At the very impressive East Bristol Books I was recently trying again to explain Big Flame, and hustle the book about BF I co-wrote with Kevin McDonnell. This time we included a conversation with Olly and Susy from Plan C. When I encountered Plan C members in Leeds about ten years ago I thought it might actually be composed of the long-lost children of Big Flame.
I’d done some photos and some bullet points and I waved my screen at the 20 or so people who gathered and my language got worse as the evening went on. They laughed when I said “But we were just young boys with big dicks,” and I immediately regretted this effort to encapsulate something that I now think we paid too little attention to in the book: for all our efforts to embrace feminism and personal politics, too many of our men, including me, failed and failed again to restrain our egotism and moderate our intellectualism. And the remark was unfair to those of us with small dicks and big heads. BF men did at least try and pipe down, sometimes.
Susy, originally from Italy, spoke eloquently about Plan C’s core commitment to social reproduction theory, and before anyone thought ‘here goes the intellectualism again’ she gave us an epithet which pretty much summarises that theory: ‘care is labour’. And she said this to entrance anyone who wants to help us make a new kind of socialism: ‘autonomous human beings are produced through care and love’. Yes, and maybe love is labour, too.
Olly said Plan C actually has a group working on ‘care and justice’, and he read a relevant section from their beautifully designed new book which is packed with great content. Susy introduced a concept we needed in Big Flame — ‘caring militancy’ — and afterwards Ben and Lucy from Bristol Transformed told me about Hannah Proctor’s book Burn Out which reminded me of how burned out I felt by the mid-1980s. Our book about Big Flame includes 40+ personal statements by old flames and burn-out percolates through some of them. I know that there was much more militancy than there was caring in our day. Young flames really must not repeat our mistake.
There was some discussion of the Corbyn/Sultana party plan. I made my usual cheap joke about Big Flame only supporting a party that was rooted in dancing and drinking, quoting, predictably, Emma Goldman, who adorns our kitchen. I was surprised that no-one wanted to speak up for the Corbyn/Sultan plan. The decision by some BF members in 1981 to join the Labour Party was one aspect of BF’s decline — the defeat of the miners and the other big dicks of the labour movement was more significant — and today the Greens must be as big as draw as Your Party, so we will need a much deeper debate if and when Jeremy and Zarah can stop their squabbling.
My contribution at East Bristol Books on party planning was to say something which is striking me more forcibly now that I’m engaging in psychoanalysis. For all of my commitment back in the day to personal politics, which included my ritual self-flagellation in a Leeds Anti-Sexist Men’s Group, I’d never really understood the emotional underpinnings of my manic political life. I’d never managed the deep psychological change that is needed in us all, but particularly us men, if we are to create a socialist movement where empathy is just as important as intelligence.
For some time in a desultory way I’ve been advocating a re-jigging of Marx which I’ve called ‘sensuous materialism’. I’m arguing that when Marx in his early writings positioned us as sensuous, labouring human beings, he meant us to take the ‘sensuous’ as seriously as the ‘labouring’. Recently, I read Bruno Bettelheim’s 1982 essay on the use of the term ‘psyche’ in the English language versions of Freud’s work. Bettelheim says the German word Freud used that gets translated as ‘psyche’ is much more usefully understood as ‘soul’. Perhaps our soul is the root of our sensuousness.
I got the lowest possible grade in German ‘O’ level so I can’t comment on the translation, but I do like the concept of ‘soul’. Not for its religious connotations, though these are relevant, but because it makes me think of soul music, which makes me think of the heart, which our cousins in the Middle Ages saw as the seat of our emotions. ‘Psyche’ relates too much the the head and, as Bettelheim puts it, resonates too much with science. Scientific socialism was a big mistake, don’t you think?
What we need is soulful socialism. Could we call it soulcalism? I think Big Flame sometimes was heading in that direction, and I think Plan C are making a better job of this than we did. A really good party will dance to Aretha Franklin while taking control of the means of re/production. After Big Flame, Latin Quarter offered us a good soundtrack, too.
For those with the appetite and the time, but don’t like their text hyperlinked, here are the references:
More about the excellent East Bristol Books here https://eastbristolbooks.co.uk/
and here
Kevin Davey reviewed our book about Big Flame here https://www.redpepper.org.uk/culture-media/books/big-flame-building-movements-new-politics-review/
Lots of great info about Plan C and their new book is here https://www.weareplanc.org/
Bristol Transformed is here https://bristoltransformed.co.uk/
Hannah Proctor’s book Burn Out — The emotional experience of political defeat is available here https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/970-burnout?srsltid=AfmBOorBmpsklr78o3TWePjGVTBSW4w0n727diW_DpS3NDDW0UbXbKtT
You can get my Emma Goldman tea-towel and much more from the Radical Tea Towel Company https://www.radicalteatowel.com/
Your Party describes itself here https://www.yourparty.uk/
On Sensuous Materialism, try this https://www.maxfarrar.org.uk/writing/sensuous-materialism-an-emotionally-charged-type-of-marxism/
Bruno Bettelheim on Freud and the soul is here https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1982/03/01/freud-and-the-soul
Check out Latin Quarter here https://latinquarter.bandcamp.com/music Two of its original members were in Big Flame, as were its first managers.
Max, Thank you for this. I would be very interested to learn more about the Plan C work on care and justice. The ethics of care have become increasingly important to me as has Lynn Segal’s work with the Care Collective. Is there someone you can introduce me to?
A modification: '. . . while taking control of the means of re/production' went into the above at the last moment, making a nod to the early c20 marxist demand, alluded to in Clause 4 of the Labour Party, dumped several years ago. I tried to update it a bit with 're/production. But as always 'last minute' is not good process. I should have said something like 'while socialising the means of re/production'. Especially with 'reproduction', 'taking control' has authoritarian connotations which I always want to avoid. And our thinking about 'the means of production' -- which had factories, mines, steel etc in mind -- needs to move on. The globalised digital economy has fundamentally changed that scenario, especially in the rich parts of the world. Also, 'taking control' conjures up a centralised state, when we need to be thinking about the local, the co-operative, and the social forms of organisation.