Gravity (2013) – dir. Alfonso Cuarón

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Soyuz TMA-7

Soyuz TMA-7

Beware: contains spoilers!

To get any enjoyment out of cinema you must have the ability to suspend reality, otherwise how can you sit through a couple of hours where light that has been shone through a piece of moving plastic is projected on to a screen. (OK, I know that most films are seen in digital format nowadays – but the principle still remains.) But if it’s upon me to suspend reality it’s up to the director to not take me into the realm of fantasy when we are looking at something that is purported to be real. What you can get away with in a cartoon is not so easy, or credible in a film where the aim is to get us to empathise with the characters portrayed. By not abiding by that ‘agreement’ between film-maker and film-goer I believe Cuarón breaks that unwritten contract in ‘Gravity’.

You have to give it to the Americans, if nothing else they’re persistent. More than 20 years after the ‘fall of the Soviet Empire’ they make a dig at the Russians as being the cause of the disaster that is this film. The initial premise of ‘Gravity’ is that in wanting to get rid of a satellite quickly the Russians send up a rocket to destroy it therefore spreading shrapnel which hurtles around the planet, causing the disastrous sequence of events which Sandra Bullock will have to surmount.

Now why a country that was the first to send a man-made satellite into orbit, the first to send a man (and then a woman – long before the west considered doing so) into space, which ‘lost’ the race to the moon (but then that was just a vanity affair as witnessed by the fact that the Chinese Rabbit on the Moon at the moment is the first item from Earth to have arrived there in more than 40 years) but continued with more long-term, potentially beneficial space projects including MIR, the basis of the present International Space Station, and also which is, at present, the only country that can keep the ISS supplied by both occupants and material to that station, should be so reckless as to create a mega-disaster and threaten ALL space projects, of the past and the future, is totally ludicrous.

So the basic premise is a non-starter.

Next we have the character of Ryan Stone the, strangely genderless, name of the scientist played by Sandra Bullock (and one of the only two characters we see alive in the film). Now this film is in the past, a bit unusual for space films. It’s in the past as this crew of US-based astronauts arrived in space on one of the space shuttles, but the final mission of these craft was made in July 2011. I make a point of the past as if we were talking about incidents set in the medium to long-term future film-makers can get away with having all types of people in space. Just look at the bunch of misfits on the Nostromo in ‘Alien’ (1979).

However, so far, the numbers of humans that have gone, are going and will go into space is very small – and they are a very select bunch. I would have thought that if the choice was between ‘the most brilliant scientist in her field’ – as is Stone – who failed crucial aspects of her training (as she admits when she says that she was never able to dock a module in the simulator) or someone who was perfect at the tasks they would need to perform in space but only second best in their field then the latter would prevail.

On top of her ineptitude she is also a psychological disaster. We learn that her young daughter had been killed and she still wasn’t over it – many parents state that they never get over it. Yet we are expected to believe that NASA would send this virtual time bomb into space.

The next ludicrous premise revolves around her breathing. Once disaster hits and she is floating around in space she panics (she probably failed that part of the training as well) and as people often do on Earth in such circumstances she takes quick, short breaths. This can lead to hyperventilation and the first aid cure on land is to breathe into a paper bag (but where you get one of those nowadays is a bit of a dilemma). It’s taken me a long time (one of the reasons for the delay in posting this review) to get a definitive answer to the question ‘Can you hyperventilate in a situation where someone is breathing a high oxygen mix?’.

For a long, long time she is taking in so much oxygen that her reserves are losing a percentage point every minute. Surely this must have an effect on the brain? Surely she would have passed out and that would have been the (fortunate) end of the film? But she needs to use up her oxygen to propel her into jeopardy. By the time she gets into a spacecraft and ‘safety’ she is holding her breath. I didn’t time it but much, much longer than 90 seconds to 2 minutes which, I understand, a normal healthy individual can achieve. Or perhaps its just that everything which stretches credibility in this film just seems to go on forever.

She gets inside the ISS with her last breath and we get the obligatory striptease which has been in every ‘woman in space’ film since ‘Barbarella’ (1968) passing through ‘Alien’ along the way. This minor erotic interlude also provides those who see the representation of birth in this film as she virtually adopts the foetal position after she strips off her spacesuit. The other aspect of the birth analogy come from the fact that there are a lot scenes where humans are attached to each other of spacecraft by ‘umbilical’ chords, some which save, others threaten.

