Black Bundists: Remembering Flame

Alfie Hancox revisits Flame to examine the challenges of anti-racist struggles and the revolutionary left’s fraught relationship with autonomous Black self-defence in 1970s Britain.

‘Whether we were in Race Today, International Marxist Group, SWP or the Labour Party, we were all young Black political people trying to find our footing in England.’ Anthony Bogues

In the early 1960s, Caribbean radicals propelled to London by economic and political turmoil at home, or by McCarthyism in the US, were often perplexed by the provincialism of British socialism. Many of the generation mentored by Claudia Jones, like John La Rose and Jessica Huntley, kept their political sights fixed on completing the anti-colonial revolution. From the grey landscape of late-industrial Britain, they conceived plans to ignite the ripening proletariat of the Southern plantations, oilfields, and shantytowns.¹ By the 1970s, though, with a younger generation of African-Caribbean as well as Asian ‘immigrants’ brought up in Britain, there was a shift in the Black political movement towards defending civil rights in their adoptive country: reflected in the powerful slogan ‘Here to stay, here to fight’. 

At the same time, the British left were changing in response to the new radicalisms unfolding in 1968. The feminist challenge had expanded the traditional left purview of class conflict, introducing new avenues of struggle in the home and welfare state, and raising questions of autonomous organising. Simultaneous interventions came from Black radicals who confronted Eurocentric and paternalist attitudes within the left. Black left groups like the Race Today collective and Black Socialist Alliance, as well as the emergent Black women’s movement, advanced community-rooted self-organisation, while intervening in wider struggles in the workplace or against the far-right threat. The cross-fertilisation between all these movements was mutually enriching but, as Matt Myers notes, it was ‘a story of turbulent interdependence’.

This article offers a retrospective on Flame, the Black section and newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) during the late seventies. It was a unique case of Black radical politics pursued inside a British socialist organisation—and the tensions that resulted were particularly intense. Young African-Caribbean and Asian socialists often negotiated dual political loyalties, which were not always understood by their white comrades. The left’s optimistic watchword ‘Black and white, unite and fight’ could conceal the depth of the material and affective divisions within the socialist and labour movement. The article looks at the problems arising from simplistic assumptions of class unity, as well as appeals to Leninist orthodoxy as when Flame’s critics invoked Bolshevik opposition to the autonomy of the Jewish labour bund, discussed later in this piece. 

In our present period, when the bureaucratised and ‘broadly toothless’ anti-racist movement faces renewed challenges from young and racialised activists steeled by Gaza, it is timely to recover these debates, and learn from the past missteps of the left.

Black workers paper for self-defence

Anthony Bogues was associated with the Abeng group in Jamaica, inspired by Walter Rodney’s fusion of Black Power and Marxism, before he was recruited to the British International Socialist group (from 1977 the SWP) by a roving seaman.² The International Socialists/SWP prioritised anti-fascist activities in response to the growing National Front, and proactively recruited Black and Asian youths. Upon arrival in London, Bogues met IS/SWP members Kim Gordon, a fellow Jamaican, and Europe Singh, a teacher in Brixton. ‘After long discussions,’ they decided there needed to be a ‘Black section’ of the party. The next step was natural: ‘like all persons on the left, one of the first things at that time when you are trying to develop an organisation is that you need a newspaper. It’s like, you know, bread and butter!’

Published from 1975–80, Flame was a paper in which you found ‘currents of radical Black thinking from the United States, radical anti-colonialism from Africa and the Caribbean and then a home grown developing Black radical politics’. Some of the issues have now been digitally archived by historian Evan Smith and the Splits and Fusions blog. Like Race Today and other London-based Black collectives, Flame was particularly gripped by the revolutionary ferment in the Caribbean Basin radiating out from Cuba, and the IMF’s counterinsurgency against Manley in Jamaica. Its desire to connect opposition to capitalist repression at home and abroad was emphasised by one of its headlines, ‘Jamaica—Britain—One Struggle!’ Flame was staunchly Pan-Africanist but, as indicated by Singh’s inclusion on the editorial board, it was also committed to the broader anti-imperialist politics of African-Asian and Third World solidarity, including with the Palestinian liberation movement.

