What do you think?
Rate this book
Big Flame: Building Movements, New Politics
This book, written by two former members, addresses the ideas and experiences of a small revolutionary socialist and feminist organisation.
It reflects on influences (among them Italian Marxism, libertarianism, feminism) and critiques (of Leninism and Trotskyism) that helped shape Big Flame and reflects on its successes and failures. Many other former members write about their experiences in lively times and in harder times, after Margaret Thatcher won the 1979 election.
They say: "our book is aimed at those in the radical movements of every type who are seriously interested in political ideas and their relationship to political struggle. It seeks to assist all those who continue to challenge racist, patriarchal capitalism and to organise for a future where love and equality will prevail".
It reflects on influences (among them Italian Marxism, libertarianism, feminism) and critiques (of Leninism and Trotskyism) that helped shape Big Flame and reflects on its successes and failures. Many other former members write about their experiences in lively times and in harder times, after Margaret Thatcher won the 1979 election.
They say: "our book is aimed at those in the radical movements of every type who are seriously interested in political ideas and their relationship to political struggle. It seeks to assist all those who continue to challenge racist, patriarchal capitalism and to organise for a future where love and equality will prevail".
- GenresHistory
370 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2024
16 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
Read
May 7, 2025This is a book about a revolutionary socialist organisation that existed for barely 15 years and had its last meeting over forty years ago. At its height its membership was never much above 200 people, with the largest fraction based in Liverpool and smaller fragments in Manchester and East London and some individuals dotted around other towns. On the libertarian fringes of British socialism its brief existence has become something of a legend which now is now attracting interest from a newer bunch of radical political activists.
My own, very marginal involvement, in what became Big Flame, the organisation, went all the way back to 1969 when a discussion was initiated in leftist circles about the possibility of founding a newspaper that would report on the numerous industrial and community struggles that raged across the city at that time. This is likely to be contested, but I still hold that it was me that suggested the name ‘Big Flame’, taken from a television play giving a fictional account of a dockers’ strike on the Liverpool waterfront that had been broadcast earlier that year. My mention of the suggestion to the real movers-and-shakers of the project, Martin Yarnit and Steve Ferdinando, in a conversation in the Black Lion pub was noted as a possibility, but just one of several. Weeks later I had that it had been taken up and ‘Big Flame’ became the title of ‘Merseyside’s rank-and-paper’ whose first issue came out in March the following year.
Big Flame occupied a space on the radical left that many found ambiguous. The movers-and-shakers behind the idea proclaimed the belief in the need for a revolutionary party that would lead the working class to socialism but frankly stated that it was not that party. It was rather an attempt to clear the way for the formation of an organisation organically rooted in working class struggle which would rise to a position of legitimate leadership through a process of learning and consolidating what was being learnt.
Early on the Big Flamers stumbled on the Italian autonomist movement and efforts were made to incorporate some of its clunkier teachings into its activism. Autonomism held the view that the working class was instinctively communist in its outlook and ways of living, though this purity had been somewhat corrupted by the influence of bourgeois reformist ideology. This could be countered by a class conscious element involved in working class struggle. It would work to counter the alien intrusion into its thinking and open up strategies which advanced the distinct interests of the proletariat.
Not so different perhaps from the several larger Trotskyist-inspired organisations which were also dedicated to fighting reformism. For supporters of that current, working class struggle tended to me confrontations with the boss class in factories and workplaces. Big Flame resisted this limited perspective. Reformist ideology extended to cover housing estates, the community, and patriarchal family households. The notion of capitalist society as a ‘social factory’, which every aspect of domination and oppression sustained the exploitation of working class people became one of the organisations key ideas.
With this commitment, Big Flame in its heyday – around 1978 – attracted the support of a number of feminist activists who had been working in the campaign to defend the right to abortion from attacks launched by a MPs across the mainstream political parties. A seminal intervention from this time – the Beyond the Fragments – pamphlet authored by socialist feminists Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright, encouraged Big Flame to redouble its efforts to present itself as a distinct revolutionary organisation, seeking support and a cadre of committed activists.
Its work was organised around a series of ‘commissions’ which matched the areas of intervention it was seeking to promote. An industrial commission looked for ways to work around factories like the Fords car plants on Merseyside and East London; the women’s commission oversaw interventions in the National Abortion Campaign; an anti-racist, anti-fascist commission worked through approaches to combatting threats from then far right; an Irish commission marshalled Big Flamers campaigning against the British military presence in Northern Ireland. The consequences were that the tiny membership of the organisation was involved in almost continual meetings as they worked to thresh out the political situation they were working in.
But the revolution got no closer and even the more immediate task of forging a party became a task too far. By the onset of the 1980s Big Flame was in steep decline and destined to wind itself formally within the next few years. It belief in the inviolable status of the working class as an implicitly socialist force was blown apart by the victories of Thatcherism in the 1980s. Moreover, Labourite reformism, rather than being exposed, opened to more hopes for left socialist advance in the form of the Bennite movement and its allies among the leaders of the trade unions.
Big Flame’s vision of a socialist left that pieced itself together from the fragments of diverse social struggle did not die with the organisation. A final chapter details what is luminaries did next as they scattered across the spectrum of possible activisms and this ranged from community building, international solidarity, left wing journalism, and immersion in the Labour Party and its factional contests. Most ex-Big Flamers say they valued the education they received in their relatively undogmatic grouping and see themselves as continuing its spirit all these years later.
