A Thousand Small Fires

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...

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 yo...

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 w...

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 Glo...

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 o...

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...

After Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2012, the Red Cross refused to coordinate with the volunteer networks that had formed — because those networks were connected to Occupy Wall Street. What filled the gap was mutual aid. And the difference between mutual aid and charity is not semantic. It is structural. It is political. Kropotkin spent years in Siberia watching animals cooperate and came back w...

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. Krop...

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 wit...