside workers and Yellow Vest veterans on the biggest day of the movement so far. The state has answered with mass arrests, police grenades, and a bill that could make protesters pay for damage without being convicted of anything. We look at what the pupils are actually asking for, who has stood with them, and what finally moved the government. We follow the curfews from Guadeloupe to the north of France, and set Macron’s response beside the one he gave the Yellow Vests. Then we go back to Mantes-la-Jolie in 2018 and Paris in 1986, to ask why the French state so often gives ground only after someone has been badly hurt. Facts as of 19 October 2026. The story is still moving, and some figures differ between sources. Content note: discusses police violence against teenagers, serious injuries, and deaths. Nothing graphic. In this episode The 2018 video from Mantes-la-Jolie, and the judge who called it proportionateFrancisco Ferrer on schools built for obedienceHow a protest at one lycée in Créteil spread to a third of the countryThe pupils’ demands, a month in, unchangedTeachers, unions, transit workers and the 17 October marchArrests of minors, the Lens grenade case, and the “you break it, you pay” billInjured pupils, and what the arguments over the fires push out of viewMacron’s Yellow Vest playbook, eight years onThe state’s first curfew, in Guadeloupe, and the ones that followed in the northMalik Oussekine and the Devaquet law, 1986What happens to a school strike when the schools close for the holidays Sources Al Jazeera, “Paris left reeling as student-led protests turn chaotic” (18 October 2026): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/18/paris-left-reeling-as-student-led-protests-turn-chaoticPublic Sénat, Laurent Nuñez before the Senate law committee (13 October 2026, French): https://www.publicsenat.fr/actualites/politique/mobilisation-lyceenne-laurent-nunez-annonce-louverture-de-36-enquetes-par-ligpn-dont-quatre-pour-des-blessures-mutilantesSNES-FSU, “Une répression administrative de la mobilisation lycéenne ?” (15 October 2026, French): https://www.snes.edu/article/une-repression-administrative-de-la-mobilisation-lyceenne/Europe 1, Guadeloupe curfew for minors (19 October 2026, French): https://www.europe1.fr/societe/apres-des-violences-urbaines-la-guadeloupe-a-impose-un-couvre-feu-pour-les-mineurs-1163574Euronews, “Anger over video of French police surrounding kneeling teenage protesters” (7 December 2018): https://www.euronews.com/2018/12/07/anger-over-video-of-french-police-surrounding-kneeling-teenage-protesters Episode Tags anarchism, France, French protests, student protests, school strike, lycée, high school students, education, direct action, solidarity, police violence, protest policing, Macron, Yellow Vests, gilets jaunes, curfew, Guadeloupe, colonialism, Parcoursup, Francisco Ferrer, Malik Oussekine, Mantes-la-Jolie, news, anarchist podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Sparks #1: France’s school strike
  6. Oct 13

    Ep:21 Direct Action Gets the Goods

    On May 1, 1886, roughly three hundred thousand workers across the United States walked off their jobs at once, demanding an eight-hour day nobody had granted them. No court had ruled in their favor. They simply stopped, together, and dared their employers to run without them. Emma Goldman put the theory behind it into words a generation later: anarchism, she wrote, stands for direct action. That argument runs from Haymarket through Lucy Parsons and the founding of the IWW, into the Flint sit-down strike, where a twenty-three-year-old organiser named Genora Johnson built the Women's Emergency Brigade out of the wives and sisters of the men occupying the plants. From there it moves to the 1973 Durban strikes, illegal under apartheid, that built independent Black trade unionism from nothing; ACT UP's Sell Wellcome action, which cut the price of AZT within days; and the Chipko movement, where women in the Indian Himalayas wrapped their arms around trees a logging company had already been given permission to fell. The harder question direct action never fully answers gets asked too: once a movement rejects a single leader who gets to call the shots, who decides what counts as legitimate action at all? Occupy Wall Street lived that argument out loud, in real time, with no chairperson to settle it either way. Further reading: Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910) — available via The Anarchist Library and Project Gutenberg Jacqueline Jones, Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons (Basic Books, 2017) Genora Johnson Dollinger, oral history "Striking Flint" — Marxists Internet Archive / historyisaweapon.com Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, "The 1973 Durban Strikes: Building Popular Democratic Power in South Africa" — thetricontinental.org Mark Bray, Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street (Zero Books, 2013) Tags: direct action, IWW, Lucy Parsons, Haymarket, Flint sit-down strike, Genora Johnson, Durban strikes, Chipko movement, ACT UP, Food Not Bombs, MST, Occupy Wall Street, diversity of tactics, anarchism Show notes: Direct Action Gets the Goods. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 7 One tactic, one argument, four continents: from the eight-hour-day strike of 1886 through a stock exchange balcony chained shut in 1989 to land and forests defended by force of bodies. What do these very different fights have in common, and the harder question underneath: who decides what counts as legitimate action once no one's in charge? In this episode: Lucy Parsons, the IWW, and "direct action gets the goods"The Flint sit-down strike and Genora Johnson's Women's Emergency BrigadeThe 1973 Durban strikes and the birth of independent Black trade unionismACT UP's Sell Wellcome action and the price of AZTFood Not Bombs — a thousand chapters, sixty countries, one refusal to stopThe MST's land occupations and Paulo Freire's literacy campaignsThe Chipko movement and Gaura Devi's stand in ReniOccupy Wall Street, Mark Bray, and the diversity-of-tactics debate that never resolved Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  7. Oct 6

    Ep:20 Black Flags in the Flood: Katrina, Common Ground, and What the State Left to Drown

    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, anarchism Show notes: Black Flags in the Flood: Katrina, Common Ground, and What the State Left to Drown. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 6 Hurricane 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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  8. Sep 29

    Ep:19 Ferguson and the Streets

    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, anarchism Show notes: Ferguson and the Streets. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 5 Ferguson 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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

About

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.