This article is based on the archives maintained by previous generations of militants, particularly the Race Today, Big Flame and Ed Emery collections at the MayDay Rooms on Fleet Street, the 2025 book Big Flame: Building the Movements, New Politics by Max Farrar and Kevin McDonnell, and the Women’s Liberation Movement collection at the LSE. Digital versions of referenced publications can mostly be accessed across leftove.rs and archive.org.

Introduction

The story of workers’ inquiry has often been told as a series of episodes, each one based in a different industrial city. It can sound like this history only exists in places we don’t know so well, like Detroit, Turin, and Paris. But the deeper we dig into the history of the method, the more examples we find from closer to home. In this article, we discuss three projects - Race Today, Shrew, and Big Flame - that picked up the method and deployed it on much more familiar terrain. We choose these examples not because they are exclusive moments of inquiry in England, but because they reflect key contextual distinctions between other inquiry projects in Europe and the US of a similar era. Namely, how anti-racist, women’s liberation, and rank-and-file workers movements drew upon inquiry to make sense of, and act within, an institutionalised mass labour movement. In a cultural climate increasingly featuring experiments with worker writing and a growing impulse towards more social democratic forms of cultural production, they turned to workers’ inquiry to generate a revolutionary analysis of the new social forces shaping post-war life.¹ Their efforts tell us about working class life and struggle in the textile mills of Bradford, the shops and offices of Lancaster, and the car factories of the Thames estuary. This is a story of some of our own local history of workers’ inquiry, and how it flourished in the radical and revolutionary movements of England in the 1970s and 80s.

Race Today

Race Today was a monthly magazine founded by the Institute of Race Relations in 1969. The institute positioned itself as a scholarly and impartial voice on matters of race, and its major tactic was to make appeals to the good will and rationality of the British ruling class. Unsurprisingly, this approach generated internal dissent from younger participants, many of whom demanded a more militant approach. In 1973, that dissent took an organisational form: the Brixton-based Race Today collective broke away from the IRR and began to take the magazine in a new direction.²

Led by Darcus Howe, they were deeply influenced by their close proximity to C.L.R. James, the broader political current around the Johnson-Forest Tendency, and its emphasis on autonomous black working class self-activity. In a 1978 interview, Howe described the task that the new editorial group set themselves: “We felt what had to be done was a clarification process based on what the working class, the black working class, was thinking and doing.”³ In one of their first editorials, the collective lay out the basics of their approach to this task: they would achieve a ‘theoretical clarification’ of the ‘newly-emerging social forces of black revolt’ they saw around them without relying on any ‘liberal mediation’.⁴ The new editorial group wasted no time in launching themselves into the rapidly proliferating struggles of the black working class to conduct that clarification from within.

The April 1974 issue of the magazine made clear just how central the method of workers’ inquiry was to their approach. Titled Asian Workers in Struggle, it began with a reference to “a short document called ‘A Workers’ Enquiry’ by Karl Marx.” The issue applied Marx’s own search for an “exact and positive knowledge of the class to whom the future belongs” to the rolling wave of strikes being undertaken by Asian workers across Britain. The issue interviewed six male Indian and Pakistani workers about their migration journeys, their everyday experiences of work, and their involvements in strikes and lockouts. The July issue carried a detailed account of the strike at Imperial typewriters in Leicester alongside reportage from Ford Dagenham. The August issue updated on the situation in both workplaces and added an extended account of the experiences of black women nurses (discussed further below). These experiments with reportage would continue through other seismic disputes like the 1976 Grunwick Strike, a two yearlong, intensely policed dispute led by South Asian women against the dire conditions in the North London photo-processing labs where they worked, gradually accumulating to create a broader analysis of racial divisions of labour in a British economy reshaped by post-war migration and the reactionary role of trade union bureaucracies in solidifying its hierarchies. The grassroots structures built in the course of these struggles were recurrent themes in these articles, as avenues for solidarity and co-ordination were forged by workers between segments of the working-class often practically divided by divisions of race & gender.⁵

