Intro to Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help: A Decade of Rebellion, Reaction, and Morbid Symptoms
The title of this book references the song “Give the Anarchist a Cigarette” by the Yorkshire “anarchist pop group” Chumbawamba. The track, from their 1994 album Anarchy, comments on a bit of dialogue from D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary of Bob Dylan’s controversial 1965 UK tour, Don’t Look Back. Like Chumbawamba, Dylan was a radical musician midway through his climb up the music industry ladder. In the previous two years, he had performed at the Great March on Washington and Silas McGhee’s SNCC-headquarters farm in Greenwood, Missouri, and wrote protest songs for the ex-Communists of Pete Seeger’s “topical-song movement.” But once he picked up an electric guitar to combine West Village folk revival with the then lowbrow art of rock ’n’ roll, pledging in beatnik lyrics to toil on “Maggie’s farm” no longer, the UK Communist Party mobilized pickets. “They’ve started calling you an anarchist,” his manager, Albert Grossman tells him in his limo after a concert, “just ’cause you don’t offer any solutions.” Leather-clad Dylan laughs and cooly removes his Ray-Bans, pouting “Give me a cigarette. Give the anarchist a cigarette.”
Perhaps recognizing their similar trajectory to Dylan, Chumbawamba firmly came down on the side of those decrying him as a Judas to the movement:
Give the anarchist a cigarette
A candy cig for the spoilt brat
Give the anarchist a cigarette
We’ll get Albert to write you a cheque . . .
Give the anarchist a cigarette / You know I hate every pop star
that I ever met
In the chorus, Chumbawamba reveal their own theory of pop as an incendiary device to inspire and support future rebellions: “Nothing ever burns down by itself, every fire needs a little bit of help.”
Three years later, the band released their smash hit “Tubthumping.” Before its infamous Trump and Biden-quoted refrain of “I get knocked down, but I get up again,” it opens with a muffled sound clip from the 1996 film Brassed Off, in which the conductor of a Yorkshire coal miners’ brass band refuses a music award to protest the wave of privatizations that will cost his band their livelihoods. “Truth is . . . I thought that music mattered. But does it? Bollocks! Not compared to how people matter.”
The Tubthumper album sold many millions worldwide, with unknown thousands more stolen from record stores with the band’s encouragement. Most listeners, however, bought it in earnest, taking its title track as a mindless anthem of substance abuse. Predictably, some of their old fans now believe the band had become Dylanesque Judases themselves.
Like Chumbawamba, Jarrod Shanahan is drawn to the radical poptimism without the same conflicted contempt for the political ambiguity that is an inevitable trade-off for mass-market appeal. His method draws inspiration from the Trinidadian marxist theorist and organizer C.L.R. James, who argued in American Civilization that the entertainment industry was creating “new conditions of the relation between art and society” that “will give us deep insight into modern political psychology and help us to knit together various currents in what is a world movement towards the creation of man as an integral human being.” Jarrod’s essays in this volume thus analyze the arsonous riots of Ferguson and the George Floyd Rebellion, the American carceral system, and the Trump movement with near equal consideration to the low-culture phantasmagoria of punk bands like the Misfits and horror franchises like Hellraiser. Shanahan writes on these subjects as an active participant and enthusiastic consumer, seeing in the confused violence of proletarian riots and zombie-apocalypse fantasies the expressed neuroses of a society materially driven towards confrontation with the class order.
Other contemporary leftist cultural critics, like the black-pilled meme theorists of Do Not Research, or Jacobin magazine’s film critic Eileen Jones, often sound like the anti-Dylan Leninists when they cover this territory, seeing pop culture as valid only when it conveys a message adequate to the platform of a not-yet-existing vanguard party. As a result, their work ironically comes off like a Dylanesque sneer that the entirety of American politics, from the alt-right to the seemingly spontaneous bursts of Black liberation, is uniformly absurd noise, signaling little more than a hopeless future.
