A Thousand Small Fires

"Information, pickets, strike." That's how a union organiser in Livorno describes the method: find out what's in the containers, put a picket on the gate, then the shift refuses the ship. Dockworkers in Livorno, Genoa and Gioia Tauro have been using it on cargo bound for Israel and for military bases, and on 30 October it went international.

This Sparks follows the Sunaid X from the radio call at Livorno's harbour mouth to its berth that evening. We look at the explosives that leave Livorno every year, the containers sent back from Genoa, the seventeen containers of steel still held at Gioia Tauro, and a day of action that reached ports from Piraeus to India and Mexico. Then the pushback: a ministerial order postponing the transport strike, fines, seized boats, and a security decree that makes blocking a road with your body a crime.

After that, we go back to 30 October 1911, when an anarchist soldier named Augusto Masetti shot his colonel on the morning his regiment was due to leave for the war in Libya, and to June 1914, when a meeting in Ancona for Masetti ended with three men shot dead and a general strike that the main labour confederation called off after two days. Domela Nieuwenhuis had asked the workers whose trades serve a war to stop it. The dockers are trying something smaller, and nobody yet knows if it adds up.

Facts as of 11 November 2026. The story is still moving.

Content note: discusses police shootings of protesters in 1914, a soldier shooting his officer in 1911, arms shipments to Israel during the genocide in Gaza, and criminal charges against protesters. Nothing graphic.

In this episode

• A radio call at the mouth of Livorno's harbour
• Why war needs logistics, and Domela Nieuwenhuis's strike against war
• "We'd act anyway": direct action on the quay
• How the dockers find the cargo
• Genoa's returned containers and the steel held at Gioia Tauro
• 30 October: a hundred and thirteen ports in twenty-two countries
• Salvini's order, the fines, and the security decree
• Augusto Masetti, 30 October 1911
• Red Week, Ancona, June 1914
• What a blockade can and can't do

Sources

• Alex Colston, "Livorno Dockworkers Are Trying to Block the Weapons of War", Jacobin (29 October 2026): https://jacobin.com/2026/10/livorno-dockworkers-flotilla-gaza-weapons
• Progressive International, "PI Briefing No. 34: Jamming the War Machine" (30 October 2026): https://progressive.international/wire/2026-10-30-pi-briefing-no-34-jamming-the-war-machine/en/
• The Wire, "How Gioia Tauro Dockworkers Fight Arms Shipments at a Port Designed for Isolation": https://thewire.in/labour/how-gioia-tauro-dockworkers-fight-arms-shipments-at-a-port-designed-for-isolation
• Errico Malatesta, "The General Strike and the Insurrection in Italy", Freedom (July 1914): https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-the-general-strike-and-the-insurrection-in-italy
• Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, "What does the refusal of military service mean?" (1893): https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ferdinand-domela-nieuwenhuis-what-does-the-refusal-of-military-service-mean

Episode Tags

anarchism, Italy, dockworkers, port workers, Livorno, Genoa, Gioia Tauro, Ancona, USB, CALP, arms trade, anti-militarism, Palestine, Gaza, Global Sumud Flotilla, general strike, direct action, Red Week, Settimana Rossa, Errico Malatesta, Augusto Masetti, Domela Nieuwenhuis, Matteo Salvini, security decree, news, anarchist podcast

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In November 1929, a British-appointed official sent a man to count goats, sheep, and people in the Nigerian village of Oloko. A widow named Nwanyeruwa asked him one question: was your widowed mother counted? Within days, tens of thousands of women across the Calabar and Owerri provinces had mobilised. This episode argues anarchism didn't arrive in Africa from Europe. A way of organising life without permanent rulers was already there, and it was the colonial project, not the "civilising" mission it called itself, that forced hierarchy onto societies built to avoid it.

It runs through pre-colonial Igbo governance without kings or permanent chiefs, the Aba Women's War and the customary practice of "sitting on a man," and Ubuntu, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, and what South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission asked of it politically. Sam Mbah's Awareness League and its jailed anarcho-syndicalists sit alongside a much older anarchist press in Alexandria that Errico Malatesta passed through twice, decades before most historians place organised anarchism on the continent at all.

It closes with two very different kinds of spread: Cherán, Mexico, arriving at nearly identical self-government by coincidence, and an Indian farmers' union that carried the Zapatista encuentro model home on purpose, straight into the founding of Peoples' Global Action.

Further reading: Sam Mbah and I. E. Igariwey, African Anarchism: The History of a Movement (See Sharp Press, 1997) Adiele E. Afigbo, The Warrant Chiefs: Indirect Rule in Southeastern Nigeria, 1891-1929 (Humanities Press, 1972) Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914 (University of California Press, 2010) Toyin Falola and Adam Paddock, The Women's War of 1929: A History of Anti-Colonial Resistance in Eastern Nigeria

Tags: African anarchism, Ubuntu, Aba Women's War, Nwanyeruwa, Igbo, warrant chiefs, Sam Mbah, Awareness League, Errico Malatesta, Cherán, Peoples' Global Action, colonialism, anarchism

Show notes: African Anarchism and Ubuntu A Thousand Small Fires — Season 2, Episode 11

Anarchism didn't arrive in Africa from Europe — from a widow's question that sparked a mass uprising in colonial Nigeria to an anarchist press operating in Alexandria decades before historians usually look, this episode argues the imposed hierarchy was the disruption, not the self-governance it replaced.

