Introduction

At the start of 2024, I crashed out. Organising commitments had taken their toll, work was going nowhere, and it felt like the world was continuing a grim decline. My feed was full of images from the genocidal assault on Gaza as well as regular reports from climate scientists about the scale of ecological breakdown. I was on a short fuse, struggling to focus, and generally in an unpleasant place. I had, in my own way, become another member of the ‘exhausted of the Earth’¹. Having ridden high on the wave of environmental protest at the end of the 2010s, I was not alone in having this experience of the crushing reality  of the early 2020s. 

I put in my notice at work and decided to take some time to learn a bit more movement history. This brought me to MayDay Rooms, a radical archive of social movements in London, located in a narrow building on Fleet Street. On one of the archive’s many open days, I found myself leafing through a variety of ephemera from Big Flame, a left libertarian group which existed during the 1970s. Going from document to document, I quickly experienced the shock of recognition – there were arguments in bulletins between Big Flame members in the 1970s which mirrored word for word the arguments I’d seen recurring in social movement spaces this decade. Bulletins arguing about centralisation versus decentralisation, how to do inclusive political education, the need for organisations to have a clear focus, and so on. Half a century had passed since the writing of these documents, yet the terms of the argument and the dividing lines seemed unchanged. I found myself spiralling in one of the cramped archive rooms. Not only was I a crank, but an unoriginal one at that. 

The recent publication of Farrar and McDonnell’s Big Flame: Building Movements, New Politics, fills an important gap in histories of the far left in Britain. As the authors state, Big Flame never exceeded 200 members, drawing from various political inspirations including the Italian workerist and autonomist writings to Marxist feminist analyses, and ending with a sizeable portion its membership disappearing into the Labour party – but its impact and its publishing activities belied its small size and its eclecticism. Whether mischaracterised as ‘soft Maoist’², or more appropriately understood as a ‘libertarian left’ organisation, one doesn’t necessarily need to agree with the political positions of Big Flame to appreciate this book. 

Big Flame provides an overview of a real political tendency and its practice in Britain, as well as revealing some of the limitations of that tendency as a political force. The problems Big Flame posed within and against the far left in Britain still haunt us, and Big Flame can help us to avoid repeating the formulas of the 70s. 

What was Big Flame?

Big Flame existed in various forms from 1970 to 1984. The authors periodise its development into four phases (pg47): 1970-74 when the organisation was mainly based in Merseyside producing a newspaper there; 1974-77 when Big Flame became a national organisation and attempted to push for a ‘new revolutionary organisation’; 1977-81 when the organisation grew and began to have extended strategic debates; 1981-84 when the organisation declined and fragmented.³ The organisation regularly produced pamphlets, a Fact Folder recording various struggles from 1971-74, a Big Flame journal in 1974-76, and another journal Revolutionary Socialism from 1977-82. The organisation was structured around a newspaper, initially produced irregularly in Liverpool from 1970, before successfully emerging as a regular paper from 1972-83. Despite its small size the organisation produced a significant amount of print material, the vast majority of which is digitally accessible. 

Farrar and McDonnell’s book has been in the works for nearly a decade. Both are former members of Big Flame itself. Recognising that the ‘personal is political’, the book is interspersed with stories and contributions from other ex-members reflecting on their time in the organisation. Big Flame doesn’t just provide an overview of the political ideas and practices that Big Flame promoted, it provides a real insight into the motivations, experiences, and the everyday life of its activists – the ordinary and extraordinary humdrum of militants’ lives that is usually derided or left out of political histories. 

The book is split into three sections. The first part consists of an explanation of the general political situation of capitalism and the far left in Britain during the 1970s and 80s, a history of Big Flame’s general trajectory and its ways of working, and an analysis of the politics of the organisation. The second provides a deeper dive into the forms of activity that Big Flame was involved in, from workplace struggles to its feminist work and its role in anti-imperialist campaigns like Troops Out. One chapter, on women in Big Flame, is written by Claire Hamburger, Judy Hunt and Jane Storr. The last section provides some critical comments on Big Flame’s politics then a concluding chapter made up of personal reflections on the afterlives of its members and those inspired by Big Flame. 

Politically, Big Flame emerged from a series of ‘base groups’⁴ in Liverpool in the early 1970s, which cohered with others around the Libertarian Newsletter Network into the national organisation in 1975. At the same time, the idea of cohering into a national organisation was rejected by the more libertarian inclined East London Big Flame group, who continued to exist as an independent organisation. Big Flame was heavily influenced by the ideas of the Italian workerist and autonomist left with its emphasis on autonomous struggle, be that of workers against their bosses, or black people against racism, or women against patriarchy. This autonomy was understood in terms of activity separate to the traditional union structures and political parties. In addition, it was reflected in a commitment to ‘inquiry’ into the changing kinds of struggles being waged in the 70s, which revealed the ‘autonomy’ of the working class from capital. Refusing to identify as ‘the party’ nor as ‘the embryo of that party’, the organisation was, in practice, a federation of various local groups engaged in an eclectic variety of activities – from support for workers organising in Ford plants, to women going on rent strike, to themovement to get British troops out of Ireland. 