Increasingly, Flame sought to intervene in domestic Black politics in Britain. While attached to the ‘parent’ party, Flame developed its own distinct ideas which, as Myers notes, was reflected in its masthead changing from ‘International Socialist Paper of Black Workers’ to ‘Black Workers Paper for Self-Defence’. Just as the SWP’s Women’s Voice magazine brought a socialist perspective to broader feminist causes, Flame linked Black workers’ struggles to wider issues of racism and police violence. This was a time of manufactured moral panics targeting Black youths. 1977 saw the famous anti-fascist confrontation at the Battle of Lewisham (which catalysed the Anti-Nazi League), in an area where there had also been sustained police harassment of Black residents. Flame members played a key yet under-appreciated role in synchronising anti-fascist activism with Black self-defence through the Lewisham 21 Defence Committee, formed in response to arrests of young Black men and teenagers on spurious charges of ‘conspiracy to steal’. Bogues was the Defence Committee’s secretary. 

As David Renton shows in his excellent history of the Anti-Nazi League, the SWP was itself a dynamic force in Lewisham, where the party shared a squat with Flame members near New Cross station. This squat became a local community resistance hub and staging post for counter attacks against the fascists. At the same time, Black activists often brought a different perspective based on their lived experiences of racism. Bogues reflects, ‘for some people it might have been a kind of political rhetoric, “They may not pass, they shall not pass”. For us it was life and death. That’s a difference, alright.’ Flame’s special issue on Lewisham by Kim Gordon situated the Battle in the lineage of Black self-defence, providing a visual timeline of a score of preceding arrestee support campaigns like the Cricklewood 12 and Islington 18. There is a poignant parallel here with the Battle of Cable Street in the 1930s, when the Communist Party was galvanised into action through ‘pressure by its, mainly Jewish, Stepney Branch and by the militant Jewish People’s Council’.³

Flame not only championed the confrontational, and often masculinist, politics of self-defence, but also engaged with the emergent Black women’s movement in Britain, including the Brixton Black Women’s Group. The mid-1970s saw landmark strikes by Asian women like at Imperial Typewriters, as well as by West Indian nurses—many of whom were restricted to inferior NHS training qualifications, and given precarious work vouchers. One Flame issue carried an interview with Nicky Siew, a nurse from Trinidad, who as a NUPE shop steward in Birmingham led a successful struggle for her and her colleagues’ permits to be secured.⁴

Sometimes tensions arose with white socialist feminists, as when Women’s Voice refused to organise with agency nurses who they claimed were undermining state-registered nurses. As Brixton Black Women’s Group pointed out in response, NHS discrimination meant that agency nurses were disproportionately excluded Black women.⁵ At other times, Women’s Voice did show respect and openness toward the struggles of racialised comrades, which expanded the outlook of the left. Another Flame member was Claudine Eccleston, credited as Britain’s ‘first woman plumber’. She was interviewed by Women’s Voice, explaining the problems of compounded racism and sexism, including from her union: ‘[A]ll our energies go into stopping the National Front. But we have not started attacking the roots of racism.’

‘Independant Intavenshan‘

The left movements against the National Front—the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism—were inspired and vitalised by the music and imagery of Black urban rebellion, from the 1976 Soweto Uprising to the almost simultaneous Notting Hill Carnival ‘riots’ against an invading police force. But the anti-racist convergence was rarely smooth. There were sometimes negative left-wing attitudes towards unemployed Black youths, which Flame saw a need to challenge. Addressing a controversy at the 1977 Carnival at which ‘some whites, including a few socialists, were attacked, and their pockets picked’, Bogues noted in the SWP’s journal that some white leftists had ‘now thrown up their hands in despair and brand[ed] the youths as “lumpen”. Bogues exhorted his comrades to look beyond the anti-white siege mentality and see ‘the depth of the Black youth action and the consistent militancy’ against police oppression, even if it took forms unfamiliar to the white Marxist left. 