In this episode:

• Nwanyeruwa's confrontation with a census taker in Oloko, November 1929
• Pre-colonial Igbo acephalous governance: age grades, councils, the Umuada
• Frederick Lugard's Warrant Chiefs and the 1914 imposition of indirect rule
• The Aba Women's War and the practice of "sitting on a man"
• Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu and the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission
• Sam Mbah, I. E. Igariwey, and Nigeria's Awareness League
• Errico Malatesta's two stints in Alexandria and the journal Il Lavoratore
• Al-Nur, the Arabic-language anarchist journal published in Alexandria from 1904
• Cherán, Michoacán, and its 2011 uprising against cartel-backed loggers
• The Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha's path from the 1996 Zapatista encuentro to Peoples' Global Action

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In October, Albania's prime minister had empty chairs lined up outside his office as an offer to talk. The protesters smashed them, and when more chairs went out a week later, they set those on fire. One analyst calls the movement "a genuine, horizontal revolt", and the government's problem is that there's nobody to negotiate with.

This Sparks follows the Flamingo Revolution from the beginning. A law that opened protected land to five-star resorts. Diggers at the edge of the Narta lagoon, and a fence across a public beach. Daily protests in Tirana under the slogan "Albania is not for sale", a crowd chanting for both the prime minister and the opposition leader to go to prison, and students who joined in October and were met with tear gas, rubber bullets and a new police register that can stop people leaving the country without a conviction.

Then we go back to 1997, when the pyramid schemes collapsed, the revolt began in Vlorë, and the state across much of the south stopped working. We look at the committees that ran the towns, what a few anarchists in Paris saw in them, and the way the uprising was wound down. This year's movement wants a technical government and constitutional reform. In 1997, a government of national reconciliation was part of how the revolt came to an end.

Facts as of 3 November 2026. The story is still moving.

Content note: discusses police force against protesters, including an eye injury, arrests of minors, and deaths in the 1997 unrest. Nothing graphic.

In this episode

• The chairs outside the prime minister's office
• Why a leaderless movement is hard for a state to deal with
• Narta, Zvërnec, Sazan, and the resort law
• "Albania is not for sale", and a chant against both parties
• The students join, and the ministries burn
• Rubber bullets, a police bonus, and a register of protesters
• The pyramid schemes and the 1997 revolt in Vlorë
• Albania: Laboratory of Subversion
• What a horizontal revolt asks the state for

Sources

• Al Jazeera, "'Horizontal revolt': Why Albania's young protesters want PM Rama to go" (20 October 2026): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/20/horizontal-revolt-why-albanias-young-protesters-want-pm-rama-to-go
• Democracy Now, "Flamingo Revolution: Albania Protests Escalate over Corruption & Kushner/Trump Luxury Resort" (21 October 2026): https://www.democracynow.org/2026/10/21/albania_protests_edi_rama
• Reporter.al (BIRN), "Jared Kushner's luxury resort in Albania launched amid controversy" (7 May 2026): https://www.reporter.al/en/2026/05/07/jared-kushners-luxury-resort-in-albania-launched-amid-controversy/
• Citizens.al, "Anti-protest laws: more control over protesters, no accountability for the police" (29 October 2026): https://citizens.al/en/2026/10/29/ligjet-antiproteste-me-shume-kontroll-mbi-protestuesit-asnje-llogari-per-policine/
• Anonymous, Albania: Laboratory of Subversion (1997): https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anon-albania-laboratory-of-subversion

Episode Tags

anarchism, Albania, Flamingo Revolution, Tirana, Vlorë, Edi Rama, student protests, Gen Z, horizontal movement, leaderless movement, commons, enclosure, protected areas, Narta lagoon, Zvërnec, Sazan, Jared Kushner, 1997 Albania, pyramid schemes, protest law, police repression, direct action, news, anarchist podcast

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In 1907, in a rented room in Tokyo, a woman signed her work with a name she built herself, inserting her mother's maiden name where nobody had asked her to put anything. He-Yin Zhen argued for the total abolition of family, state, and property together, a generation before that argument became fashionable anywhere in the world. The record filed her writing under her husband's byline for most of a century afterward.

Her essays run from "On the Revenge of Women," which took apart the Confucian classics used to justify male rule, through "On the Question of Women's Labor," tracing exploitation back through the ancient well-field system, concubinage, and female infanticide. Her framework, nannü and shengji, treats gender and economics as one question rather than two, arriving at something close to intersectional theory a century before the term existed, out of Tokyo's exile politics rather than any Western tradition.

