The 2013 science fiction thriller Gravity raises a question as to who is in charge of the plot of a film; the main characters – in this case Lieutenant Matt Kowalski and Dr Ryan Stone – or the actors who play them, George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, or, perhaps more likely still, the director, here Alfonso Cuarón for a film he co-wrote with his son Jonás. Cuarón has good radical form, directing the best of the crop of little boy wizard films with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in 2004, and then, two years later, a film he also wrote, Children of Men (a film that twisted to the left a 1992 novel by Tory Peer P. D. James). In other words, Cuarón is really the main man here, taking bad material and making good of it.

It is then too easy to be misled by the antics of Clooney and Bullock. They look like the stars, up among the real stars on the NASA Explorer Space Shuttle to fix the Hubble Space Telescope. But, when they are hit by debris resulting from a Russian missile attack on one of its old pieces of equipment, it looks like Clooney and Bullock will both soon be dead meat. It is Clooney who pegs out first, reappearing in one of Bullock’s later hallucinations as she works her way into an abandoned Russian Soyuz craft and then onto a Chinese Shenzou vehicle, just in time to zoom in and break through the upper atmosphere and arrive safe back on earth.

We are up in space circling the planet for most of the film, getting more than a bird’s eye view of home, more than enough, too much to work out what is really going on down below. Instead, in a hyper-real internationalist perspective on the world, we navigate in this film the vain attempts by nation states to project themselves into space, into territory they do not yet control. Just as in Children of Men Cuarón was able to make us see something about our reality that we could not already see, to see more of it, so in Gravity, he was able to show us how little we are, little bit players in our national struggles; we have to step beyond the nation state, beyond earth itself, to get a better perspective on what is really going on.

FIIMG

The Fourth International in Manchester Group (FIIMG) is, let’s be honest, one of the smaller, if not the smallest of revolutionary organisations. If it were really led by George Clooney (which is a plausible supposition) then his partner Sandra Bullock would be rolling her eyes wondering what an earth he is doing most of the time tangled up with those old macho leftists who are tangled up in turn with the tangled lines of old clapped out group leaders. She’s the one who will survive this. But it’s not even down to George, this thing.

Cruciverbalists will detect in the initials FIIMG ‘Fourth International’, of course, and then ‘IMG’ which will remind old Trotskyists in Britain of the International Marxist Group, some of whose ex-members are accumulating a valuable public archive of material; that’s an invaluable accompaniment to the FIIMG Mapping the British Left through Film project. The current incarnation of the IMG as British Section of the Fourth International is Socialist Resistance, SR, which might lead you to expect FIIMG to praise SR and the FI and attack the rest as pretenders. Not so, because the Fourth International has always comprised a weird mix of old-line Trotskyists, surrealists and libertarians, and all the more so today when it includes members around the world from very different revolutionary traditions; it is a space for action and critical reflection.

Ok, take a deep breath and admit it, there is now more than one ‘fourth international’, in the sense that there are actually many groupings of revolutionaries who link politics around the globe; you need but two Trotskyists to found a party, three to build an international, and four to produce a split. Maybe that is one reason why we, FIIMG, are actually less than one. We need to acknowledge the others racing around the globe in hyperspace because we are hit by their debris every now and again.

Next down in size after the Fourth International with credible continuity with the organisation founded by Trotsky and his followers in 1938 are, number two, the very nice on the whole comrades of the International Marxist Tendency, whose British section inside the Labour Party is named for its newspaper Socialist Appeal. Next down on the list, number three and four in the international hit parade, are two internationals with so few members here as to make them inconsequential to the British scene (unlike the other local groups, LOL), the Fourth International La Vérité, followers of Pierre Lambert (of which the British Section is ‘FI Britain’), and the Latin-American ‘Morenoite’ International Workers League, whose British Section is confined pretty much to the Old Swan district of Liverpool (where it is called the International Socialist League). The British SWP runs its own outfit called the International Socialist Tendency, a fifth contender on the world stage.

Sixth, there is a one half of the Committee for a Workers International (with a very small group in Britain called Socialist Alternative), though internationally the ‘majority’ and renamed in early 2020 the International Socialist Alternative; and, in seventh place, the other half of the Committee for a Workers International, the ‘minority’, still staggering on under its original name after a disastrous split in 2019 that was very much to do with London-centric control-freakery by one of its few remaining live groups, the Socialist Party. There are still tinier ‘internationals’, some of which still claim the title ‘Fourth International’ (fragment fall-outs from the sexual abuse scandals that spawned the current thankfully much-reduced version of the Workers Revolutionary Party and Socialist Equality Party, and some going where no one has gone before, or will do, to the ‘Fifth International’ of Workers’ Power. Unfortunately, the Cuarta Internacional Posadista, which did try to make contact with flying saucers no longer exists except in name.

It all looks very different from space, no doubt, but we didn’t need Alfonso Cuarón to tell us that in space no one can hear you scream. Comrades have given their lives to the tin-pot dictators that run some of these groups, and that’s why internal revolutionary democracy is the absolutely indispensable key to building anything that is worth the time and the energy we have left before the world itself heats up and capitalism kills us all. It is small consolation that people are able to escape every now and again and find a revolutionary space to work together instead of against each other.

You can fill out Gravity with any old ideological content, even with advertising, recuperate it, and turn it against the left. And you can do the same with each and every group on the left, drag it back into the orbit of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. In fact, that’s what many of the so-called revolutionary groups already offer themselves up to, set themselves up for, and then it is all the worse when they try and build their own ‘internationals’ in their own image, as simple projections onto a global scale of the way they see things on their home ground. FIIMG escapes that, circling around the British groups, liminal to them, whatever their size, and the various ‘internationals’ that pretend they are the one.

FIIMG cannot, of course, break free from the Fourth International which was actually founded by Leon Trotsky and fellow anti-Stalinist revolutionaries, not only because the FI can be traced back to the historical origins of revolutionary socialist struggle against both capitalism and Stalinism, but also because this Fourth International is the most honest and open about the need to connect with other revolutionary traditions. This Fourth International does its level best to build something from the fragments, to make another world possible, just as FIIMG shows you where those fragments colliding with each other in Britain come from, all the more effectively for you to make your own commitment to take them some place better.

This is part of the FIIMG Mapping the English Left through Film project.