Detailed investigation into forms of self-organisation also bolstered Race Today in its contestation of the ‘vast propaganda machine’ of state narratives and mainstream newspaper coverage.⁶ Ridiculing racist, patronising media condemnations, premised on legitimising state and police violence, for example, Race Today read in the dynamics of 1970s unemployment within the Black working class an ‘overwhelming refusal of shitwork’, a reality which posed profound questions for how revolutionaries were to orient themselves toward to capitalist social crisis and the state’s attempt to navigate its effects.⁷ Having continually surveyed the terrain of strikes, riots and conflicts across the country’s cities and towns, and the diverging institutional attempts to quell and capture their energies, the Race Today Collective’s relation to the sequence of events across 1981 also clarify how they mobilised around the political knowledge generated through their participation in localised activity. Following the New Cross Massacre on January 18th, RTC helped to co-ordinate the 20,000-strong march on Black People’s Day of Action, purposefully scheduled on a weekday in response to a call for a mass strike by a black Ford worker.⁸ The subsequent intensification of police harassment in their local Brixton area, orchestrated in ‘Operation Swamp ‘81’, and the nation-wide youth uprising demonstrated the collective’s perspicacity regarding the complex, shifting relations on the ground.⁹ As the ‘official’ representation of the events emerged, Race Today’s rejection of Lord Scarman’s Inquiry report (‘as lame as it is tame’) echoed in concert with the activity of groups like the Brixton Defence Campaign, as they asserted on-the-ground perspectives of the events against pacifying institutional narratives.¹⁰ Their politics of inquiry consisted not simply in circulating the experience of workers and activists on the ground, but in contesting the state’s attempt to demobilise the formations in which they actively participated and were working to cohere.

The relay between struggles on the shopfloor and those on the streets also served as a related point of emphasis for the magazine. This was achieved, most obviously, in the composition of each magazine issue: strike reports sat alongside news of migrant housing struggles, resistance to school closures, international book fairs in community halls and street parties across the country, as they traced the transmission of political energy between sites of everyday life, leisure and labour. The close relationship between problems of work and housing were articulated, for example, through the continued presence of the Bengali Housing Action Group in Race Today’s pages in the mid-late 1970s, mapping how Bengali garment and hospitality workers and their families undertook mass organised squatting and self-defence campaigns in the urban areas they’d migrated to as sources of low paid labour.¹¹ That confidence gained through anti-racist street confrontations would seep into workplace self-activity was also self-evident to the workers documenting their activity in Britain’s major industries. ‘Was this to be the year that Ford workers would take into industry the momentum of the uprisings on the streets of Brixton, Southall, Toxteth and Moss Side during the spring and summer?’ asked a worker at Fords Langley, in their 1982 issue, Black Workers at Fords. Noting that the ‘tremendous working class resistance’ across the car plants in recent years had been poorly understood, he clarifies how myriad forms of sabotage and refusal that had cleaved open opportunities for collective transformation had failed to be defended or seized by the union apparatus.

For the collective, inquiry served as one means of attuning themselves to newly surfacing tendencies, in younger generations’ inventive practices of resistance or in the state’s evolving structures of racialised governance. The space of the magazine’s wider coverage put these reports in the context of the longer arc of Black and Asian communities’ cycles of struggle against colonial domination. This dynamic fuelled their ambitious international analysis, as calls for lessons to be gleaned from struggles overseas, from Guyana to Canada and South Africa, could be positioned immediately alongside the latest developments in the area surrounding the magazine’s offices. Rooted in Brixton’s ‘frontline’ area of Railton Road, amongst other squatted buildings, social centres and activist spaces, Race Today conducted its work, often in productive tension and dispute, with a wider milieu of journals and organisations ‘thinking black’ on the upheavals of their era, and for whom, the process of writing was understood not solely as a means of documentary, but as a ‘process of coming into history’ that could forge a collective, critical political consciousness.¹²

Women’s Liberation Movement

Race Today’s editors and politics often intersected closely, as well as clashed with, those of the women’s liberation movement. Writing in “Black Women and Nursing: A Job Like Any Other” for the August 1974 issue of Race Today,¹³ the Brixton Black Women’s Group used workers’ inquiry to describe these divisions within the women workforce, and even the women’s liberation movement that existed inside it. Framed as a discussion of how the class composition of nursing had changed over the previous 20 years, the article brought together insights from interviews with various black, immigrant nurses in Britain, using their perspectives to analyse how a contemporary increase in overseas student nurses was altering balance of power between workers and managers in the hospitals. They paid particular attention to the role of stricter border controls, and how this greater risk of state violence, should they lose their jobs, changed the nature of their struggles.

