Talk:Big Flame (political group)

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To call Big Flame "quasi-Maoist" or "soft Maoist" would be a bit wide of the mark. The Wikipedia entry appears to have been written by someone who has no real knowledge of that organisation. It's true it was associated on an international level with groups that originally came out of the Maoist tradition (France, Spain, Denmark and above all Lotta Continuain Italy) but I read their paper and magazine and was a member for about a year. I never saw any icon of Mao, Little Red Book or anything like that in the pages of their publications or at any meeting or conference of BF.They may well have been uncritical of Maoist China but the organisation contained quite a few individuals from an anarchist background or from the libertarian scene ( the same one which produced the Angry Brigade) of local papers, claimants unions etc- people like Lyn Segal. I'm afraid the fact that a group calling itself libertarian Marxist does not necessarily lead onto joining the Socialist Unity grouping, as the entry seems to imply. Nick Heath
 * Thanks for your comments. You can edit the article yourself and improve it - as indeed you can with any article on Wikipedia.  Given your knowledge of the subject, I'd encourage you to do so! Warofdreams 13:00, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * I'll ask my parents about them as they were both members and still have a lot of literature. I believe the main (only?) Maoist feature of the group was their belief in the 'Mass Line'. As for the association with Lotta Continua i think one of the founding members of big flame was an Italian who had been in Lotta Continua when he lived in Italy. As I said I'll ask then update the article.

--Ebz 19:42, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Big Flame
Big Flame was an important part of my political development. I don't recognize it from the piece published here. It's tone is all knowing and written from three hundred miles away. We brought our experiences to the group and there was a meeting of hearts and minds that was not crushed by dogma. I think that our theories helped us hear about the experiences of others, and to have a flexible, theoretically informed politics. Big Flame meetings were some of the most democratic places I have ever been; I remember a shared expectation that everyone could be heard. Mark Joseph 11:17, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Edits March 2009
Tidied up a bit, added a few references and a little extra content and deleted some unsourced POV material. Was aware of Big Flame but they were well before my time; hope I've improved this article Kumarajiva (talk) 01:22, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

China in their heads
Picking up on that comment (from seven years ago!) about Maoism, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s by Richard Wolin shows that China could be the name of a sustaining vision even after it was known that the actual place contained brutal and unacceptable realities. (Mark Joseph (talk) 15:48, 1 October 2012 (UTC))