Shanahan, on the other hand, echoes the conclusions of the intro to “Tubthumping”—while there may be little hope in the catchiest conventional narratives of class society, extreme and grotesque art and cultural moments represent the violence of everyday desires to burn down the cruel excesses of the old world and build communism from what remains. I first encountered the indefatigably optimistic milieu that connected James to Jarrod at the Hard Crackers journal release parties at Freddy’s Bar in Brooklyn. During the aughts, this working-class watering hole became notorious as the final holdout against the massive developmental project that razed blocks of Brooklyn’s downtown for luxury high-rises and the Barclays Center. Freddy’s fought eminent domain to the bitter end, opening its backroom to grassroots meetings of neighbors, like writer and longtime anti-apartheid activist Mike Morgan, long after the project’s main opponents, the Democrat-machine NGO ACORN, sold out to the developers for a role in administering a percentage of “market-value” apartments. Freddy’s was eventually demolished and moved to South Slope in Brooklyn, where Morgan held regular release parties for a new journal founded by himself, Shanahan, and former Race Traitor editors John Garvey and Noel Ignatiev in 2016.
Race Traitor was a ubiquitous novelty among the anarchist zine tables at the punk shows and infoshops of my youth. Its central thesis, which remains surprisingly controversial among US marxists, was that the American class order was structured around the keystone of white supremacy. Every revolutionary movement in modern American history, from John Brown’s attempted slave insurrection to the general strikes of runaway slaves that won the Civil War, to the civil rights movement of the sixties, to the Movement for Black Lives of our previous decade, has shown the country’s white majority the path towards liberation. They were only defeated by the reaction of white workers who came to believe the ongoing immiseration and hyperexploitation of their Black counterparts was integral to the modest privileges that Du Bois called the wages of whiteness. In this narrative, the greatest barrier to American revolution is clearly the perpetuation of whiteness itself as a cross collaboration that promises to exploit white and nonwhite workers to different degrees. Race Traitor, and later, Hard Crackers, argued for a mass refusal of this ever-fluctuating alliance far more profound than mere privilege checking; nothing less than the abolition of whiteness could establish a truly autonomous, international, and interracial working-class force that could fight seriously for the demands of the Black proletariat, and to eventually overcome the divisions of wage labor, nations, and race altogether.
At Freddy’s I was honored to meet the septuagenarian Ignatiev in the flesh. Gigantic, slight, kind, and stunningly ambitious, he truly believed the zine would spread the politics and methods of their milieu like wildfire, just as Race Traitor had in the nineties. It was a similar affect to the other ’68ers Jarrod and I have encountered, like Loren Goldner, Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, and Phil Wohlstetter—undying commitment to the long march lost to nearly all our millennial comrades. These cleareyed partisans of the real movement that abolishes the present state of things (Marx and Engels’s concise definition of communism) had witnessed the certainty of revolution in the late sixties, the Movement’s pitiful liquidation into cults and sects, and the reputed end of history in the nineties. Even as they watched their friends become apolitical careerists or political prisoners, they were impervious to the cycles of pessimism and optimism that immobilized me and other comrades in the lulls between
struggles.
This political depression is especially epidemic in our current year, as progressives and social-democrats alike abandon their civil rights movement and BLM-era commitments to social and racial justice in the face of fascism’s reemergence. The most likely source of stability in the chaotic era of capitalist decline, social disorder, and climate chaos, his new bleak bipartisanship asserts, is border walls, law-and-order policing, and ever-expanding prisons to discipline the working-class
and exterminate all resistance. The race traitors, of course, have seen this nadir of struggle before, and always quieted overwhelming doubts in the viability of proletarian revolution with the pounding certainty that capitalism cannot last forever.
Shanahan’s contributions to Hard Crackers bridged the gap between the New Left elders of Race Traitor and the more subjective literary styles of anarchopunk zinesters like Aaron Cometbus, Cindy Crabb, and Ericka Lyle. His writing situates the subversive joy of what proto-punk Raoul Vaneigem called the revolution of everyday life within the post-Leninist strategy of Race Traitor’s sixties mentors. Believing the activity of ordinary, nonparty workers had surpassed the orthodox marxist focus on union bureaucracies or political parties, C.L.R. James, James Boggs, and Grace Lee Boggs, and the Facing Reality group called on communists to “recognize and record” developments of the class struggle at its quotidian origin on the factory floor. In the half century since the Facing Reality group developed this method, capitalism dramatically restructured and radically altered American class composition. The New Left likewise expanded its understanding of the primal source of revolt from the workplace to everywhere capitalist social relations are produced—homes, universities, neighborhoods, the streets, and even countercultural enclaves, online and off
Beyond zinester personalism and New Left marxism, Shanahan adopts the experimental honesty in encountering these recreative realties typical of the beatnik prose of Henry Miller and Samuel Delany, the passionate rock criticism of Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Ellen Willis, and Chuck Klosterman, and the “gonzo” journalism of Hunter S. Thompson and Normal Mailer. His contributions to recognizing and recording American cultural history especially stand out in his direct reports from within the eye of society’s most ferocious storms. The second section of this book, for instance, describes his experience with America’s carceral system not as a social worker or undercover prison guard, à la Shane Bauer, but as an inmate.
