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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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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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 Collective
• The Algiers Point vigilante shootings and Donnell Herrington
• The Danziger Bridge shootings and the Gretna bridge blockade
• Common Ground's free clinic, 22,000 volunteers, six years of work
• Naomi Klein, disaster capitalism, and the firing of 7,500 teachers
• The demolition of New Orleans's "Big Four" public housing
• The 1985 Mexico City earthquake and the topos who dug survivors out by hand
• Brandon Darby's FBI informant betrayal, and what survived it anyway

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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 Struggle
• Water, milk, and legal observers: how a leaderless response actually organises itself
• Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and "leaderful, not leaderless"
• COINTELPRO, Fred Hampton, and why decentralisation is a strategy, not an accident
• Mariame Kaba, We Charge Genocide, and UN testimony that echoed a 1951 petition
• Hong Kong 2019 and the "Be Water" protests
• The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation's $6 million house
• DeRay Mckesson and the leader the media invented

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In 1979, a man named Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin sat in a cell at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, serving a life sentence, and wrote a pamphlet arguing that Black liberation did not need a new state built in place of the old one. He called the alternative the Black Commune. He did not arrive at that idea through a European text. He arrived at it through SNCC, the Black Panther Party, and years of watching the American state hunt him personally.

Ervin's argument runs through Kuwasi Balagoon, a Black Panther and Panther 21 defendant who called himself a New Afrikan anarchist and was also, openly, bisexual at a moment when almost no one in the armed Black liberation movement was saying that in public; through Ashanti Alston's insight that the Panthers' own slogan, "all power to the people," was already anarchistic before he ever read the theory; and into the present, at Cooperation Jackson, a federation of worker cooperatives built in Jackson, Mississippi on the same argument Ervin made forty-five years earlier.

Two centuries earlier, at Quilombo dos Palmares, a self-governing Brazilian community survived six Portuguese military expeditions and lasted nearly ninety years. And there's the Haitian Revolution, the only nation in world history founded by a successful uprising of enslaved people, forced afterward to pay for the privilege of having won.

Further reading: Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition (Pluto Press, 2021) Kuwasi Balagoon, A Soldier's Story: Revolutionary Writings by a New Afrikan Anarchist (Kersplebedeb/PM Press) William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi, As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (AK Press, 2018) BlackPast.org, "Palmares (ca. 1605-1694)" and "Haitian Revolution (1791-1804)" Cooperation Jackson — cooperationjackson.org

Tags: Black anarchism, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Kuwasi Balagoon, Ashanti Alston, Black Panther Party, New Afrikan anarchism, Palmares, Zumbi, Haitian Revolution, Cooperation Jackson, Anarchist People of Colour, Black radical tradition, anarchism

Show notes: Black Anarchism: The Tradition the White Left Keeps Forgetting. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 4

The anarchist canon this show quotes most either ignored Black radical thought entirely or engaged with it only once it had been filtered through a European vocabulary — this one follows the radicals who built anti-authoritarian politics from lived experience of the state, and the self-governing communities that predate the theory by centuries.

In this episode:

• Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin and Anarchism and the Black Revolution, written in a Marion, Illinois cell
• Kuwasi Balagoon, the Black Liberation Army, and New Afrikan anarchism
• Ashanti Alston and "Beyond Nationalism, But Not Without It"
• William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi's As Black as Resistance
• The Anarchist People of Colour conference and Pedro Ribeiro's "Senzala or Quilombo"
• Quilombo dos Palmares — ninety years of self-governance in Brazil
• The Haitian Revolution and the 150-million-franc debt that followed it
• Cooperation Jackson and the Jackson-Kush Plan, built today

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In 1892, a twenty-two-year-old anarchist named Alexander Berkman walked into a steel magnate's office and shot him. He served fourteen years for it, and it was in that Pennsylvania prison, not a lecture hall, that one of the most significant American texts on homosexuality before the twentieth century's midpoint got written.

Queer anarchism runs from Berkman's Prison Memoirs through Emma Goldman's public defence of Oscar Wilde, at a time when almost no public figure would touch it, into the Two-Spirit traditions that predate the word "anarchism" by centuries and the decolonial history of their erasure. José Esteban Muñoz's argument that queerness is a horizon, not yet here, sits alongside ACT UP's dual structure, built so a small affinity group could chain itself to a stock exchange balcony without the open floor ever knowing it was coming. And there's Simon Nkoli, who came out to his co-defendants inside a South African treason trial that carried the death penalty, and went on to help organise the first Pride march anywhere on the African continent.

