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)

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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 argument: the housewifisation of women was not a natural development. It was enforced.

Sometimes violently. The witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were, in her reading, a mechanism of social control.

Also: the Wages for Housework campaign of 1972, its founders and its internal feminist debate. Arlie Hochschild on the second shift and the global care chain. And the anarchist question underneath all of it: what would a society look like if care were its central organising value?

Topics: care work, Silvia Federici, anarcha-feminism, Wages for Housework, Arlie Hochschild, global care chain, reproductive labour, capitalism, feminist theory.

Further reading: — Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (2004) — Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero (2012) — Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift (1989) — Arlie Hochschild & Barbara Ehrenreich (eds.), Global Woman (2002) — Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics (2017)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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