I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism

by A.M. Gittlitz

Advocating nuclear war, attempting communication with dolphins and taking an interest in the paranormal and UFOs, there is perhaps no greater (or stranger) cautionary tale for the Left than that of Posadism.

Named after the Argentine Trotskyist J. Posadas, the movement's journey through the fractious and sectarian world of mid-20th century revolutionary socialism was unique. Although at times significant, Posadas' movement was ultimately a failure. As it disintegrated, it increasingly grew to resemble a bizarre cult, detached from the working class it sought to liberate. The renewed interest in Posadism today - especially for its more outlandish fixations - speaks to both a cynicism towards the past and nostalgia for the earnest belief that a better world is possible.

Drawing on considerable archival research, and numerous interviews with ex- and current Posadists, I Want to Believe tells the fascinating story of this most unusual socialist movement and considers why it continues to capture the imaginations of leftists today.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Biography, Theory, 21st Century, Philosophy

272 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2020

Reviews

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a scifi fan, Cold War history buff, American-style Leftist, and Terminally Online Shitposter (TM), so when the memes of the DSA Posadist caucus started filtering across my feed a few years ago, my immediate reaction was "What is this premium content that was made specifically for me?" More than any specific analysis, the juxtaposition of imagery is a whole damn mood, as the kids say. Gittlitz has written the authoritative biography of J. Posadas, with an analysis of why it has recaptured contemporary imaginations.


Selection of DSA Posadist Caucus buttons

For decades, Posadism has served as the butt of jokes for the increasingly marginalized Trotskyite Left. Like, we might all be irrelevant coffee table revolutionaries, but at least we aren't members of a UFO cult. And it's hard to deny that Posadism as a movement was a cult, centered around the veneration of the increasingly eccentric Posadas, with strict discipline and centralization of thought. UFOs and our Intergalactic Socialist Comrades were actually a tertiary concern for Posadas and his movement. The central tenet of Posadist beliefs was that the Revolution was Immanent and capitalism was in its last stages of collapse, a perpetual optimism that coincident with Posadas' personal maniac charisma, explains much of the movement's durability.

Where it gets weird is that the second tenet is that a global thermonuclear war would be good for Communism. Apocalypse, the deaths of billions, and the destruction of industry and society would smash the bourgeois in the single blow which proletarian revolutions could not deal. The Party would rise from the ashes, instituting a socialist utopia. And after that, the positions gets increasingly heterodox. Communion with dolphins, following the work of Igor Charkovsky, was a far greater part of the program than UFOs. The rest of the Posadist program can only be captured as stridently oppositional to the mainstream, whatever it is, including support for Peronisn, Baathism, and the 1968 invasion of Prague by the USSR.

If this book has a flaw, it's that it is a serious history and biography of Homero Cristalli, the Argentinian agitator who adopted the revolutionary nom de guerre J. Posadas. This isn't Gittlitz's fault, it's a truth of the historical record that rarely has anything mattered as little as the Trotskyism.

Born into poverty in Buenos Aires, Cristalli's energy propelled him to a failed socialist political campaign, and then into the revolutionary world of the Fourth International. In what is the story of Trotskyism, the movement failed comprehensively, fragmenting into dozens of almost identically named subparties who purged their ranks and denounced each other, published newsletters (the basic activity of the Trot, it seems), were picked off by CIA-backed right wing death squads, and who failed to make any meaningful alliances with either mainstream trade unions or actually Communist countries from China to Cuba. When the moment of worldwide breach came in 1968, Posadas initially denounced the mass youth movement as "unwashed bohemian bourgeois", and while he came around eventually, Trotskyites were bystanders to events, unable to capitalize on the global wave of energy.

1968 marked a major transition for the movement. Cristalli/Posadas had organized movements in Latin America for decades, and for all his many faults was a genuine regional power on the Left. In 1969 he and his top cadres were arrested in Montevideo and exiled to Italy. Over the following years, Posadas denounced and expelled the old South American organizers who had been with him from the start, replacing them with sycophantic young Europeans who looked up to him as a guru and father figure. Posadism had always had a heavy emphasis on discipline and his eccentric ideas. Now it completed its transformation into person-centered cult, as Posadas rejected his previously austere personal morality to begin affairs with young women in the group, first a comrade by the name of "Ines", and then his young daughter's nurse "Rene". He died in 1981, after several heart attacks. None of this second group of Posadists agreed to be interviewed for the book, an astonishing level of devotion four decades on.