The Brixton Black Women’s Group described how labour in hospitals was divided according to sex, race and age. These created divisions between those workers who were “professionals” and those who weren’t, weakening workers’ organisation in the hospitals, much like how the traditional divisions between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers expressed through organisational forms such as craft unionism had for a century weakened the labour movement. Despite their precarious position, these workers had been repeatedly attacked by the nurses union COSHE, rank-and-file workers’ groups, and other supposedly revolutionary organisations. This included the International Socialist’s group “Women’s Voice”, which argued for a ban on both working and organising with agency nurses, who were mostly migrants. Their inquiry then was key for raising these black, women workers’ own voices to intervene in spaces they were otherwise barred from, comparing this situation to that of the early labour movement, in which many unions were often formed to keep women out of the workforce.

As well as Race Today’s interventions into the women’s liberation and labour movements through workers’ inquiry, there were a variety of other grassroots projects informed by the theory and practice of workers’ inquiry. In her 1973 book Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World,¹⁴ Sheila Rowbotham, a veteran of the women’s liberation movement, discusses the role of women in capitalist society, their relation to commodity production, and the emergence of the women’s liberation movement. Refusing to leave the women as a subject within capitalism within the home, she recognises the role of women workers both within commodity production and the formation of the working-class. Whilst insisting that women have always worked in “workplaces”, and in particular acted as a reserve army of labour, Rowbotham also posits that as commodity production increasingly penetrates the life of women, so do women increasingly penetrate commodity production. As well as recognising the unpaid labour women do in reproduction of labour-power, and in that there connection yet separation from commodity production, she also argued that it is both contemporarily and historically inaccurate to see women as uninvolved in and unshaped by wage labour directly. Rowbotham’s contemporary theoretical analysis was grounded not on pure abstraction, but a significant thread within the women’s liberation movement, that aimed to understand how the work of women was changing, at home and in the workplace, and wanted to use that to intervene within it, in doing so directly challenging misogyny within the labour movement itself.

Shrew, a magazine produced by London Women’s Liberation Workshop, released multiple inquiries by workers, most often in interview format. ‘Conditions in a Northern Factory as Described to Me by My Mother’ in the June 1971 issue interviews an anonymous woman working in a factory. ‘Barbara Talking’ in its October 1970 issue interviews a woman, who describes her experience as a migrant worker. Having worked in a range of jobs over a decade living in England - as a machinist, a finisher, a cleaner, and working on electrical wiring for telephones and neon signs - she explains how despite discrimination, she has found elements of solidarity between black and white women, based in the fact they are both worked harder for less than their male coworkers.¹⁵

As well as sporadic interviews with workers that give a snapshot of the working-class in one location, more prolonged inquiry projects were used to supplement feminist labour organising, most significantly night cleaners campaigns. Both Shrew and Socialist Woman, the publication of the International Marxist Group’s women’s section, published special issues dedicated to night cleaners campaigns in London and Lancaster respectively, that were on the cutting edge of the women’s liberation movement’s intersection with working-class struggles.¹⁶

Women’s liberation activists within East London Big Flame, a local group that separated from the Big Flame group proper that we will discuss later, also formed the “Lesneys Women’s Group”. Seeing the political movements built through the night cleaners campaign and the Ford Dagenham equal pay strike, four of these activists gained jobs in the Lesney’s toy car factory in Hackney, which had 2,800 workers, most of whom were women. They began to conduct workers’ inquiries with the workers here, as part of their attempts to organise within the factory, directly citing the “‘politics of autonomous class struggle’ being developed in Italy”.