Her presence causes a fire – there’s no other explanation if not – and she runs away to the one remaining Soyuz. She is prevented from escaping immediately by one of the unfriendly and not nurturing umbilical chords, the chords of the prematurely deployed parachute, so she has to make a space walk to disconnect cables which would have been sufficient to tether a ship the size of the Titanic. She does this with a tool remarkably similar to one she was using earlier to disconnect a panel from the Hubble Telescope, a sort of modern equivalent to Dr Who’s sonic screwdriver. By now the debris that had destroyed the said telescope, the space shuttle and the rest of the crew, was coming around for a second bite of the cherry. And a huge bite it takes of the ISS, apart, that is, from Stone and her Soyuz. (Technically this is a masterful piece of cinema and watching it in 3D you instinctively flinch when this metal comes towards you.)

By now she should have realised that she was invincible, having survived such major disasters, but it’s quite the opposite – she gives up because she runs out of petrol. Her aim was to get to the Chinese space station where she hopes there’s a craft that could possibly make it through Earth’s atmosphere and have a parachute that will drop her gently to safety.

Considering this is supposed to be a ‘feminist’ film (not least as she is now the only character on-screen, George Clooney having sacrificed himself so that she might live) it’s strange that she only pulls herself together (after switching off the oxygen supply when she lost hope) when he comes back to her in her delirium and tells her that ‘nobody up there can harm her’ – that’s presumably not taking into account the ever-increasing amount of debris that is growing exponentially as virtually all of all countries’ satellites in Earth orbit have been reduced, or soon will be, to scrap metal.

In her dream he mentions the landing engines and that source of fuel. So even though she kept on crashing on the simulator on Earth (how could such an abject failure in training be allowed to go into space?) the knowledge is there to enable her to get to her only hope of getting down, the escape module at the Chinese station – obviously with a lot more hyperventilation and the obligatory, all-American, emotional speech full of platitudes and clichés.

But credibility us stretched to the very end. Considering that the planet is 8 tenths water and desert (not counting the Antarctic) it is astounding that she splashes down in shallow, fresh water in a temperate zone. Yet even with this amazing stoke of luck she ends up flooding the capsule (surely they’re constructed to be stable if landing on water however inefficient and incompetent the crew members?) and after floundering around in space she has to fight for her life on her home planet.

With her luck what was surprising was that she did not find a winning lottery ticket for Euromillions, the National Lottery (both with multi week rollovers), together with El Gordo and the Irish Sweepstake.

But she did, in a way. The whole of the planet would be in total disarray after the carnage that had been taking place a few hundred kilometres above her head. ALL satellites would have been destroyed, communications would be down throughout the planet, people would be rioting on the street due to the fact that couldn’t connect to their chosen social media, commerce would have ground to a halt, stock exchanges world-wide would be paralysed. It would be the end of life as we know it and yet she still gets a message that Houston has picked her up by radar. Come on, let’s be real. The last thing people would have been doing was try to track someone almost certainly considered to have died with all the rest in space.

The fact that this travesty of a film is even being considered for an Academy Award later this year shows how bad 2013 has been for cinema. If it was to win anything significant would just go to emphasise that the Academy has no appreciation of real cinema and such ceremonies merely exist to perpetuate the moribund idea of a Hollywood which has long passed its sell by date.

However, the tear drop was impressive (just before her almost attempt at suicide) and if the film is seen at all it should be in 3D and on a big screen.

Robin Hood’s Bay to Liverpool – A Twearly returns home

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The Final Hill - Robin Hood's Bay

The Final Hill – Robin Hood’s Bay

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Robin Hood’s Bay to Liverpool – A Twearly returns home

Having taken 16 days to get across country, from the Irish to the North Sea, the aim was to try to get back in one and, as part of the game, to try to see if it was possible to get from Robin Hood’s Bat to Liverpool, without too much pain, by using the Twearlys’ All England Bus Pass.

First I had to get out of Robin Hood’s Bay. As things worked out I had decided to leave at the first opportunity. The weather wasn’t looking too promising (and during the course of the day became considerably worse) and I suppose I was also getting fed up of the instability that comes with being away from home. There were no real problems it was just that I didn’t feel like chasing around to fill my time with something useful. It’s one of the consequences when you set yourself a task, a target, that on completion there’s a sense of anti-climax, the adrenalin that has kept you going returns to normal levels and consequently you feel tired. So I thought a day sitting on a bus, gradually heading west, was the best option.

