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A Thousand Small Fires
A Thousand Small Fires episodes
- Ep:2 Mutual Aid: The World That Already Exists
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 with a scientific argument against Social Darwinism. Dean Spade updated it for the twenty-first century. Silvia Federici showed why the conditions for mutual aid were deliberately destroyed. The Black Panther Party's Free Breakfast Program fed 20,000 children a day — and J. Edgar Hoover called it the greatest threat to the FBI's efforts to neutralise the Panthers.
The problem is never that there isn't enough. It is that what exists is controlled by people who benefit from scarcity.
Topics: mutual aid, anarchism, solidarity, Dean Spade, Kropotkin, Silvia Federici, Black Panther Party, Occupy Sandy, dual power, charity vs mutual aid.
Further reading: — Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) — Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (2020) — Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (2004) — adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy (2017)
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
17 min - Ep:1 What Even Is Anarchism? (And What It Isn't)
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)
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
16 min - A Thousand Small Fires — Trailer
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)
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
10 min
About A Thousand Small Fires
From the publisher's feed
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.