Through this work, they began to produce a bulletin titled Lesneys Newsletter. Distributed at the factory gates, within its pages were discussions on the issues women workers in particular faced, including that of the male-dominated trade union. Eventually, a full pamphlet titled “Working at Lesneys”¹⁷ was produced, which detailed the various ways in which women workers were exploited, from the viewpoint of the shopfloor. Linking this work to that which Big Flame was doing at various Ford factories, this included contesting how, despite the similarity of the work itself, male colleagues were far better remunerated.

This feminist workers’ inquiry was informed by the fact that the male workers, despite making up less than a third of the workforce, still dominated the union presence at Lesneys. Within the literature produced by the Lesneys Women’s Group, they relay the details of how the shop steward structure, even with five women shop stewards, reinforced a patriarchal and racist organisational structure within the union. However, at higher points of struggle, these structures could be subverted and used to build the confidence of a mass rank-and-file of workers, beginning to break down some of the divisions between the workers on the shopfloor.

Nonetheless, racism remained a decisive factor on the shopfloor. Black women were separated onto different production lines, and some white workers expressed overt racism towards their black colleagues. Trying to find new subjectivities who could be organised to bridge these divides, the activists describe how a more militant alliance emerged between black women and younger, more radical white women, whereas the older white women were more likely to fall in behind those shop stewards who sided with management.

This project of workers’ inquiry not only changed the politics of those who already worked in the factory, but also those of its instigators. In the “Working at Lesneys” pamphlet, one participant describes how disorientated they had felt attending Big Flame meetings whilst working at Lesneys, with the discussion at the meetings feeling disconnected from the reality they faced at the shopfloor. Inquiry was a process through which they could truly understand only how the world worked, beyond just the theoretical reasoning that may have brought them into left activism, as well as the political tasks in which they faced as militants. Reflecting many years later, another expressed:

Working in that factory for a year profoundly changed my world view. I think for the first time I understood what ‘class’ was really about, and for the first time felt personally angry about it. I also learnt about what we are up against with racism and sexism.¹⁸

Big Flame at Fords: Organising Within and Against the Union

Big Flame itself was a libertarian Marxist revolutionary organisation founded in Liverpool in 1970. The organisation co-ordinated ‘base groups’ in major workplaces, most noticeably the Ford plants in Halewood in Merseyside and Dagenham in East London, as well as within wider working-class communities.¹⁹ The aim of these base groups was to root external revolutionaries in direct dialogue with workers on the factory floor. As Big Flame militant Marcello Dall’Aglio describes in Big Flame: Building the Movements, New Politics, this method allowed them to listen to workers and gather the elements needed to form a ‘forceful analysis’ of factory conditions directly from the base.²⁰ Rather than focusing on recruiting Ford workers to their organisation, Big Flame prioritised building the self-activity of the class, producing popular leaflets and bulletins that exposed management tactics and circulated knowledge from the factory back into struggle. These bulletins went beyond declarative political statements or lines, and were responsive to the everyday and granular details of factory life.

The Ford base groups treated workers’ inquiry not as a separate intellectual or sociological exercise, but as an organising method offering the useful action of increasing the circulation of information amongst workers. Inquiry was practical, partisan and immediately tied to intervention. The point was not simply to describe the labour process, but to generate a situated analysis that could sharpen collective antagonism, identify points of leverage, and support forms of action that official union structures would often contain or block. In this respect, Big Flame’s practice differed from other workers’ inquiry traditions in Europe and the United States. It was less textual than the American traditions associated with workers’ narratives, and less theoretically codified than Italian operaismo. Instead, it took the form of a live circuit between listening, analysis, agitation and organisation. Militants embedded themselves in the workplace, gathered knowledge through sustained presence, and rapidly returned that knowledge to workers through bulletins, meetings and interventions. The bulletins we find from the Halewood campaigns, written with Ford workers, makes this especially clear. A 1971 leaflet insisted that workers must organise themselves rather than be manipulated by trade union bureaucrats or professional politicians, while also stating that Big Flame brought ‘ideas and skills’ but not ‘yet another political leadership’, because leadership had to be generated by workers ‘inside the factories and the community’.²¹ This is not to say that the group didn’t agitate through their publications though. Another bulletin from 1975 (held in the archives at the MayDay Rooms) makes a strong argument for workers’ control of the factories, against the Bennite forms being proposed at the time.