Where did Big Flame fit? 

Organisationally, Big Flame attempted to chart a path between the ‘democratic centralism’ of the various ‘Leninist’ groups of its time and the more diffuse model of anarchist organisation. To the former, it viewed their forms as not just undemocratic, but also relating to class struggle in an elitist sense. To the latter, it argued for the necessity of a national organisation with elected roles and greater structuring. 

As time passed and the revolutionary moment did not suddenly arrive, Big Flame members were forced to consider their relationship to the wider movements of the left and other groups. Big Flame’s attempts to articulate a vision for uniting a fragmented left still have many lessons for those of us trying to overcome the same problems today. 

At its 1976 Conference, two plans were voted on – Plan X and Plan Y. The former, proposed that Big Flame should argue ‘to the wider social movements that they coalesce into a new organisation, which Big Flame would dissolve itself into.’ (pg84). Plan Y, on the other hand, proposed that Big Flame should grow through ‘greater political centralisation of leadership, ideas and resources’ whilst maintaining its internal democracy. 

At the Conference, after an awkward silence when it was revealed that no one had put themselves forward to propose either plan, Plan X won out by a narrow margin. The resultant pamphlet, worked on by movers of both plans, Towards a New Revolutionary Organisation, is probably the most extensive articulation of Big Flame’s analysis and practice at the end of the 1970s. However, the uptake of promoting and delivering Plan X amongst the membership was not consistent – with only West London following through with a local network of various leftists. Following Plan X, regroupment really was in dribs and drabs. A small group of 12 who had left the International Marxist Group (IMG) in 1974 joined Big Flame, a few floated in from the Socialist Workers Party splinter the International Socialist Alliance, but otherwise Plan X was not carried much further beyond the printing and distribution of the pamphlet. (pg241-242) 

In 1977 Big Flame supported an electoral candidate with the IMG in Birmingham, receiving a small number of votes. In its 1978 conference, it voted to support the IMG’s Socialist Unity alliance further but balked at any further regroupment between the groups. After a brief and critical engagement with the Beyond the Fragments conference, which was inspired by the book of the same name and the expressed desire to unite the various movements of the late 70s, Big Flame began a protracted debate about whether to enter into the Labour party (not dissimilar to the debates in the IMG and other groups at the start of the 1980s). A significant number of its members did so, splintering the organisation in various ways, and it ceased to exist. 

Capable of recognising what it saw as the undemocratic inadequacy of those who identified themselves as ‘parties of a new type’, but incapable of cohering the ‘fragments’ it related to, Big Flame found itself stuck. It engaged with each unity initiative in a manner that was increasingly sceptical and tired, until it could no more. 

What lessons are there from Big Flame? 

In the original draft of Big Flame, Max Farrar had written an extended piece examining the relevance of Big Flame’s politics today, but it was cut due to size. This is a shame, as there are many important lessons from the experience of Big Flame. 

As the many individual testimonies within this book make clear, the activists in Big Flame were held together as much by personal ties as by any shared political analysis or commitment to a particular kind of activity (74-75). This produced a decidedly uneven organisation – some comrades were heavily influenced by the then cutting edge texts from the Italian far-left, while others were only motivated by the friendships formed in relation to a particular struggle. This was not lethal to the organisation as long as these struggles continued. At their best, their publications show Big Flame members attempting to listen to their experiences of struggles and articulate their wider relevance to the changing class composition of British capitalism. 

However, this federated mode of organising, whereby every local collective was engaged in a variety of initiatives and limited coordination could be enforced nationally, had major limits. In one of the pamphlets by its women’s commission, Big Flame referred to ‘Walking a Tightrope’ between autonomous activity and a national organisation – it is the tightrope act which did not succeed. Priorities nationally were not agreed in a meaningful sense, as any attempt to do so merely would see the withdrawal of members elsewhere – either from leaving the organisation, or more often, simply not doing anything to follow through on stated aims.  This led to a paradoxical situation: Big Flame members and local groups could be highly active in a particular struggle, producing insightful inquiry and effective campaign work. However, as a national organisation, Big Flame could not direct itself to intervene in a sufficiently unified manner. 

By the close of the 1970s, when Big Flame remained a limited size, when the attempts to engage the rest of the far-left had been unsuccessful, and when the struggles which had sustained the organisation ebbed due to the emergent neoliberal counterrevolution, the tendency to fragmentation and drift already imminent to the federal model became terminal. Big Flame began to fall apart – not in an explosive manner, but in a limping way. 