Robin Hood’s Bay would be a pleasant place to spend some time in the right conditions (as is the YHA at Boggle Hole) and I’ll make an effort to return in the not too distant future – as well as getting to Whitby to experience the famous fish and chips. It’s different from what I expected. I didn’t realise that the old part of the village is at the bottom of a very steep hill and that caused me to wander around aimlessly looking for the bus stop the day before.

There’s a strange ‘monument’ at the bottom of the hill, next to the Coast to Coast finish/start sign. This is a statue, if that is the right word, of a fish, donated by a couple of locals (I assume), a Captain Isaac Mills and his wife. Didn’t notice a date and have no idea what it’s supposed to represent. So that the fish won’t escape it’s fenced in.

What makes Robin Hood's Bay Famous!

What makes Robin Hood’s Bay Famous!

Before relaxing on the English local bus network there was one last challenge – and that was getting up the hill. There had been some steep ascents during the last couple of weeks and this was one of the steepest, but thankfully short, if not so sweet.

With the timetables of the buses I reckoned I could get back across country in about 10 hours. This would be on 5 different buses and some of the changeovers were tight so a delay of only 10 minutes or so at a couple of places would have meant a delay of another hour or two, so there was a lot resting on the buses keeping to their timetable.

In planning the exact buses to catch I had forgotten one crucial fact – and that’s the time limitations on the bus pass, i.e., it’s not valid before 09.30. Trying to use the pass before that time brands someone a ‘twearly/twirly’ (don’t know if there’s an official way of spelling it). For those who may not have come across it this is the term applied to any old fart who tries to get on a public bus before 09.30. It almost certainly has it derivation in Liverpool, that city and Sheffield being the only two metropolitan areas that offered free travel to over 60s long before it became a national affair.

A ‘twearly/twirly’ would stand at the bus stop anything from 10 or 15 minutes before the pass was valid and would ask the driver ‘Is it too early to use my pass?’. Perhaps the first ones to try it succeeded but after a while drivers began to realise that the same people would be trying it on and so started to stick to the time limit. As drivers would change the persistent old arses would keep on trying and hence the term came into everyday use in Liverpool.

I think it’s probably spreading around the country now, especially in the major cities but, fortunately for me, has not yet become an issue in North Yorkshire. I was at the bus stop for the 09.24 bus and it wasn’t till it came to me en route to Scarborough that I realised I had, inadvertently (honest) joined the ranks of the ‘twearlies/twirlies’.

Travelling long distance on local buses is an interesting experience/pastime. For one thing, being used, as we have become, to racing along at 70 plus mph on motorways when travelling by road we have lost the pleasure of passing through small towns and villages. The pace is obviously slower so when you are passing places of interest there’s actually time to see what’s there. The routes will change from fastish dual carriageways to then follow a quiet country road on the off-chance that someone in an out-of-the-way village is waiting for the bus. For those with no transport of their own these bus services become a bit of a lifeline to the outside world. I cursed these diversions (unfairly) when my bus was running late, especially when no one would subsequently either get off or on the bus, but that’s just being selfish.

The outside world is seen in a different light but so is the internal, the one inside the bus itself.

Travelling throughout the day you get to understand the different groups of bus travellers who occupy the different time slots and you get an insight of people’s lives as they interact with public transport. And it’s not always that edifying.

On the first bus, from Robin Hood’s Bay to Scarborough, leaving as it did at 09.24 it was too late for the early start workers, or even schoolchildren, but even on that bus there appeared to me to be a handful of people who might be starting work a little later, or even travelling to work via Scarborough railway station, the terminus for this particular route. Together with them you find those who might be making relatively local visits, going early morning shopping or having a day out in the larger seaside town.

The bus from Scarborough was completely different. Going all the way to Leeds (a scheduled journey of 2 hours 45 minutes which takes in York) this was packed by the time it left the centre of the city and was almost full of people using a bus pass. Some going only a short distance but quite a few getting out at York. They would have been on a day trip, returning after an afternoon wandering the narrow streets of the old town. But that bus also picked up people doing their shopping and those travelling relatively short distances to carry out the everyday affairs that make up people’s existence – visiting family and friends, doctors, dentists, signing on at the dole, getting away from annoying family members, trying to escape for a short time, basically just doing something different to break up the monotony of their mundane lives.