The practical form of this politics was highly structured. The Ford Halewood report to the 1976 Big Flame conference noted that base group meetings involving workers and external militants took place roughly every three days. These meetings discussed disputes in the plant, agreed demands and a political line, drafted leaflets, and then got them duplicated in a member’s house and distributed to the night shift that same day and again the following morning. Sometimes they also widened the frame of discussion, linking workplace disputes to broader issues such as fascist activity in Liverpool. This gives a much sharper sense of how workers’ inquiry functioned in practice: not as observation from outside, but as a rapid cycle of collective discussion, clarification and agitation.

Their relationship with the official union was fiercely “within and against”. Big Flame argued that shop stewards had become integrated into the official union hierarchy, receiving perks from management in exchange for procedurally managing the workforce.²² Consequently, the base groups supported wildcat walkouts that the official stewards would not. For example, they supported Monday morning absences, which often occurred because workers were recovering from weekend parties, framing them as protests of workers trying to regain their own lives. This stance reflected a broader strategic judgement: that workers’ autonomy could not be reduced to representation within existing union channels, because the institutions of negotiation were themselves increasingly implicated in the regulation of labour. At Ford, then, the base group was intended as a political form able to operate close to everyday grievances and forms of refusal that interfaced with the institutional labour movement, without subordinating them to official procedure.

At the same time, this approach was shaped by the specificities of the British context. Unlike in Italy, where workerism developed against a weaker mediating role for unions at the point where mass worker struggles erupted, Big Flame operated within a labour movement already heavily institutionalised through shop stewards, national bargaining machinery and Labourist political traditions. That gave their anti-bureaucratic politics a particular sharpness, but it also produced strategic limits. Paul Thompson later noted that their hostility towards building a presence on the shop stewards’ committee meant they recruited few experienced union militants, which ultimately contributed to the collapse of the industrial base group model as external militants moved on. The strength of the Ford project lay in its refusal to confuse class activity with union procedure; its weakness lay in sometimes treating existing workplace mediations as obstacles to be bypassed rather than terrains to be contested.

Big Flame’s stance on trade unions was heavily influenced by the Italian Operaismo tradition as well as more movementist groups coming out of Italy, such as Lotta Continua. Big Flame viewed unions as institutions that merely bargained ‘inside capital’ over the commodity of labour power, while structurally ignoring the autonomous, revolutionary needs of the working class. This strategy could be characterised as “practical ultra-leftism”, of working within institutions whilst also holding strong political lines. This meant focusing on rank and file mass action on the factory floor to fight everyday exploitation such as speed-ups and Measured Day Work, rather than attempting to capture union leadership. The Ford leaflets made this argument in concrete terms. One 1971 leaflet detailed how foremen sought to keep production going at all costs by rewarding compliant workers, keeping files on militants and penalising troublemakers, before arguing that mass collective action on the shop floor was the only way to fight speed-up and managerial control.

They did not shy away from the gritty realities of industrial sabotage when procedural negotiations failed; for instance, when management docked pay at the Ford Langley plant after workers took extra breaks to cope with extreme heat, workers used a crane to drop a rogue cab onto the line, destroying around 30 cabs as ‘retribution’. Yet the significance of this politics at Ford lies not only in its militancy, but in the way it fused inquiry and action: the base group sought to identify the concrete forms through which workers were already resisting, and to amplify them rather than replace them with a pre-given line. This also meant engaging with the trade union structures that workers’ were faced with, encouraging rank-and-file engagement with the union and circulating information and worker’s perspectives to agitate from within.
The organising at Ford also vividly demonstrated their internationalist tendency too. They understood Ford not as a local employer, but as a multinational empire using the global supply chain to discipline its workforce across borders. The bulletins and newspapers circulated around the Ford factories included explicit support for the Irish Republican struggle. Alan Hayling, a Big Flame militant at the Ford Langley plant, mapped this supply chain directly from the factory floor. Using a redundant foreman’s desk during breaks, he would telephone Ford plants in Valencia. Having built networks through conferences with car workers in Spain, Denmark and Germany, Big Flame militants discovered that Ford management was using identical talking points across different countries to divide the workforce and force concessions. This is most clearly seen in the Counter Information Services “anti-report” on Ford that gives a fascinating cross-national picture of macro trends and local management practices across the company.²³ This internationalism extended beyond Europe into direct, material solidarity. Exploiting the empty space in crates of partially built Ford trucks destined for South Africa, Langley workers smuggled thousands of African National Congress leaflets into the country, directly linking car worker politics to the global struggle against apartheid.

