Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help

A decade of American society coming apart.

Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help collects a decade of reflections on recent US struggles—Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the George Floyd Rebellion—alongside accounts of the rise of Trumpism, the alt-right, an apocalyptic shift in popular culture, to paint a dense and complex portrait of a decade of protracted social crisis. Jarrod Shanahan reports from the ground. On the streets in 2014, from the depths of the Rikers Island penal complex, inside the alt-right underground and the carnival of Trump rallies, and in the line of fire in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020, among other scenes that Shanahan accessed not as a credentialed observer but an active participant: prisoner, infiltrator, activist. The resulting essays outline the pitfalls and opportunities facing those seeking to reverse the suicidal course of capitalist society and build a liberated world.