The state isn't failing us. For many people, it's working exactly as intended.

Anarchism has one of the clearest and most historically grounded critiques of state power — one that long predates the modern left's debates about reform vs. revolution. In this episode of A Thousand Small Fires, we sit with that critique seriously: What is the state, structurally? What does it exist to protect? And what does it mean to build political life outside of — or against — it?

We look at the anarchist argument that the state is not a neutral container for democratic will, but a machine for enforcing hierarchy — of class, race, gender, and empire. We look at how state violence isn't a bug or an abuse of power, but its foundation. And we ask what it means to want something different, without falling back on a simpler state or a better government.

This isn't an episode about chaos. It's about clarity.

A Thousand Small Fires is an anarchist podcast exploring political ideas with rigour, care, and a refusal to simplify. New episodes drop every Monday.

Further Reading

• Pyotr Kropotkin — The State: Its Historic Role (1896) — one of the foundational anarchist texts on how the modern state emerged through the destruction of mutual aid and self-governance
• Emma Goldman — Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) — especially "The Individual, Society and the State"
• Murray Bookchin — The Ecology of Freedom (1982) — on hierarchy, domination, and the state as a social relation
• James C. Scott — Seeing Like a State (1998) — how states make populations legible and controllable, often at enormous human cost
• Frantz Fanon — The Wretched of the Earth (1961) — on colonial state violence and the limits of national liberation
• Angela Davis — Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) — the carceral state as a racialised institution
• David Graeber — Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004) — short, accessible, and sharp on stateless societies and political imagination
• Peter Gelderloos — Anarchy Works (2010) — practical examples of stateless organisation across history

Episode Tags

anarchism, the state, state power, political theory, state violence, police, prison abolition, Emma Goldman, Kropotkin, James C. Scott, Frantz Fanon, hierarchy, mutual aid, abolition, political philosophy, feminist theory, decolonisation, radical politics, anti-capitalism, anarchist podcast

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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 which families are legitimate. Emma Goldman understood this in her essay Marriage and Love: that the institution takes genuine human longing and organises it into ownership. She refused it her whole life, and privately burned with the jealousy and need that the structures she opposed had built inside her. That gap — between the world we argue for and the people we already are — is the most honest place to argue from.

Elizabeth Brake coined the term amatonormativity in 2012 to name the assumption that everyone is better off in an exclusive romantic couple — an assumption that structures law, economics, and inner life, and discriminates against almost everyone whose most important relationships don't fit the script. Andie Nordgren's relationship anarchy manifesto applies anarchist principles directly to intimate life: no ranking of people, no predetermined scripts, relationships designed consciously by the people inside them.

This episode also looks beyond the Western anarchist tradition. Across South Asia, West Africa, and Latin America, the nuclear couple has never been the dominant unit of care. The Hausa tradition of reciprocal support names something Kropotkin was arguing — mutual dependence as social foundation — lived in the texture of intimate life without the European theoretical vocabulary.

Topics: relationship anarchy, anarchism, amatonormativity, Emma Goldman, Andie Nordgren, Elizabeth Brake, free love, chosen family, care work, nuclear family, joint family, mutual aid, intimate politics, decolonisation.

Further reading: — Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) — Voltairine de Cleyre, They Who Marry Do Ill (1907) — free at theanarchistlibrary.org — Elizabeth Brake, Minimizing Marriage (2012) — Andie Nordgren, The Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy (2006) — free at theanarchistlibrary.org — Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now (2019)

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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 youth. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera built STAR House from a truck in 1970 — a shelter for homeless trans kids, funded by their own sex work, governed horizontally. Rivera was booed at the 1973 gay liberation rally for being too radical.

But the American story is only part of it. In India, the hijra community held court authority under the Mughal Empire for centuries — until the British Raj criminalised them with Section 377 in 1860, a colonial law imposed on 42 countries that had no equivalent at home. In Uganda, the laws used to persecute queer people today were introduced by British colonial administrators, not by African tradition. In Brazil, the travesti communities built mutual aid networks and political organisations against state violence decades before the mainstream movement noticed they existed.

The laws criminalising queer life across the Global South are not ancient local traditions. They are colonial exports. And the communities that resisted them did so through exactly the practices this show keeps returning to: mutual aid, horizontal organising, building the world you need without asking permission.

ACT UP's direct action cut the price of AZT. Bash Back kept asking the question the mainstream movement had stopped asking. The argument has never stopped being made — everywhere, in different forms, for a very long time.

Topics: queer anarchism, Stonewall, Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, STAR House, ACT UP, marriage equality, Bash Back, Section 377, hijra, colonial law, Brazil, travestis, ASTRAL, food sovereignty, queer liberation, trans rights, decolonisation.

Further reading:

— Susan Stryker, Transgender History (2008)

— Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007)

— Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? (2003)

— Enze Han & Joseph O'Mahoney, British Colonialism and the Criminalisation of Homosexuality (2018)

— José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (2009)

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