Big Flame’s political effect at Ford did not simply disappear with the breakdown of the original base group model either. During the 1978 Ford pay dispute, ex-members and contacts helped to create the Ford Combine, which distributed strike bulletins each week, later produced Fraud News, and tried to build a rank and file organisation that was separate from any one political party so workers from different political backgrounds could act together. From the beginning, wives and girlfriends of Ford workers were involved, including through a counter-demonstration in Southampton against a ‘wives back to work’ campaign. This politics suggests not just militantancy and internationalism, but also an attempt to recompose broader forms of rank and file organisation that linked workplace struggle to wider social relations.

Conclusion

Inquiry should be understood as an open and interpretative tradition, committed to the refusal of those silences through which the everyday experiences of working class exploitation, frustration, compromise and defeat so often disappear from view. This also means resisting the temptation to treat inquiry only as a method for locating exemplary struggles. There is always a danger, especially in periods of weakness, to ambulance chase moments of militancy, or of circulating a narrow repertoire of positive and “lighthouse” struggles, whose very brightness can obscure the more difficult dynamics of fragmentation, exhaustion and defeat. Inquiry, in this sense, cannot simply be a means of affirming what we already hope to find. It must also remain attentive to what is blocked, partial, contradictory or unresolved.

This is one reason why the archival function of inquiry matters. The point is not only to produce interventions which are immediately useful, although that remains important. A piece of writing, a conversation, a report or a collective reflection might intervene directly in a dispute, clarify a set of shared grievances, or help workers name the conditions they are already confronting. But inquiry also produces a living archive whose value may only become visible later, or in unexpected ways. A text that appears minor in the present may later help reconstruct the texture of a workplace, the emergence of a particular form of organisation, or the reasons why a struggle failed to generalise. Both functions are important: inquiry as immediate intervention, and inquiry as the slower accumulation of collective memory.

Looking back at our traditions also allows us to see the infrastructures that made different forms of workers’ writing possible. Such writing did not emerge simply from individual expression. It was often sustained by political organisations, workplace groups, magazines, reading circles, publishing projects, friendship networks, editorial labour and practical forms of support. These infrastructures provided spaces for experience to be narrated, tested, revised and collectively interpreted. They also made possible different types of writing.²⁴ In this respect, the history of inquiry is also a history of the material and organisational conditions through which workers’ knowledge has been produced and circulated.

This is worth stressing because the contemporary media environment can give the impression that the problem of circulation has been solved. Social media allows many workers, often as individuals, to document their working conditions instantly, to publicise disputes, and to connect experiences across workplaces and sectors. This is not insignificant. But this is no substitute for sustained relationships, editorial infrastructures, or collective platforms that build the resources for slower reflection. The capacity to post about work is not the same as the capacity to produce shared analysis of work. Nor does visibility itself resolve the harder questions of organisational form, ideological confrontation, and continuity.

The projects discussed above circulated at different scales and through different structures: political organisations, base groups, magazines, pamphlet series and publishing initiatives. Their forms of inquiry were shaped by these infrastructures, but also limited by them. They emerged within particular conjunctures and, in many cases, faded or entered crisis as those conditions changed. This is itself part of the history that needs to be registered. For example, the rapid disappearance of the base group model within Big Flame should not simply be treated as an organisational footnote, but as an indication of how fragile the infrastructures of inquiry can be when the forms of direct activity in the workplace, political coordination and collective reproduction on which they depended began to break down.

To return to these histories, then, is not to recover a single model to be repeated. It is to recognise inquiry as a contested and uneven tradition of documentation, interpretation and political organisation. Its value lies not only in its capacity to discover struggle, but in its willingness to record the conditions under which struggle becomes thinkable, difficult, defeated, displaced or renewed. This might well be one of the most important resources it offers for our present.