I’ve been a fan of Jarrod Shanahan’s work, but only with his new essay collection Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help: A Decade of Rebellion, Reaction, and Morbid Symptoms, published by PM Press, did it occur to me just how long I’ve been reading him. Well, I guess it’s been a decade. I have vague memories of discovering the book’s opening essay “The Old Mole Breaks Concrete: The Ongoing Rupture in New York City” in the wake of the Ferguson Uprising and the initial wave of Black Lives Matter, of course not knowing anything about the pseudonymous author or expecting to read them again. I was just eager for a radical analysis of the events I saw unfolding from afar as well as their tamer iterations that I attended at home. At the time, I was in the early years of a PhD and ensconced (smothered?) in liberal academia, a couple years removed from the insurrectionary anarchist street confrontations and lingering anti-globalization protests of what I then naively considered “my youth.” “The Old Mole Breaks Concrete” put me back in touch with a political world that felt far away then. Now it’s gratifying to reread that early essay alongside more recent ones like “Zoomers Go to Hell” and “The Future Belongs to the Mad” that have since inducted me into the Jarrod Shanahan fanclub. I hope his new volume expands our membership rolls.
As much as I think the collection testifies to Shanahan’s skill—more on that later—I also hope that it re/introduces readers to Hard Crackers and the tendency whose lineage it bears, from the Sojourner Truth Organization to Race Traitor, from the likes of the late Noel Ignatiev and Loren Goldner to Don Hamerquist, John Garvey, Mike Morgan, and Shanahan’s frequent collaborator Zhandarka Kurti. As Shanahan notes, many of the volume’s essays first appeared in the (web) pages of Hard Crackers. Shanahan, as one of the journal’s former editors, displays all of its best characteristics in his essays: clear-eyed and unflinching about the real conditions of “everyday life” under capitalism; intellectually weighty without feeling rarefied; and maybe above all, practical and lived-in. In the volume’s title essay, Shanahan points to the recent resurgence of the “white race traitor” on the Left. I think the publication of his new book is both a result of that phenomenon and an opening to further it—a dialectic, if you like. We could say the same thing about Hard Crackers itself. It has provided fertile soil for Shanahan’s own writing, and I hope those fruits now entice others to continue cultivating and tilling that ground.
For a volume all about capitalism’s “morbid symptoms,” often full of zombie splatter and horror punk, the packaging is pitch-perfect, done up in Halloween colors with what Shanahan himself calls “the sick ass cover art.” (270) The cover promises a fright fest all about the waking nightmare we’re living, but the book ends up more like a full-throated “fuck you” to the ghouls shambling toward us. It’s worth pausing here to note that, as a book from the PM Press, Every Fire means that Shanahan has completed the contemporary Leftist intellectual’s hat trick: he’s now also published with Verso (Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage as well as Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity, the collection of Ignatiev’s writing co-edited with fellow Hard Crackers editors Geert Dhondt and Zhandarka Kurti) and Haymarket (Skyscraper Jails: The Abolitionist Fight Against Jail Expansion in New York City, also with Kurti).
The book’s sections organize it according to Shanahan’s major subjects, with what I think of as a bonus section for the title essay. The first section, “Rupture,” is the most unwieldy. Alongside “The Old Mole Breaks Concrete,” which fits the section title neatly, Shanahan gives us an essay about his stint in Manhattan’s Central Booking and observations while inside, following the Facing Reality group’s injunction to “recognize and record” the class struggle as it plays out at the most local level. (xiii) Shanahan includes his remembrance of Noel Ignatiev, too, which left an impression on me when I first read it in the pages of the now defunct Commune. I think I can see his rationale for grouping the three essays. But unlike the subsequent sections, the reader has to put in some legwork to connect the dots.