Flame’s interventions reflected wider frustrations at a left experientially disconnected from what Stuart Hall called the internal Black colony life. Independent and community-based organising was pursued by Black Power groups like Altheia Jones-LeCointe’s British Black Panthers, and by the Asian Youth Movements. These groups criticised paternalistic attitudes among white leftists, and their approach of ‘parachuting’ into Black communities in a way which had colonial missionary undertones. Collective Black aggrievement at the condescension and flightiness of the ‘white left’ was captured in dub poet and Race Today activist Linton Kwesi Johnson’s ‘Independant Intavenshan‘ (1979):

wat a cheek

dem t’ink wi weak

an’ wi can’t stan up pan wi feet

di SWP can’t set wi free

di IMG can’t dhu it fi wi

di Communist Pawty, cho, dem too awty-fawty

an’ di laybahrites [Labourites] dem naw goh fite fi wi rites

soh mek dem gwaan

now it calm

but a wi who haffi really ride di staam

Flame’s attempt to bridge the divide was expressed in its pamphlet, Black Nationalism and Socialism, which was strongly influenced by CLR James. ‘Since the fight against capitalism requires the revolutionary party’, argued Bogues, ‘then Black socialists should be in that party’. However, ‘the party also has a responsibility … It must educate the white working class that unless it supports totally the movement of Black people for equality then it will not free itself’. ‘Political respect’, he insisted, ‘is never given but earned.’⁶ The catch-22 position of Black socialists was voiced by Birmingham Flame member Azim Hajee, a future leader of the trade union Black caucus campaign, in the SWP’s internal bulletin:

We either become so overshadowed that we become the shadows of the revolutionary organisations, estranged from the communities. Or else, like the Linton Kwesis and Black Socialist Alliances [see below] of this world, we are so keen to show that we are not influenced by “whities” that we seek political independence, which in effect leads to reformism, separatism or cultural masturbation. … It is only when our black members can say out loud “The SWP can’t do it for us….alone” without fearing that comrades will think us separatist, that we will be able to confidently march along the road of “Black and white, unite and fight for revolutionary socialism”.⁷

Both Flame and the SWP sought to harness the ‘spontaneous’ energies of Black youth upsurge to steer the transition ‘from Black anger to socialism’, but, as it turned out, the party leadership was less willing to go beyond this organising approach to accept and uplift Black political leadership and self-activity.⁸ 

Flame extinguished

The SWP’s ostensible support for ‘socialism from below’, emphasising the self-activity of the oppressed, was outlined by party leader Tony Cliff with a nod to ‘the boys and girls of Soweto’. However, internal developments curtailed the group’s earlier openness, when the leadership responded to strategic disagreements during a difficult transitional period of ‘downturn’ in class struggle by quelling dissent and expelling minority factions.⁹ Cliff’s stress on centralisation and direct party recruitment merged with attacks on the autonomy of Women’s Voice and Flame, which were accused of fostering separatism and Black nationalism. Debate raged in the party bulletin. Prominent members Nigel Harris and Alex Callinicos (a current leading member of the SWP) were praised for their anti-Flame ‘demolition job’.¹⁰ Chris Harman, who had been part of a factional dispute over the Socialist Worker newspaper, also criticised Bogues by disparaging Black defence campaigns, in a telling erasure of Flame’s dynamic role at Lewisham.

There were of course differing viewpoints on autonomy among Black members of the SWP and within Flame itself, and an alternative approach of white deference to an assumed-to-be-unified racialised experience would have been patronising in its own way.¹¹ However, the party leadership’s engagement with Flame’s positions was mired in dogmatism. Europe Singh articulated the difficulty of speaking out on a subject ‘so branded with the label of factionalism’, appeals to ‘Leninist sanctity’, and ‘where those that disagree with the CC [Central Committee]’ are labelled ‘anti-Marxists’. Singh was disappointed by the unwillingness to heed the experience of Black activists who had spent years working in immigrant communities and grappling with ‘the race/class dialectic’.¹² Hajee highlighted the leadership’s failure to learn from ‘the last Black caucus dispute’ which caused Soonu Engineer—who had founded the party’s Asian newsletter, Chingari (Spark)—to leave and start her own group around the independent paper Samaj (Black) in’a Babylon.