That being the case, one wonders if its failing was, as is sometimes the case, a matter of being premature rather than outright wrong. Suppose a Big Flame had been around in the 2000s, working across its commissions and projects, and in a position to pick up on the wave of populist condemnation of capitalism that infected millennials and Gen Z’ers after the financial meltdown destroyed hopes for a capitalism that worked for them. What if a decade of presence in industrial and community struggles had fed directly into the movement that galvanised around Jeremy Corbyn in 2016? Would we all have been better prepared to resist the backlash when the profoundly conservative Labourite mainstream asserted itself in open revolt against a left wing leader? It’s a shame that book has only appeared forty year after Big Flame had vanished from the scene. If that had been so perhaps this book would have been less a lament for long lost opportunities, a more a practical handbook on how the left should be organising today.
My own, very marginal involvement, in what became Big Flame, the organisation, went all the way back to 1969 when a discussion was initiated in leftist circles about the possibility of founding a newspaper that would report on the numerous industrial and community struggles that raged across the city at that time. This is likely to be contested, but I still hold that it was me that suggested the name ‘Big Flame’, taken from a television play giving a fictional account of a dockers’ strike on the Liverpool waterfront that had been broadcast earlier that year. My mention of the suggestion to the real movers-and-shakers of the project, Martin Yarnit and Steve Ferdinando, in a conversation in the Black Lion pub was noted as a possibility, but just one of several. Weeks later I had that it had been taken up and ‘Big Flame’ became the title of ‘Merseyside’s rank-and-paper’ whose first issue came out in March the following year.
Big Flame occupied a space on the radical left that many found ambiguous. The movers-and-shakers behind the idea proclaimed the belief in the need for a revolutionary party that would lead the working class to socialism but frankly stated that it was not that party. It was rather an attempt to clear the way for the formation of an organisation organically rooted in working class struggle which would rise to a position of legitimate leadership through a process of learning and consolidating what was being learnt.
Early on the Big Flamers stumbled on the Italian autonomist movement and efforts were made to incorporate some of its clunkier teachings into its activism. Autonomism held the view that the working class was instinctively communist in its outlook and ways of living, though this purity had been somewhat corrupted by the influence of bourgeois reformist ideology. This could be countered by a class conscious element involved in working class struggle. It would work to counter the alien intrusion into its thinking and open up strategies which advanced the distinct interests of the proletariat.
Not so different perhaps from the several larger Trotskyist-inspired organisations which were also dedicated to fighting reformism. For supporters of that current, working class struggle tended to me confrontations with the boss class in factories and workplaces. Big Flame resisted this limited perspective. Reformist ideology extended to cover housing estates, the community, and patriarchal family households. The notion of capitalist society as a ‘social factory’, which every aspect of domination and oppression sustained the exploitation of working class people became one of the organisations key ideas.
With this commitment, Big Flame in its heyday – around 1978 – attracted the support of a number of feminist activists who had been working in the campaign to defend the right to abortion from attacks launched by a MPs across the mainstream political parties. A seminal intervention from this time – the Beyond the Fragments – pamphlet authored by socialist feminists Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright, encouraged Big Flame to redouble its efforts to present itself as a distinct revolutionary organisation, seeking support and a cadre of committed activists.
Its work was organised around a series of ‘commissions’ which matched the areas of intervention it was seeking to promote. An industrial commission looked for ways to work around factories like the Fords car plants on Merseyside and East London; the women’s commission oversaw interventions in the National Abortion Campaign; an anti-racist, anti-fascist commission worked through approaches to combatting threats from then far right; an Irish commission marshalled Big Flamers campaigning against the British military presence in Northern Ireland. The consequences were that the tiny membership of the organisation was involved in almost continual meetings as they worked to thresh out the political situation they were working in.
But the revolution got no closer and even the more immediate task of forging a party became a task too far. By the onset of the 1980s Big Flame was in steep decline and destined to wind itself formally within the next few years. It belief in the inviolable status of the working class as an implicitly socialist force was blown apart by the victories of Thatcherism in the 1980s. Moreover, Labourite reformism, rather than being exposed, opened to more hopes for left socialist advance in the form of the Bennite movement and its allies among the leaders of the trade unions.
Big Flame’s vision of a socialist left that pieced itself together from the fragments of diverse social struggle did not die with the organisation. A final chapter details what is luminaries did next as they scattered across the spectrum of possible activisms and this ranged from community building, international solidarity, left wing journalism, and immersion in the Labour Party and its factional contests. Most ex-Big Flamers say they valued the education they received in their relatively undogmatic grouping and see themselves as continuing its spirit all these years later.
That being the case, one wonders if its failing was, as is sometimes the case, a matter of being premature rather than outright wrong. Suppose a Big Flame had been around in the 2000s, working across its commissions and projects, and in a position to pick up on the wave of populist condemnation of capitalism that infected millennials and Gen Z’ers after the financial meltdown destroyed hopes for a capitalism that worked for them. What if a decade of presence in industrial and community struggles had fed directly into the movement that galvanised around Jeremy Corbyn in 2016? Would we all have been better prepared to resist the backlash when the profoundly conservative Labourite mainstream asserted itself in open revolt against a left wing leader? It’s a shame that book has only appeared forty year after Big Flame had vanished from the scene. If that had been so perhaps this book would have been less a lament for long lost opportunities, a more a practical handbook on how the left should be organising today.
Displaying 1 of 1 review