To return to the analysis, in 2020, at what feels like an absolute nadir of Global Leftism, why does Posadas matter? As Gittlitz gets at in his survey of the phrase "Fully Automated Luxury Communism", if even the most incremental change is impossible, why not demand everything? The arguments between realists and utopians is one of the oldest splits in the Left, with a distinct scifi turn through Alexander Bogdanov, recaptured and reflected in Posadas strident revolutionary sermons, in the lifestyle Counterculture consumerism of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, and the fuzzy post-scarcity of Star Trek. Perhaps the most salient feature of contemporary politics is the anti-factual alliance between New Age mystics, conspiracy theorists, and right wing authoritarians: the anti-vax, Flat Earth, QAnon crossover. Current Posadist social media accounts are sadly inactive, but why shouldn't the Left have an anti-realist wing? There are too many crazies to ignore, and your boss, landlord, the cops, TV, and The Algorithm are genuinely conspiring to ruin your life and extract all your precious surplus value.

Posadas as a man was a sad mentally ill authoritarian. Posadism as a program is a hodgepodge of Marxist exegesis with little useful to say. But The Future is too precious to cede to neoliberal bureaucrats, fascist streetfighters, and billionaire tech titans, and that's where the shocking discontinuity of neo-Posadist imagery serves as a flag to rally around. Slap a Lisa Frank dolphin in front of a mushroom cloud and open your definition of 'comrade' to include all people everywhere, the aliens who are definitely not visiting us, and even objects defined by their social relationships (hello Bruno Latour). Posadism is bad theory and worse praxis, but I love it anyway, and really appreciate Gittlitz for doing the hard work of researching and writing this book.

Oh, and VIVA POSADAS!

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Posadas recalled Moreno’s insistence on referring to the Marxist canon to settle their dispute: 'They insulted us… they brought mountains of books of Trotsky, of Marx, of Engels, hoping to crush us. A game of insults followed in which we never gave up the ball.' When Moreno said he had read all three volumes of Capital, Posadas replied that he had 'read six.'"

[André Bonk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellently researched history, but Posadas' life was much less interesting than the funny dolphin, alien, and mushroom cloud memes led me to believe. Given he was a Trot, I should have known it would be mostly fighting with other leftists.

The writing is quality and the story actually does go somewhere by the end, but the two-page list of acronyms for various communist splinter groups at the beginning should clue you in to what you're in for with this one.

[Eric Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book. People will read it because J. Posadas and the Trotskyist sect he led for decades were, for want of a better phrase, completely bonkers. A proponent of UFOlogy, thermonuclear war and communicating with dolphins, in recent years Posadas has become a humorous meme shared by a generation that finds traditional Trotskyists boring.

But there’s actually a lot more going on here. J. Posadas was the “party name” for a young, semi-literate Argentinian footballer who managed to build, almost single-handedly a vast regional network of Leninist revolutionaries who had a real impact on the world of Latin American leftism for many years. Of course Posadism disintegrated into a bizarre (and tiny) sect by the end, but for a time Posadas and his followers had real influence, first among some of the Cubans (they were close to Che) and later with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

An extraordinary story, well-told, of a largely forgotten slice of left-wing history.

[xenia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this would be a funny hah hah read, but it was lowkey terrifying. My flatmate has told me many tales of the Trotskyite to reactionary pipeline, but I hadn't read an in-depth account myself. It's sad, because Posadas came from destitute poverty. One time, he and his seven siblings had to share an unripe bunch of bananas for a week. His parents were part of an anarchist workers' union, but switched to a liberal one for fear of political crackdown. Posadas's political leanings were based in his material conditions, but as time progresses, he grew increasingly paranoid and grandiose, interpreting the arguments of other Marxists in bad faith, as attacks on his very being. I'm not going to psychoanalyse, but his symptoms were a clear case of unresolved trauma.

By the time he split from the Fourth International, he was running a Trotskyite cult where members could only marry other members in the group, democratic forums were openly mocked, homosexually was condemned as "bourgeois decadence", nuclear war seen as necessary and desirable, political rivals were called "faggots" and "pussies" by his rabid student followers, and "counter-revolutionary imperialists" by Posadas himself. By the 1960s Posadas resembled an internet-cucked incel, which speaks to how long these machismo discourses have existed in socialist circles. There are still plenty of brocialists who use this kind of language to act out their insecurities and avoid accountability. It'd be pathetic if it wasn't life threatening. Not once did Posadas set up any support networks that weren't oriented towards warfare. The Black Partners were Maoists and even they supported their communities with free food, healthcare, and education.