Cliff, who was himself a Jewish socialist born in Palestine, invoked Bolshevik doctrine by pointing to Lenin’s opposition to the autonomy of the Bund, a militant left anti-Zionist movement, from the Russian socialist party (RSDLP). The Bund strengthened collective organisation among marginalised Jewish workers, and built self-defence squads against pogromist violence. For Bogues, Cliff’s analogy was ‘apples and oranges’, and a more appropriate reference point would have been Lenin’s writing on the national question, which included tacit support for Black self-determination in the US. There were, though, perhaps stronger parallels with the Bund example than Bogues acknowledges. 

Lenin had insisted that ‘the Jewish problem amounts to: assimilation or isolation.’ He argued that ‘neither the “logical analysis” of autonomy nor the appeals to history can provide even the shadow of a “principle” justifying the isolation of the Bund’. As the late Steve Cohen noted, Lenin’s objections to the Bund, alongside concerns of left-wing fragmentation and ‘separatist’, ‘ghetto politics’, included the Bundists’ rejection of cultural assimilation—a refusal orthodox Marxists interpreted as driving a wedge with gentile, or non-Jewish, proletarians—and its insistence that antisemitism had ‘struck roots in the mass of the workers.’¹³

For the Bundists, however, recognising the specificity of antisemitic oppression in the Russian empire, and the rich reservoir of Jewish oppositional culture, did not mean rejecting strategic unity with the wider socialist and labour movement. Later, orthodox Leninism received a similar challenge from CLR James, who insisted that Black struggle ‘has a vitality and a validity of its own’, that is neither reducible to ‘the organised labour movement’ nor ‘the Marxist party.’

Though Flame already defined itself as a revolutionary socialist organisation, the SWP executive had moved a defeated congress amendment that Flame ‘must start off with a set of basic revolutionary socialist principles which must be drawn up by the Central Committee’. Flame’s statement that ‘We are an organisation of Black socialist revolutionaries fighting for the total liberation of our race’ was taken as a retreat from Marxism because, for the leadership, socialism entailed ‘the self-emancipation of the working-class as a whole, irrespective of race, sex, colour or national origin.’¹⁴ In 1979, the party leadership reportedly issued a ‘sudden and total rejection’ of the previous congress’s vote of support for Flame and Women’s Voice.¹⁵

After returning to Jamaica and working as a cultural advisor to the Manley government, Bogues finally moved to the US and became a leading scholar of CLR James. In his biography of James, Caliban’s Freedom, Bogues describes the hostility that the Trinidadian revolutionary’s ‘dual political practice’ as a Marxist and Pan-Africanist in the 1930s drew from his British Trotskyist comrades, which included accusations, ‘if not in so many words, of Negro chauvinism’. Bogues may have been reminded of his own experiences of being a ‘Black heretic’ in the British left.

Some burnt out ex-Flame members like Claudine Eccleston joined the ephemeral Black Socialist Alliance, formed by young Black intellectuals including cultural theorist Paul Gilroy, historian Winston James, and novelist Ferdinand Dennis, who shared common frustrations with the ‘white dominated left organisations’.¹⁶ Eccleston, now a trailblazer of the Black arts movement in Sussex, remembers, ‘it was a group of incredibly ambitious, driven people who had other paths’.¹⁷ The Alliance’s brief existence also reflected the 1980s reorientation of anti-racist politics towards the local government ‘rainbow’ activism sponsored by Ken Livingstone’s GLC.

