I want to start with something I don't know how to resolve.
Over the course of this season I have argued that the state is not your friend, that prisons do not produce safety, that settler colonialism is ongoing, that the feminist movement made things worse for the most marginalised women by handing their safety to the same system that endangered them. I believe all of that. And I also live inside all of it. I pay taxes that fund the prison system I said should not exist. I live on land whose original custodians never ceded it. I have called the police, once, in a situation where I did not know what else to do.
The contradiction is not something I can argue my way out of. And I don't think the point of this show was ever to pretend I could.
This is the season one finale of A Thousand Small Fires. It does not summarise. It reconsiders. It pulls threads from all fourteen episodes, names the three things the season did not resolve, and turns the critical lens on anarchism itself as a tradition that has not always practiced what it preaches.
It closes with the questions i´m still carrying, about what it means to practice mutual aid rather than just believe in it, about what we owe people who need something now, about what you would have to give up. And with a glimpse of what season two is going to be about.
Further reading:
All reading from Episodes 1-13 remains relevant — this episode draws on the whole season
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974) — the novel closest in spirit to what this show is trying to do
Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (Verso, 2020)
Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution — free at theanarchistlibrary.org
Tags: season finale, prefigurative politics, mutual aid, anarchism, self-critique, prison abolition, settler colonialism, carceral feminism, Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Zapatistas, Black Panthers, Mondragón, season two, A Thousand Small Fires
Show notes:
What are we actually building?
A Thousand Small Fires — Season One Finale
The season started with a question: what even is anarchism? This episode comes back to it from the other side, after fourteen episodes of history, theory, and the people who built something different anyway.
In this episode:
- The personal contradictions that don't resolve
- Threads from all fourteen episodes — what each one opened and what it left unresolved
- The three things the season didn't answer: scale, urgency, and the show's own position
- Anarchism as a movement that has not always practiced what it preaches
- A self-critique of the show itself
- The mutual aid texture — what it actually feels like when it works
- A glimpse of season two
If you want to get in touch with the show, you can reach us on instagram, A thousand small fires or on the mail BarksMx@proton.me
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