From Leeds the make-up of the passengers changed again. Some seemed to be going home after sorting out their affairs in the big city, perhaps after dealing with officialdom or shopping. Then there were the first people who may have started work really early, on a morning shift perhaps, and going home in the middle of the afternoon as they had started in the middle of the night. As we got closer to Skipton (this bus’ terminus) it got darker and soon we were travelling through driving rain. These were the weather conditions I thought I might have had to face, but fortunately for me didn’t, as the winds from the east kept me dry. Once I didn’t need them the winds reverted to normal and hence the torrential rain, which kept falling until I was almost within sight of Liverpool. Towards the end of this journey schoolchildren started to appear as by 15.30 we were coming towards the end of the school day.

The changeover in Skipton was tight, only 5 minutes between one bus scheduled arrival time and the next one, to Preston, leaving. By now the rain was persistent and heavy and Skipton bus station is not somewhere you want to spend a lot of time in such weather conditions. One of the problems with the deregulation of buses, and the slashing of staffing levels, is that there’s no one present to hold buses back for a few minutes if a connecting bus is delayed. There must have been 7 or 8 people doing the same as myself and transferring to the Preston bus but if the Leeds bus had arrived only 5 minutes later it would have meant another hour’s wait for the next one. There’s just no planning for these situations when technology provides an easy way to create an integrated transport network, possible even with many bus companies if there was the will. But timetable punctuality means more than passenger ‘satisfaction’, something which also happens on the railways. If notice boards contained passenger comments rather than meaningless statistics we would all have a better understanding of transport infrastructure efficiency in Britain.

But ‘a close to Skipton bus station pub’s’ loss was my gain as the next bus pulled into its bay less than a minute after I got there. Now the passenger mix changed yet again. There were a few of us long haul passengers, making it all the way from Leeds to Preston – and beyond. Again people returning home along the almost 2 hours of this route. But dominated by schoolchildren. Passing through a number of small Yorkshire and then Lancashire towns the route passes many schools so not a surprise that they would be providing the passengers. What did surprise me was the distance some of these young people had to travel. They weren’t in any way going to a local high school. This was the case at the beginning of the route but became even more pronounced on the second half of the journey where some of these kids were on the bus for 45 minutes or more, to then arrive in the centre of Preston – how much further they had to go I wouldn’t know. And we’re not talking about a local bus that gets caught up in traffic lights and roundabouts. This was a bus that raced along dual carriageways and the miles soon mount up. These children must have been spending at least a couple of hours a day just getting to and from school and that can’t be right. I walked to all my schools and if it took longer than 10 minutes you were dawdling, surely that’s a more civilised approach to education?

The final stage from Preston to Liverpool was the 17.30 commuter bus. They are always quiet as people tend to travel alone and with mobile devices there’s even less incentive to communicate with fellow travellers. But even on this bus there was an indication of the pressures that are placed on working people in ‘austerity forever Britain’. A young teacher, or trainee, was looking through her class’s workbooks for the first part of the journey (which for her was over an hour). This is as bad as the circumstances of the schoolchildren earlier. She wouldn’t have got home much before 19.00 and I can’t imagine what time she left in the morning. I would like to think she had spent an hour or so in the pub after finishing teaching but I think that is, unfortunately, unlikely. People are working too long! When I was involved in the trade union we were fighting for a shorter working week/life but that is all a thing of the past now. The advantage of her working such a long day is that she won’t have to wait until her early 70s before retiring, she’ll be dead before then.

One of the last of my travelling ‘companions’ was a young women who had obviously been spending some time mucking out stables. This information was gleaned not from her dress or what she might have said but by the smell of horse piss and shit emanating from her foot wear. Judging (is this being prejudiced and imposing stereotypical points of view?) by where she got off the bus she was unlikely to have been the owner of a horse, more a stable girl. But why bring her work home with her, and in the process leaving her mark on a public bus? So many questions, so few answers.

By now the rain had stopped. The streets were wet but I had, yet again since leaving home just over a couple of weeks ago, missed getting seriously wet. Liverpool awaited. It had taken me 13 days walking to get from west to east and just 10 hours (more or less) to get from east to west.

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Who’s mourning Nelson Mandela – and why?

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Murder at Sharpeville 21 March 1960 - Godfrey Rubens

Murder at Sharpeville 21 March 1960 – Godfrey Rubens

In May 1929 Mao Zedong wrote a short article entitled ‘To be attacked by the enemy is a good thing and not a bad thing’. If a revolutionary does something that challenges the capitalist/imperialist system then their representatives will do their utmost to discredit, undermine and denigrate those revolutionaries involved in order to destroy their attractiveness to the oppressed masses. In the same way they will praise to the skies anyone who, under the guise of ‘fighting’ for the oppressed actually are no more than a lackey of the ruling class. It is in this light that we should look at who’s mourning Nelson Mandela – and why.

