Don Flynn on British autonomist socialists
Big Flame: Building Movements, New Politics by Max Farrar and Kevin McDonnell published by Merlin
This 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 is now attracting interest from a newer bunch of radical political activists.
Big Flame occupied an ambiguous space on the radical left, which confused more dogmatic comrades. The movers-and-shakers behind the project proclaimed belief in the need for a revolutionary party, but frankly stated that it was not Big Flame. It was an attempt to clear the way for the formation of an organisation that would be up to that task, but only after a thorough engagement with working-class struggle and a process of learning and consolidating all that was being learnt.
The idea of autonomism, borrowed from Italian far left activism, held sway in the early Big Flame. This saw the working class as being instinctively communist in its outlook and ways of living, though sadly corrupted by the influence of bourgeois reformist ideology. However, a class-conscious movement could counteract this intrusion and facilitate the development of strategies that advance the distinct interests of the proletariat.
Big Flame saw the terrain of class struggle as extending beyond what went on in factories. The battle for working-class interests had to cover the conditions on housing estates, the community, patriarchal family households, and more. The notion of capitalist society as a ‘social factory’ where every aspect of domination and oppression sustained the exploitation of working-class people became one of the organisation’s key ideas.
Its work was organised around a series of ‘commissions’ which matched the areas of intervention it was promoting. An industrial commission looked for ways to work around factories like the Fords car plants on Merseyside and in 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 the 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 thrash out the political situation they were working in. A deep exhaustion set in.
The revolution got no closer, and even the 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 up within the next few years. Its 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 up 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 struggles did not die with the organisation. A final chapter details what its luminaries did next as they scattered across the spectrum of possible activism, 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 even today see themselves as continuing its spirit.
In retrospect, its failure can now be seen in its misjudgement of the dominant trends in politics in the 1970s, which went in the direction of Thatcherite reaction rather than libertarian communism, with whole sections of the working class grasping their share of the action through right-to-buy council housing sales and windfall cash handouts from privatisation. Big Flame’s mistrust of reformism led to a misjudgement about its role in holding together a rudimentary sense of class interests in one of the oldest countries of mature capitalism.
The crisis of reformism, which Flamers looked forward to, was not to come from the working class chucking its ideologies off to become, finally, communistic. It happened most at a later date when a segment of aspiring millennials and Gen Z’ers discovered the free market system was closing down the hopes they had for home ownership and independence. If only they had a Big Flame organisation, matured in working in workplace struggles and community empowerment to turn to at a point when it could supplement the Corbynite moods that upended the Labour Party in the teen decade. Had that been the case, perhaps this book would be less a lament for a lost past and more a practical manual on how to continue the struggle.