Where queer theory and anarchist theory pull apart gets named too: a canon built almost entirely by straight men who rarely theorised gender or sexuality at all, and a queer theory that can drift toward the personal at the expense of the structural. Neither tradition gets a pass.

Further reading: José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NYU Press, 2009) Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke University Press, 2004) Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (Mother Earth Publishing, 1912; available free via Project Gutenberg) Terence Kissack, Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895-1917 (AK Press, 2008) South African History Online, Simon Nkoli — sahistory.org.za

Tags: queer anarchism, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, José Esteban Muñoz, queer theory, Two-Spirit, Simon Nkoli, ACT UP, apartheid, Bash Back, queer futurity, LGBTQ history, anarchism

Show notes: Queer Anarchists. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 3

Queer anarchism has existed for well over a century under different names, a tradition both mainstream queer politics and the mostly white, mostly male anarchist canon have had a habit of forgetting was ever there, from a Pennsylvania prison cell to a treason trial in South Africa, asking where the two traditions actually meet.

In this episode:

• Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs and its unlikely place in LGBTQ history
• Emma Goldman's public defence of Oscar Wilde and "The Intermediate Sex"
• Two-Spirit traditions and the decolonial history of gender variance
• José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, and queer futurity's disagreement with Lee Edelman
• Mary Nardini Gang's "Toward the Queerest Insurrection"
• ACT UP's dual structure and the Sell Wellcome action
• Simon Nkoli, the Delmas Treason Trial, and Africa's first Pride march
• Where queer theory and anarchist theory actually pull apart

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In 1974, a psychologist named Herbert Freudenberger needed a word for what he was watching happen to himself and the other volunteers at a free clinic in New York: people who believed their work was too urgent to rest, wearing down until they were useless to the cause they cared about most. He called it burnout. Fifty years later the word is everywhere, mostly drained of its original edge.

This episode turns inward, away from movements and toward the bodies inside them. It follows Audre Lorde's argument that "caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare," written while she was living with the cancer that would kill her, and traces the same idea through adrienne maree brown's Pleasure Activism, Tricia Hersey's Rest as Reparations, and ACT UP's political funerals, where grief itself became protest. It looks at Ella Baker's group-centered leadership, built specifically so a movement wouldn't depend on any single person's stamina to survive, and at Standing Rock, where thousands of people learned the same lesson at the scale of an entire encampment.

It closes somewhere less tidy than a manifesto wants: rest gets sold back as a bath bomb, and the crises this show has spent two seasons naming are not on pause while anyone recovers. Both of those things are true at once.

Further reading: Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: And Other Essays (Firebrand Books, 1988; Ixia Press reissue, 2017) adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (AK Press, 2019) Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto (Little, Brown Spark, 2022) Cher Weixia Chen and Paul C. Gorski, "Burnout in Social Justice and Human Rights Activists," Journal of Human Rights Practice, 2015 John L. Hammond, "Mística, meaning and popular education in the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement," Interface: a journal for and about social movements, 6(1), 2014

Tags: burnout, activist burnout, grief, Audre Lorde, adrienne maree brown, Tricia Hersey, rest as resistance, transformative justice, Ella Baker, SNCC, ACT UP, political funerals, MST, mística, Buen Vivir, healing justice, anarchism

Show notes: Burnout, Grief, and Staying in It A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 2

Burnout ends more organising careers than any raid or arrest ever has, and this episode argues that's not incidental, it's a test of a movement's actual politics: the difference between caring enough to act and knowing when to rest, and what infrastructure, not willpower, actually makes staying possible.

In this episode:

• Herbert Freudenberger and the 1974 origin of the word "burnout"
• Chen and Gorski's research into martyrdom culture in activist spaces
• Audre Lorde: "self-preservation... is an act of political warfare"
• adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism, and Emergent Strategy
• Tricia Hersey, The Nap Ministry, and Rest as Reparations
• ACT UP's political funerals and the Ashes Action
• Cara Page, healing justice, and grief treated as organising
• Ella Baker's group-centered leadership and Standing Rock
• MST's mística and Buen Vivir, written into two national constitutions

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