The main thing Big Flame could agree on was what it was not – it presented itself against existing organisations as undemocratic, too focused solely on the workplace, inattentive to how the ‘personal was political’. As the authors reflected: 

‘Much of its attraction was that for the most part its members did not think they had everything sorted out, and that its path was a dynamic irregular journey. Indeed the membership was often divided and lacking clear ideas about which way it could go. This though, is far preferable, we argue, to the single-minded, dogmatic certainty of much of the left. For many the attraction of Big Flame was more about what it was not.’ (pg274)

This kind of negative unity could only sustain itself for so long. The combination of the federal practice and lack of clear political unity meant the members of Big Flame who entered into Labour could no longer sustainably operate together in the same way as others who entered did, like the Trotskyist Militant tendency. Operating as a collective within a wider organisation requires a clear structuring publication, priority setting and enough members committed to focused action against more rightward elements. For all the critiques levelled by Big Flame against the various Marxist sects, those groups were far more capable of sustaining themselves over the long term – perhaps for their own sins. 

There are some parallels to the left in Britain of the last two decades. Just as Big Flame emerged from a wave of new struggles at the close of the 1960s, so too did a ‘libertarian’ left emerge from the student movement in Britain in the early 2010s, finding its clearest expression in the organisation Plan C. In both the early 80s and the late 2010s, both tendencies found many of their leading participants rapidly swallowed by activity within and around the Labour party. With both, as the many stories within Big Flame showed, individual militants emerged from these groups forever changed and committed to different forms of resistance. In the worst cases, the absence of a collectively articulated politics and structures of accountability, saw people drift ever rightwards caught in the nexus where ‘horizontalism’ becomes less about it supposedly prefigurative and democratic decision making, and instead is fuelled by a desire to not be bound by the others we organise with.  

The ultimate tragedy of groups like Big Flame, as well as others that emerged across Europe around the same period, only becomes clear when viewing the left as a whole. The authors of Big Flame have asserted that they often met people who claimed to be Big Flame members, but were in fact not. This reflected the fact that Big Flame spoke to a real tendency that exceeded its particular organisation in Britain. The politics of Big Flame, as part of a wave of ultra-left activity over Europe in the 1970s, resulted from a cleavage between new forms of resistance and the historic institutions of the Marxist left. Workers were engaging in struggles which the existing unions and many of the Marxist groups either weren’t in touch with, or were deeply conservative towards. The emergence of the second wave of the feminist movement, the early gay liberation movement, and the student movement all fit uncomfortably at best with the existing organisations. Tendencies which attempted to theorise this breach like autonomia and operaismo can only be effectively understood as partly the result of a failure of the existing left groups to stay with the trouble.⁵ In Britain, those spread to the winds at best incorporated themselves in organisations like Big Flame and the other smaller groups which emerged in these decades. Such forms could effectively relate to and learn from the new terrain of struggle, but could not articulate their politics at the level of the British state and across the many different terrains of class struggle. A distance grew between what little base the Marxist organisations had inherited, and the real movement capable of abolishing the present state of things.  That distance still exists. 

1.  Ajay Singh Chaudrey, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World, (Repeater Books, 2024).  ↩︎
2.  Chris Harman, ‘Crisis of the European Revolutionary Left’, International Socialism 2:4 (1979). The authors of Big Flame cite this description as applying to Big Flame, though the original article only uses it in application to the Italian tendencies which some Big Flame members engaged with – albeit that Harman cites the Red Notes publishing project book Italy 1977-8: Living with and Earthquake, which was the product of Big Flame member, and key vector of Italian texts to the anglosphere, Ed Emery.  ↩︎
3.  A small collective following 1984 did attempt to retain the Big Flame name, but this also fell apart by 1987.  ↩︎
4.  The ‘base groups’ were in Big Flame’s own words, ‘autonomous interventionist structures, linking external and internal factory militants to share experiences and put forward ideas and tactics in a mass way through leafleting etc’ (pg6). In other words, a set of people came together and decided to focus on a particular workplace, leafleting it, adapting their leaflets in response, inviting workers to meetings and so on. This model of coherence based on a location of intervention developed in various forms over the years, including by expanding beyond the workplace to various tenants’ struggles.  ↩︎
5.  There were many who attempted to warn about this rupture, to try desperately to act as intermediary figures, most notably in Italy – see for example  Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, Letters from Inside the Italian Communist Party to Louis Althusser (Verso Books, (1973); Lucio Magri, The Tailor of Ulm: A History of Communism (Verso Books, 2019); Rossana Rossanda, The Comrade from Milan (Verso Books, 2020).  ↩︎