His thirty-day sentence was the result of a climactic march over the Brooklyn Bridge, after Eric Garner’s killer was cleared of charges in December 2014, during which he broke an officer’s nose during a melee.
In the days afterwards, a citywide search for the perpetrators ensued, complete with a wanted poster featuring Jarrod’s blurry face on the cover of the New York Post. A year and a half later, as Trump ascended through the Republican primaries, I visited Jarrod at the Rikers gymnasium. When I solemnly asked how he was, I was shocked that he excitedly answered “Great!” He was filling notebooks with every detail of bastille life and his fellow inmates’ stories, he told me. When I asked if he was able follow the news of the world, he grinned and said there was no need. “I’m in the center of it.”1
A year later, Trump was president and Jarrod and I watched in horror as the alt-right smashed the Overton window wide open in a Gramscian attempt to transform the GOP into the Nazi Party. Seeking insight into the scheme, Jarrod began posting on the forums of the Daily Stormer in the persona of a skinhead named “Irish Jay.” Within no time, he was invited to their “Book Club” and “Hate Hikes,” working his way up to their most secretive midtown conference. As the rally wound down, he texted me the location of its beer-hall afterparty. Around two in the morning, when Jarrod was confident he had accumulated enough material and could finally be free of this sad little world, I overheard him lightheartedly admit to one of the subjects that he was an antifascist, and their whole cabal would soon be exposed. The Nazi looked at him in stony silence for a tense moment before the two burst out laughing.
On the morning of August 17, 2017, the day the entirety of the alt-right movement arrived for the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, some details of Jarrod’s investigation were leaked to the public. With the double lives of these small-business owners, tech-workers, neo-volk pagans, and wealthy intellectuals now exposed to their “normy” friends, family, and coworkers, they undoubtedly received a barrage of furious texts as they marched toward battle. But even after they were defeated in the streets by thousands of brave antifascists and Charlottesville locals, and Jarrod had published his Commune magazine tell-all on the operation, the race warriors could not believe they had been bested by ordinary people who hated their politics enough to risk life and limb to fight them. Victims of their own narrative that the MAGA movement emerged from the economic anxiety of downwardly mobile whites, many still argued that Irish Jay had been a Nazi all along, and had only betrayed the movement in an act of cowardice.
After the alt-right’s fracture following Charlottesville, Shanahan continued to probe this narrative within the broader MAGA movement by enduring several Trump rallies. Where some edgy social democrats, like Angela Nagel, saw a blue-collar revolt against neoliberalism, Jarrod found instead “an interconnected web of small-time hucksters, politicized police and Border Patrol, Christian chauvinists, ideological white supremacists and xenophobes, and local petty bourgeois prone to representing themselves as “the white working class.”
After Trump lost his reelection, tens of thousands of this coalition mobilized to support his attempted coup by storming the Capitol to prevent the electoral vote tally on January 6, 2021. Some antifascists were so horrified to see Carhartt cosplayers battling their way through police lines that they regretted not mobilizing in defense of Biden, and began participating in a campaign to identify the rioters and turn them over to the FBI. Jarrod, on the other hand, judged the moment to be a parodic, but potent petit bourgeois recreation of the May 28 precinct burning that initiated the George Floyd Rebellion. Fearing the significance of J6 and M28 alike would be lost, he wrote: “Collective actions like the siege of the Capitol register in the minds of millions of people the idea that drastic measures can be taken by ordinary people. What is our alternative?”
Jarrod and I are, of course, not “ordinary people.” We are partisans of a centuries-long class war, students of its great theorizers like Hegel, Marx, Du Bois, James, and Ignatiev, and writers that connect isolated moments of proletarian rage through long cycles of burst and bust. We treat these great episodes the same way record collectors and film nerds do often-obscure genre waves—important marginalia striving towards some culmination still past the horizon of marxist prognostication.
This archive of their failures and triumphs has been compiled in hopes that future generations of rebels will enjoy them as something more than subversive songs satisfying the riot-porn itch of depressed radicals contemplating defection. Instead, think of these texts as a carton of smokes that can provide both yard-time relief, or kindling for tomorrow’s fires; an invitation to do what the anarchist sang: strike another match and start anew.
