Political Science

The story of the Centro Iberico, a legendary music venue of the UK's postpunk era, has been fragmentary and disjointed, its tangled twelve-year history never properly documented before now.

Its tale spans the Spanish Civil War as we follow an anarchist hero who spilt blood for his beliefs, fought the Nazis, fought Franco’s fascists as part of the resistance, endured a death sentence commuted to twenty years’ imprisonment, before devoting his twilight years to evangelizing his cause from exile in London. His survival and the inauguration of the Centro Iberico were thanks to London's anarchist underground, which maintained a foothold and kept the torches burning despite harassment and disinterest, before finding new life amid punk’s co-optaion of “anarchy” as a youth culture phenomenon. Punks and political anarchists rallied together to support the victims of an egregious and shambolic antiterror trial. The Centro Iberico's peripatetic journey ended as it came into contact with the squatters occupying an abandoned school, morphing from its activist roots to become a creative hub which gave refuge to the residents of the anarchy center before the first murmurs of the ’80s construction boom finally ended its existence.

The Centro Iberico was the only consistently established anarchist center that survived throughout the decade, forming a key connection between the international political prisoner support offered by the Anarchist Black Cross, the anarchist groups abroad that fueled the Black Flag newspaper, while sustaining its own activities in support of the cause.

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.