Part 2 is titled “The Rock” and collects Shanahan’s essays on the prison, in which he draws on personal experience. That, along with his scholarly expertise on mass incarceration and the seedy strangeness of the, err, culture among Rikers guards, makes Part 2 the volume’s heavy hitter. Readers’ prior knowledge will vary here, of course, depending on how closely they’ve encountered the carceral system. For myself, I only have experience teaching in prisons, a highly controlled, even choreographed affair, so Shanahan’s essays about Rikers showed me the flip-side of a world I recognized only as a visitor. My favorite of this section is “Days Spent Doing Too Much of Fucking Nothing,” which was the first Shanahan essay I remember reading under his name. It’s also his essay I return to the most, as I sometimes use it to teach my (outside) students about some of the realities of prisoners’ lives inside. And it’s an essay in which Shanahan chronicles everyday life so effectively because he reveals how even the mundane is intensely political, and what could be more mundane than being bored? As he writes,
Far from a minor side effect of incarceration, boredom and the sheer futility of life behind bars is a key element of the prison experience that often takes backseat to sensationalist stories. In terms of explanatory power, the acute boredom communicates the impersonality and dispassionateness of mass incarceration far more accurately than the tales of impassioned violence. In short: You are not locked up because society cares so much about you that they want to hurt you, stem your advancement, or assert supremacy over you. You are locked up because nobody with any social power cares about you enough to make it stop or to give you a better life. (53)
In Part 3, bearing the tongue-in-cheek title “Morbid Symptoms,” Shanahan indulges his obvious love for all things horror, including the horror punk OGs, the Misfits. It’s hard to tell if the section title’s joke will be more forward for readers than its actual reference, Antonio Gramsci’s often misunderstood pronouncement that “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Joke aside, it’s an apt title. Gramsci’s work, after his death, became a major touchstone for both Marxist and Marx-ish cultural analysis. And Shanahan tears into his pop culture subjects with fiendish delight. Because I’m a literary historian, this was the section I was most excited for but also most primed to nitpick for dull scholarly reasons. Instead I found myself having too much fun to quibble over methodology. For example, even though I’m skeptical of reading, say, the long-running mainstream horror series The Walking Dead too functionally—in Shanahan’s words, “it simultaneously educates us in the means by which ruling-class organs decipher dissatisfaction with our world and our striving for a better one, while attempting to neutralize it” (81)—the zombie lore and Shanahan’s analysis of our moment far outweighed any of my criticism.
My favorite essay of this section, and maybe of the book, wound up being one I hadn’t read before: “Hybrid Moments,” about a conflicted Shanahan attending “The Original Misfits” reunion show. I think this might have been the smartest blend of all the book’s constituent parts: radical analysis, pop culture, working class experience, scholarship. I missed out on “real” punk in my youth, only coming to it and the Misfits themselves when I was in my 20s, so I lived vicariously reading about Shanahan’s youthful punk days. The essay’s final turn regarding one fan’s reappropriation of the infamously violent lyrics to “Last Caress” exemplified for me the kind of analysis that Shanahan pursues throughout the book. In his own words,
It would be obvious for someone, especially in today’s polarized cultural terrain, to hear this song and denounce its creators and all who would dare hum its tune. But maybe that’s too obvious, too predictable, and perhaps playing right into [Misfits founder Glenn] Danzig’s hands. So this fan had refused to flinch. She stared straight in the Mona Lisa smile of the Crimson Ghost, and grinned back. The music of the Misfits, the profound sense of alienation from which it sprang, and the belligerent desire to chart one’s way out of it, all belong to her just as much as anyone else, including the author of the song himself. (131-2)
But I think I like this one so much because Shanahan himself enters the essay more fully than all the others. This one’s self-reflective, a style I favor, as well as self-effacing, a manner I appreciate so much because I, too, am a graying radical trying to negotiate my hatred for authority with an aching back and an early bedtime.
Part 4, “Looking Right,” collects Shanahan’s observations—sometimes harrowingly close ones—of the Right, from the now defeated Alt-Right to garden variety MAGA fash. The meditative “Iowa Bluffs” stands out especially. But I want to turn toward the sole piece in Part 5, the title essay “Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help.” The longest in the book, this essay first appeared in a special issue of Endnotes on the George Floyd Rebellion. For my money, it may well become the most important essay of the volume, and it justifies giving the book its title. Along with Tobi Haslett’s “Magic Actions” in n+1 and Shanahan and Kurti’s States of Incarceration, this essay ranks among the best analyses of rebellious 2020 and its aftermath. Moreover, it offers a handy history of the state of the struggle in the US since the Long Downturn began in the ‘70s, what Shanahan dubs in a subtitle the Left’s “Forty Years in the Desert.” For new radicals looking for a brief summary of the anti-globalization years, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and how they led us here—or for old ones who lived through it yet are still trying to figure out what the hell happened—this essay will prove indispensable.
