UK

The relevance of the Big Flame experience today

 January 20, 2025

Max Farrar introduces some upcoming events around his new book, co-authored with Kevin McDonnell, Big Flame: Building the Movements, New Politics, published by Merlin Press.

“I met Big Flame women in east London in the early 1970s. I learned a lot and they did great work. For example, they could see the local youth club really just catered for the boys. So they set up a youth club for the girls — it was a big success.” “What did Big Flame actually do to secure that its women members had equal power with the men?” “There’s all this talk now about a new left party — is Big Flame at all relevant to that?”

These were some of the many issues we discussed when Kevin McDonnell and I went went to Caracol Books in Norwich the other day. It’s taken us 15 years to finally get this book about Big Flame into print. The response so far makes us think it’s been worth the acres of time we’ve spent in archives and libraries, cajoling 40 or so ex-members to send us their contributions, digging up photos — and cutting a manuscript of 340,000 words down to a hefty 150,000.

Big Flame started in 1970 in Liverpool as a rough-and-ready newspaper that had more in common with the self-produced ‘community papers’ of the 1970s than any of those produced by the Leninist and Trotskyist groups. These burgeoned in those heady days when lots of us thought revolution was in the air. Yes, really.

From 1971 to 1981, BF spread across most of the big cities in England and some of the smaller ones. It had a national committee with little or no power and it never had more than 200 members. In fact, we never quite knew who its members were. We meet people today who say they were in BF but they never appeared in any papers held by the oddballs who kept lists. (I was one of those admin oddballs.)

Several influential members left in 1981 to join the Labour Party, and some of them became councillors and some were effective in the Labour Co-ordinating Committee. So we do have something to say about the ‘new left party’ question that’s running around the websites and meeting rooms right now.

In fact, being Big Flame, there will be a variety of responses. Some will support the idea but not all. We were congenitally anti-party, unless there was lots of singing and dancing. ‘Sympathetic rejection’ was the overwhelming feeling in the small but perfectly formed space that Caracol Books occupies in Norwich. Run entirely by eleven committed volunteers, breaking even because they’ve got the nous to successfully sell enough lefty books, they reminded me of Big Flamers 50 years ago. One even had to dash o to look after his baby.

Quite a few of BFers who voted against the pro-Labour Party motion in 1981 actually joined when Jeremy Corbyn was its leader. Most of those newbies left when Corbyn stood down, but some are still there.

BF always voted Labour but only because the Tories were so obviously so much worse. In 1978-9, we co-operated with the International Marxist Group in an electoral venture called Socialist Unity — but our votes were so pitiful that some turned decidedly against electoral politics and some thought we should actually join Labour, to support Tony Benn’s efforts to change it from within.

BF’s praxis throughout was to think and work simultaneously as Marxists, feminists, internationalists and anti-racist/anti-fascists. We did political work in the kitchen and the bedroom, within neighbourhoods, and in all types of waged workplaces. We believed that social and class movements would build organs of popular power and these would open up the space for revolution.

We said “the personal is political” and we wanted to level out all hierarchies (including within the organisation). We rejected gurus, but we admired Simone de Beauvoir and Harriet Tubman, and, with varying amounts of enthusiasm, Adriano Sofri and CLR James. We tried to apply much of the early writing of Marx and Engels. We didn’t have much time for Lenin.

When the boot-boys in Thatcher’s Cabinet and her police force defeated the miners, most of us thought this spelled time for a tiny organisation that was closer to libertarianism than Leninism. A few struggled on till 1987. Our unusual emphasis on supporting the autonomous radicalism of women and people of colour is now widely accepted and we count that as a gain.

We wrote this book because we thought its ideas and its methods were as relevant today as they were then. We know we failed back then, and we are wiser (and more cautious) today.

Authoritarianism (stepping towards Fascism2.0) is as great a danger as the protectionist, bluetoothed, autocratic capitalism that is forming itself under the auspices of regimes as different as Starmer’s and Trump’s. BF was acute in tracking the move from Keynesianism to monetarism, with the authoritarian and class-decomposing tendencies that resulted. I would now focus on the corruptive effects on mass narcissism at both societal and individual levels.

I suspect those still locked into the far left of the 70s and 80s will go ahead and form a new left party. The vast majority of Old Flames will steer clear. There’s no real base for this right now.

But lots of us would welcome some kind of Coalition of the Movements, where people who mainly work, say, on ecological or trade union or women’s or black people’s issues meet together with the thousands of independent socialists in order to think better and strategise more effectively. And we’d see this developing more effectively if there was a socialist government in Parliament, so we would not turn our backs on an activist, non-sectarian socialist party with real roots.

We’re meeting around this book at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford on 6th February, and then at May Day Rooms in London in March. Events in Sheffield and Bristol are being planned. One of the ways that Big Flame tried to curb the power of men was by insisting that no-one spoke for more than three minutes. Kevin and I will probably speak for a bit longer than that, but not much, and the emphasis will be on discussion, with no gurus involved. Everyone who enjoys the respectful exchange of ideas and experiences is welcome