Her husband, Liu Shipei, later defected to the Qing government they'd both fled, and she is recorded in the Chouan Hui, the organisation that backed a later attempt to restore the monarchy. Historians disagree, sometimes sharply, about how much of that was her conviction and how much was her circumstance.

Further reading: Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, eds., The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (Columbia University Press, 2013) Peter Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (Columbia University Press, 1990) He-Yin Zhen, "On the Question of Women's Liberation," 1907 — translated in The Birth of Chinese Feminism He-Yin Zhen, "On the Revenge of Women," 1907 — translated in The Birth of Chinese Feminism

Tags: He-Yin Zhen, Chinese anarchism, anarcha-feminism, Tianyi bao, nannü, shengji, Liu Shipei, Tokyo exiles, intersectionality, women's history, erasure, anarchism

Show notes: He Zhen A Thousand Small Fires — Season 2, Episode 10

A Chinese anarchist-feminist who argued for the total abolition of family, state, and property together in 1907, filed for most of a century under her husband's name — her theory, her later entanglement in a monarchist restoration movement, and what it takes for a record to finally correct itself.

In this episode:

• The byline He-Yin Zhen built by inserting her mother's maiden name
• Tianyi bao, founded in Tokyo in 1907, considered the first Chinese-language anarchist journal
• The Society for the Restoration of Women's Rights and its mutual aid work
• "On the Revenge of Women" and the critique of yin-yang cosmology
• "On the Question of Women's Labor" and the well-field system
• Nannü and shengji, her framework linking gender to economics
• Liu Shipei's 1909 defection to the Qing government
• He-Yin Zhen's recorded presence in the Chouan Hui monarchist movement
• The 2013 translation project that finally recovered her authorship

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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 it
• Proudhon’s line between a home and property
• The march, the camp in Sol, and the decrees parliament threw out
• Rent at nearly a young person’s whole wage
• A general strike called by tenants’ unions
• How this camp differs from 15-M in 2011
• Lisbon and Porto: camps cleared twice, and a popular assembly that stayed
• The 1931 Barcelona rent strike and the Ferrer i Guàrdia neighbourhood
• Wait 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-election
• Working 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-camp
• Euronews, “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-camps
• Wikipedia, “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

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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 enforces
• Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action, and the "seed beneath the snow"
• Peter Kropotkin's guilds, village communes, and Mutual Aid
• David Graeber's essay "Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You"
• West African esusu and its Caribbean diaspora forms: partner, box hand, sou-sou
• Bayanihan, the Filipino tradition of communal house-carrying
• The Sámi siida system and Scandinavian state registration
• Queer chosen family as mutual aid with no legal recognition
• Murray Bookchin's "lifestyle anarchism" critique of Colin Ward

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

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 Sad
• How a plenum works, and why delegates can’t negotiate
• From Belgrade 2006 to Zagreb’s Occupation Cookbook and Tuzla’s plenums
• Zborovi: the neighbourhood assemblies that spread off campus
• Unions, farmers, the 15 March protest and the alleged sonic weapon
• Vučić’s resignation and his run for prime minister
• How the plenums vetted 250 candidates, and the Student Plan
• Otpor: the last leaderless student movement to become a party
• The result, the irregularities, and a victory speech nobody could agree on giving
• Can 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-leader
• The 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.

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 1906
• The 1919 renaming, Nestor Makhno's Ukraine, and Bolshevik repression
• Giuseppe Pinelli, the Piazza Fontana bombing, and Italy's strategy of tension
• The Kotoku Shusui case and the London appeal that couldn't stop an execution
• Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin's 1979 proposal and the Anarchist Black Cross Federation
• Angela Davis, the Soledad Brothers, and the Marin County courthouse takeover
• Mariame Kaba, Survived and Punished, and criminalised survivors
• Mapuche political prisoners and the 2010 Chilean hunger strike
• Anarchist Black Cross Belarus and the Black Nightingales

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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 proportionate
• Francisco Ferrer on schools built for obedience
• How a protest at one lycée in Créteil spread to a third of the country
• The pupils’ demands, a month in, unchanged
• Teachers, unions, transit workers and the 17 October march
• Arrests of minors, the Lens grenade case, and the “you break it, you pay” bill
• Injured pupils, and what the arguments over the fires push out of view
• Macron’s Yellow Vest playbook, eight years on
• The state’s first curfew, in Guadeloupe, and the ones that followed in the north
• Malik Oussekine and the Devaquet law, 1986
• What 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-chaotic
• Public 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-mutilantes
• SNES-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-1163574
• Euronews, “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

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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 Brigade
• The 1973 Durban strikes and the birth of independent Black trade unionism
• ACT UP's Sell Wellcome action and the price of AZT
• Food Not Bombs — a thousand chapters, sixty countries, one refusal to stop
• The MST's land occupations and Paulo Freire's literacy campaigns
• The Chipko movement and Gaura Devi's stand in Reni
• Occupy Wall Street, Mark Bray, and the diversity-of-tactics debate that never resolved

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