One of my favorite elements of “Every Fire” is Shanahan’s attention to Left conspiracy thinking. He writes of that heady summer, “poor information discipline among even the most sincere activists led to breathless rumors proliferating of impending attacks by right-wingers, making the white rebels putting themselves on the line in the streets increasingly suspect, and sowing distrust in moments that could have been characterized by communal letting go of fear.” (248) He makes a similar point in his earlier essay on the J6 insurrection, “The Big Takeover,” dismantling the claim that the reactionary riot that day benefited from collaboration with the Capitol Police—an inside job. Such conspiracism, he explains, “allows people to sidestep facing the challenge that a comparatively small, focused, and courageous group of people can do a whole lot once it lets go of its fear and preoccupations with appeasing polite society or stepping on the toes of anyone who claims to represent large groups of people.” (194) This problem has been on my mind lately. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the internet has been awash in conspiracy theories about the event, all missing the much more important lesson that a determined person, Right or Left, with decent aim and a little luck, can act decisively, for better or worse. As we witnessed when rebels torched the Minneapolis Third Precinct or when street fash invaded the Capitol, the seemingly unstoppable and all-powerful forces shaping the world are more vulnerable than we’ve come to believe.
Mind you, Shanahan doesn’t get everything right. But who does? As I (re)read “Every Fire,” I planned to take him to task for some of his predictions regarding the post-rebellion years. For example, his focus on street fash has proven misguided. Or rather, history has since taken a different course. With Trump’s return to power, the threat from street fash has, if not vanished, then certainly been dwarfed by the threat from the state fash. Case in point, comrades with years of experience fighting it out with Nazis in the streets now feel helpless in the face of the ICE kidnappings that are terrorizing people around the country. For all their shared politics and often overlapping memberships, the street and the state fash remain very different enemies. Similarly, “abolition” has not lived up to its potential as a unifying politics in the way that Shanahan anticipated. Earlier I said I planned to dig into these points. But Shanahan himself beat me to it. In his afterword, he acknowledges and critiques his predictions. How can I hold them against him, then? Instead, I’ll take issue with this: I’m actually not as convinced as Shanahan now is that “abolition” has failed to live up to its promise. As I write this in occupied DC, with the third or fourth helicopter fly-over of the evening providing air support for the ICE checkpoint down the road, I can say that elements of police abolition have generalized among the normies in at least this city. There’s still time to prove Shanahan’s self-correction about “abolition” wrong.
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In his smart introduction, “Get Back Up Again,” A.M. Gittlitz unravels the thread that ties together the whole collection: Chumbawamba. As Gittlitz observes, the book’s title derives from the British “anarchist pop group[’s]” song “Give the Anarchist a Cigarette,” which references an interaction between a young Bob Dylan and his manager as captured in the documentary Don’t Look Back (ix). Gittlitz sets this reference alongside one that some readers may more readily recognize, namely, the chorus to Chumbawamba’s once inescapable radio hit “Tubthumping.” In doing so, Gittlitz, correctly, in my opinion, summarizes the book’s project: “Like Chumbawamba,” he writes, “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 [sic] 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.’” (x)
Taking my cue from Gittlitz, I want to give one final pull on this thread—Shanahan’s radical analysis, “everyday life,” and the great Chumbawamba—in order to unwind what I think the best aspect of this volume really is. Whenever I listen to “Give the Anarchist a Cigarette,” I always home in on Alice Nutter’s vocals. The chorus, the source for Shanahan’s title, hits me hard, filling me with an aching hope-beyond-hope in the collective power of real people: “Nothing ever burns down by itself, / Every fire needs a little bit of help.” Part of this is the politics given voice in the song, but part of it is also just Nutter’s voice, one especially striking element of the song’s overall composition. It is—not just in its politics but in its artistry—beautiful.
As much as I love the radical analysis in Shanahan’s book, I also think it’s just damn good writing. I’m biased as a fan of the essay as a form, but I increasingly think essays such as these, especially given their comparatively short length, hold some real, even urgent hope for us trapped in the so-called attention economy. I’m an English professor by trade, so I see with my own eyes students struggling to read every day. Unlike most people, though, I blame this not so much on phones and apps per se as I do on the fact that my students are so desperately overworked. Schooling in the US transformed into an arms race (pun intended, unfortunately) long ago. In addition to them being full-time students, many of the people I teach hold down more jobs than I do. They tell me all the time that they want to be readers, that they care about big ideas and even something like “culture” because they’re curious about the world. They just don’t have the time to do it, or to do it as well as they’d like.
Maybe’s it’s grandiose, but I believe that accessible essays like Shanahan’s—indeed, like those published in Hard Crackers—represent a way not only to further the struggle for freedom through radical analysis or to chronicle everyday life but to rebuild a truly popular working class culture of reading and writing—of art—at a moment when the capitalists count on us to pay (for) attention to the wrong things.