This is a fascinating documentary film about the Spanish revolution featuring personal testimonies from numerous anarcho-syndicalist militants who took part. Today, 75 years after it began, the lessons of the revolution - its successes and failures - remain as relevant as ever.
For more info on the 75th anniversary commemoration of the revolution, visit here (in Spanish).
Written by Jim Allen and directed by Ken Loach, The Big Flame was broadcast as the BBC's Wednesday Play in 1969. It documents a fictional unofficial strike on Liverpool's docks in which the workers, frustrated by the uselessness of their union officials, decide to take matters into their own hands (as we in SolFed advocate).
Three delegates from the Solidarity Federation attended the conference mainly dealing with 'precarity', self-management and co-operatives. The conference was hosted at the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo's IX anarchist camp near León in northern Spain.
There were about 100 people at the camp and 60 participants in the conference. Ten sections were represented: CNT-F (France), FAU (Germany), Priama Akcia (Slovakia), ZSP (Poland), SolFed (Britain), SP (Portugal), USI (Italy), KRAS (Russia), NSF (Norway) and of course the CNT-E (Spain). There were also two guest organisations: MASA from Croatia and two delegates from the Peruvian newspaper La Humanidad, who however arrived several hours after closure of the conference due to immigration/visa problems.
In early to mid 2010, members of North London SolFed organised text readings and discussions open to other anarchists and members of the public, under the name of the Radical Reading Collective.
Texts discussed included 'Give Up Activism', 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness', 'Hierarchy, Structure and Consensus within Activist Groups', a public talk on Rudolf Rocker with a speaker from the Radical History Network of North East London, Rocker's 'Anarcho-syndicalism', Marx's 'Value, Price & Profit', Mason's 'Live Working or Die Fighting', 'The Organisational Platform of Libertarian Communism', and a film showing of Vivr La Utopia.