For the radical left, the dissolution of Flame was a missed opportunity, with the result that the SWP had no Black group at the time of the 1981 inner-city uprisings. There was, of course, no easy path to anti-racist unity, and the SWP’s political interventionism had been key to the successes of the anti-fascist movement. As a counterexample to the Flame experiment, one libertarian-socialist group reflected that ‘[o]ur principled non-interference with the debates inside the Black movement mean that we have only one Black member’.¹⁸ Leninism—forged in the crucible of imperialist war and revolution—bequeaths a potent political toolbox, but as Sheila Rowbotham argues in Beyond the Fragments, there is perpetual danger in the dead hand of dogma, and deferential attitudes to ‘the Party’. The tension between unity and autonomy is not resolvable by abstract principle alone, but has to be negotiated in shared struggle, with recognition of how racial and patriarchal oppression shapes the terrain of anti-capitalist resistance. This is the enduring lesson to be remembered if the radical anti-racist/anti-fascist energies of the seventies are to be reignited.

Notes

1. On these black revolutionaries’ aspirations to remotely found a ‘Communist Party of the West Indies’, see Naomi Jasmin Norris Oppenheim, ‘Writing the Wrongs’: Caribbean Publishing in Post-war Britain from a Historical Perspective, PhD thesis (University College London, 2022), pp. 243–5. They were particularly influenced by Che Guevara’s revolutionary model of the guerilla foco, and made plans to go to Cuba to receive military training. Nirad Abrol, interview with Ricky Cambridge, forthcoming in Ebb Magazine. ↩︎
2. Anthony Bogues, interview with author. Abeng was named for the horn used by Maroon communities. Specifically, Bogues formed a Jamesian splinter from Abeng, called the Revolutionary Marxist League. ↩︎
3. Steve Cohen, That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic: An Anti-Racist Analysis of Left Anti-Semitism (Leeds: Beyond the Pale Collective, 1984), p. 89. ↩︎
4. ‘Black Nurses Resist Deportation’, Flame, no. 12 (December/January 1977). ↩︎
5. Brixton Black Women’s Group, ‘Black Women and Nursing: A Job Like Any Other’, Race Today, vol. 6, no. 8 (August 1974). ↩︎
6. Tony Bogues, ‘Organising for Revolution’ in Bogues and Kim Gordon, Black Nationalism and Socialism (Socialist Workers Party, 1979), p. 61. ↩︎
7. Azim Hajee, ‘Independent Intervention’, SWP Internal Bulletin (1979), p. 36. ↩︎
8. ‘From Black Anger to Socialism’, Socialist Worker (2 July 1977), p. 12. ↩︎
9. Martin Shaw, ‘The Making of a Party? The International Socialists 1965-1976’, Socialist Register, 15 (1978), pp. 132-8. ↩︎
10. Swapan Dasgupta, ‘The Flame Debate’, SWP Internal Bulletin, no. 4 (1979), p. 31. ↩︎
11. In his autobiography A World to Win: Life of a Revolutionary (London: Bookmarks, 2000), Cliff recalled ‘[p]ulling together a group of black members—Mort Mascarenhas and Bruce George in particular’ to oppose Flame (p. 152). In an internal defence of Flame, two of its members claimed that Mascarenhas and George ‘do not and have not worked within the black community.’ Jagdish Dalal and Micky Gay, ‘A Reply to Mort Mascarenhas and Bruce George’, SWP Internal Bulletin, no. 5 (1979), p. 34. ↩︎
12. Europe Singh, ‘Race Work and the Party’, SWP Internal Bulletin, no. 5 (1979), p. 31. ↩︎
13. Cohen, That’s Funny, p. 71. ↩︎
14. Kim Gordon, ‘Black Work’, SWP Internal Bulletin, no. 5 (November 1979), p. 34. ↩︎
15. Singh, ‘Race Work and the Party’, p. 31. ↩︎
16. Paul Gilroy, interview with author. ↩︎
17. Claudine Eccleston, interview with author. ↩︎
18. Ian McKenzie and Fred Read, ‘Re-Thinking Party and Class: Leninism and Beyond’, Big Flame Discussion Bulletin, no. 33 (December 1980). ↩︎