International politics is not civilised. There’s too much at stake, not just in terms of wealth but also control, prospects for the future and the long-term existence of particular social systems. At the moment there’s only one political system that’s able to have a significant impact upon matters globally and that’s the system of exploitation and oppression known as capitalism. For a good part of the 20th century this moribund and decadent system was fighting a rear-guard action against the progressive system of socialism, first with the establishment of the Soviet Union after the 1917 October Revolution and then the dramatic success of the Chinese Communists and the declaration of the People’s Republic in October 1949.

The Soviet Union took the revisionist road in the years after the death of Joseph Stalin and China went even quicker down that capitalist road within months of the death of Chairman Mao. The reasons for those dramatic developments have been, are and will be subject to debate and an analysis which is too complex to go into here. Suffice it to state that this caused confusion and disarray amongst revolutionary forces throughout the world and it’s impossible to calculate the consequences of these traitorous moves on the poor and oppressed throughout the planet.

However, it wasn’t until the collapse of the Soviet Union as a viable entity in 1991 that imperialism felt confident enough to go on full-scale attack and recover its dominance over the world. This covered: the economic – with the whole scale privatisation of the people’s resources in whatever country under the guise of restructuring and efficiency; the philosophical with, for example, the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History and the Last Man’ in 1992, which argued that capitalism was the epitome of human development; and the cultural with the widespread dissemination of English language films and the ubiquitous presence of capitalist ‘icons’ such as McDonalds and Coca/Pepsi Cola.

It was into this environment that Nelson Mandela was released from his 27 years imprisonment under the neo-fascist South African apartheid regime. The timing of his freedom couldn’t have been better chosen.

As early as July 1987 debate was taking place amongst the South African establishment of the necessity or otherwise of the apartheid regime in maintaining capitalist control of the country. Newspaper articles at that time looked to the lack of significant change in the economic structure in neighbouring Zimbabwe since Independence in April 1980 and argued that capitalism had little to fear from Black majority rule.

In Zimbabwe the status quo had not been significantly challenged. This was partly due to Mugabe honouring the conditions of the Lancaster House Agreement (signed in London on 21st December 1979) but also to a lack of real political understanding by the leadership in Harare. At the time I considered that Mugabe and pulled off a coup against the white Rhodesian supremacists and their British supporters but have had to revise that opinion in the light of subsequent developments. The ten years of grace given to the white racists allowed them to consolidate their control and also to undermine the revolutionary forces by seducing the weak and fomenting disillusionment amongst the true revolutionaries.

Later pressures and restrictions placed upon the country by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund throughout the 1990s only made matters worse. When land seizures became more prevalent at the beginning of the 2000s it was too little, too late and led to the chaotic situation that has bedevilled the country in recent years. Only now with the support of capitalist China is Zimbabwe able to drag itself out of the mire but only to change one master for another.

So by February 1990, when Mandela was released from prison (less than three months after the fall of the Berlin Wall) his role as mediator between the extremes of the apartheid regime and the Azanian revolutionaries was crucial in maintaining South Africa in the capitalist orbit. Leaders that spend such a long time in prison, separate from the day-to-day struggle, are notoriously bad at understanding the contemporary situation. He went in with certain political ideas and views and came out with those same views 27 years later. Subject to the oppression of the apartheid regime in a passive sense he hadn’t experienced the viciousness and violence to which the people of the townships were increasingly being subjected. In that way Winnie Mandela was a better representative of the ordinary people.

On the balcony in Cape Town the biggest cheer in his speech was that in response to his declaration that the armed struggle would continue – this from a man whose attitude to such a course of action was ambivalent to say the least. In that same speech he also spoke of reconciliation but in the climate of the time, with the general impression and feeling that the regime was on the run, that the long, long years of oppression were almost at an end, there was a mismatch between the masses in the square and the individual on the pedestal.

But those behind the scenes knew exactly what was going on. I’m not necessarily saying that Mandela made an agreement to secure his release. He didn’t need to. If anyone was to read his defence speech at the Rivonia Trial of 1964 (the one that ends with the words ‘ …. I am prepared to die’) rather than just refer to it as ‘one of the most famous speeches of all time’ they would realise that Mandela spent more time saying what he didn’t agree with than what he did. Being in prison, isolated from the struggle, not developing his ideas as the struggle in the country intensified, to be of use to the Afrikaaner state (and its imperialist backers) he just had to remain intellectually where he was in the early 60s. And he did.

