Big Flame were a revolutionary socialist group whose members were came from and were influenced by different traditions, including; Trotskyism, Autonomous Marxism, Maoism, and I would add identity politics. They were active throughout the seventies and early eighties, and if you’re active around the far left for any length of time nowadays you can still bump into former members. One ex member has started this blog, looking back at their work. There’s loads of interesting articles, and memories, and he’s scanned up old pamphlets, and journal issues for us to investigate.
The interesting thing for me is, that they are very highly regarded by a fair few decent activists even today, but looking at their material I’m not really sure why, a lot of it seems influenced by some pretty stereotypical “loony left” identity and autonomy stuff – even if they did appear to get some things right, like an open and democratic internal culture, and a willingness to change their mind(s).
Perhaps I’m missing something, the blog is certainly likeable, and readable, and should be of interest to any lefty trainspotter.
old enough to remember this lot. Well meaning but unfortunately they came across like a libertarian wing of the IMG. Even in the 70s they sounded like they were still in the 60s, now they would be in the Greens.
Yep, it sounds like everyone who new them thought they were nice enough but basically liberal…
Mat, Chuck and Bear are pretty well right – we in Big Flame were Likeable, Loony, Libertarian (well, some of us), perhaps even Liberal. And some of us did migrate to the Greens; others went into the Labour Party; most of us remained where we started, inside the autonomous movements, if we could find them. And, yes, we were rooted in the 60s, since that’s when most of us came of age, and now we actually are in our 60s we can see why we look rather antique.
But I don’t share the scepticism you seem to display towards the first three of those Ls, and I still think that some features of (real) Liberalism (eg tolerance, anti-authoritarianism, open-ness to ideas) are to be admired. We were composed of people with the traditions you refer to (and we had some almost-Leninists as well) – and we were probably the only group on the left who saw that what came to be called ‘identity politics’ was of crucial importance. But, in sharp contrast to those who imagined their identity as singular, we saw that all the identifications that motivated people – class, ‘race’, gender, sexuality, age, physical ability – were inter-related. we aimed to mobilise all those identity-positions alongside each other, not separated out. For us, that never meant they were expected to be unified (certainly not under any kind of party leadership) but we argued they could, and should, work together in struggle against capital. (And no doubt in struggle with each other: BF feminists would never let us males off the hook.) These were some of the things I learned in BF which I believe remain relevant.
The BF web-site you refer to would welcome your considered responses to any of the articles you read there . . . BF knew that politics are always highly contextual and contingent (to use that overworked term). We know that the 21st century desperately needs new ways of doing radical politics which fit the present conjuncture – so let’s have your thoughts and proposals.