Pik Botha, and later FW de Klerk, knew Mandela wasn’t a hot-blooded revolutionary who wanted to fundamentally change society. He would be happy with the end of the apartheid system even if it didn’t change the basis of South African society. Never did Mandela express any support for, real understanding of and a desire for the establishment of socialism let alone communism. He stayed loyal to his class background and presided over a Black majority state where the conditions of the people got worse instead of better.

It’s one of the contradictions of ‘freedom’ in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In 1987 Zimbabwe was ‘free’ but was still restricted by capitalist control of the economy but across the border in South Africa the people weren’t ‘free’ but the standard of living of those in the townships was often higher than those of comparable workers in Harare. The people in the erstwhile Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe are now ‘free’ but things like education, health, welfare services and elderly care are increasingly out of reach for many of the poorest in society.

Forces within Africa, particularly the Pan-African Congress, did have the shoots of a socialist ideology but the ground was taken from under them with Mandela’s release. Very soon after his release he became the darling of the ‘west’ and the ‘east’ (he made a visit to Cuba) and soon it appeared that the only person who could talk for the Azanian people was Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC). People believed the empty promises as his release presaged a better future for everyone. These empty promises were believed in the same way that ‘democratic’ politicians promise the world before elections but deliver nothing when in power – just consider the mismatch between promises and reality in late 20th Britain. And those promises were made for the same reasons, to try to deflect the people from taking more direct and significant action.

(Just as an aside, whatever happened to the term Azania and the impression that I certainly had, for many years before the ‘end’ of apartheid, that South Africa would be renamed, just as Rhodesia became Zimbabwe? But that would have upset the Afrikaaners and we wouldn’t want them put out.)

Mandela gave greater credibility to the right-wing within the ANC which wanted no more than black faces in control of the society as it was. Even though there were some within the ANC and Umkonto We Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) – the armed wing of the ANC – that considered the armed struggle the only way to true liberation, especially in the early years (see copies of Sechaba from the 1970s), it never had the impact that was achieved by the other liberation movements in other countries fighting European colonialism and racism as in Rhodesia, Mozambique, Namibia, Guinea-Bissau and Angola. In fact, the armed movement was so ineffectual in South Africa that the apartheid regime was able to send its forces to try to claw back what the ex-Portuguese colonies had achieved through long, bitter and painful liberation wars.

Nelson Mandela became the ‘First Freely Elected Black President of South Africa’ in 1994 and in his wake revolutionaries faded into the background, corrupt black politicians and business started to feed at the trough once exclusive to the whites and the poor, both black and white, remained poor.

What, it seems, is often forgotten in the context of Southern Africa is that the ratio of blacks to whites in South Africa was about 3 black to one white in the 1990s. That meant that poverty wasn’t just the fate of the blacks. Some blacks lived in relative luxury in Soweto – the township to the south-west of Johannesburg – whilst poor working class whites might be homeless and begging on the streets. Contrast that with the situation in Rhodesia before independence when the ration was something like 27 blacks to one white and which led to an even more vicious and vindictive society. As the whites had much more to fight for that resulted in 47,000 black Zimbabwean deaths in the National Liberation War between 1973 and 1980.

And that situation remains almost 20 years later. Instead of uniting and fighting against the system that oppresses them all the workers, of whatever colour, are fighting amongst and against themselves and leaving the rich and powerful to carry on in the old way. That’s fundamentally Mandela’s legacy.

He didn’t want a revolution and those that did never realised that a revolution is not a dinner party (as Mao described in an article in 1927). A revolution is messy, violent and unpredictable. The only ones that can gain by avoiding such a situation is the present ruling class. They can/will be contrite and make all the apologies necessary, as long as their wealth and power are not challenged. On the other hand the exploited and oppressed can only end their exploitation and oppression by challenging the world order, by turning the world upside-down.

And that’s why world leaders, both past and present, are falling over themselves to shower Mandela’s corpse with praise. He stopped people from doing that. This is all shown in the film that came out at the time that must have had the producers rubbing their hands with glee – just weeks prior to his death. The film Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom showed quite clearly where his politics lay.

If to be attacked by the enemy is a good thing and not a bad thing then being praised by all those who spend all their time and efforts maintaining the system of inequality and injustice is a bad thing and not a good thing.