Fuck these guys and everything they stand for. They don't care about the revolution, they don't care about bringing about a better world, they just want to stand on the necks of others, no matter capitalist, fascist, or socialist.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book for the same reason I imagine many did: I think Posadas memes are funny. However, far from being a joke, this book undertakes a serious socio-historical analysis of Posadism (and even more broadly, Trotskyism from the 1930s to the 1980s). The book treats Posadism (and Posadas) as a serious political actor in its first few decades (or at least as serious as any other socialist grouping), and rather than seeing its descent into a cult-like sect as unique, places this descent within a broader trend based on the organisational forms these groups took.

It also addresses the question of the 'stranger' sides of Posadism (belief in communist extra-terrestrial life and want for a nuclear war in the Western world) within the broader historical context - which, whilst not arguing for them as coherent positions, helps to explain why these positions appeared and why the followers of Posadas were not simply followers out of insanity.

Overall a really well-researched and informative book - would highly recommend!

[Ştefan Tiron · Rating 5 out of 5]

A.M. Gittlitz books has to be one of the best of the year. The dictum (attributed to both Jameson's&Žižek) that "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism" does not ring the same after reading this book. For a time at least, during the cold war, it seemed that one would usher in the next. These impossibilities start to converge while reading I WANT TO BELIEVE - both truly intergalactic in scope: a world revolution and the contact with highly advanced extraterrestrial civilizations.
In this brief, succinct and packed booklet, Gittlitz achieves what every heretical Maxwell-Marxian demon is supposed to be doing: ride the entropy wave of XX century left-wing movements, look into their irradiated innards, follow purges, sectarian squabbles amidst the spectacle of reciprocal excommunication while admiring their intransigence, overcoming the impasse of internal bickering looking beyond the constant outcry about 'cancel culture' and current online purges. But it is clearly much more than this. The book zooms in via primary sources into the life of these unknown, abusive and authoritarian figureheads and extracts essential cautionary tales & lessons for a XXI century steeped in secular catastrophism:

a. I welcome a book that provincializes Euroatlantic + any limited Eurocentric or traditional Cold War model (include here the Soviet or Eastern European) when dealing with a very complex geographic situation and the global sweep of revolutionary left-wing internationalist movements and alliances during the 50s, 60s, 70s.
Eminently well researched from primary sources, the book deals in fine detail with South American (+Cuban, Guatemalan, Mexico etc) and especially Argentian labor movements, an unknown (for me) political and social history be it trough its anarchist, communist and Trotskyist guise. One also finally gets a feel of what the whole Stalin/Trotsky split was all about without feeling defeatist or being partisan.
You almost get the feeling like the European Fourth International Trotskyist base (Mandel etc) is both fragmented as well as constantly stimulated by its much more active, mordant and defiant brothers and sisters on the Western Hemisphere (Latin America). The East had very good literary connections and lots of 'magical realism' translations were done from major South American literary figures in Romanian, Polish etc, yet this side of Dolphin multispecies revolutionary Posadism did not seem to have crossed over back then.
Both tragedy & farce at the same time, it truly makes you see what went on the eve of Missile Crisis, or why against current common sense, Atomic 3 war was expected or even followed with exultation.
The revolutionary spark always seems to travel from splinter groups to the center, from the breakaways becoming more extreme (necessarily desperate?! or non-realist? speculative-imaginative?) at the most inopportune times, and frankly and as blasphemic as it sounds, demonstrating how important it is sometimes to stay out of touch with the times while being in the middle of it all. The value of this vertiginous cultishness, of transforming unsuspected ideologic collages into a fruitful aberration, leads straight into a hallucinatory bubble that makes the Posadist 'heresy' paradoxically prepared to confront dead-ends and apathy.

b. The most important was for me the Wu-Ming, Luther Blissett, MIR (Men in Red) Italian connection and revival in the 1990s and noughts, with radical ufology groups morphing from the Posdadist collapse & fringe group status into something else. As center-margins relations have inverted, the 'fringe', or what has been largely critiqued as fringe beliefs has long morphed and feedback fed into larger, achieving some sort of vindictive post-ironical comeback. Whatever was laughable or considered low culture trash trappings and sensationalist dribble - is now more animated and more pervasive than ever. Strains of dogmatic, straight-jacket thinking are thus hybridized with the more outrageous and unpopular strains.
The politicization of the conspirative UFO terrain (Marxism and the question of Fermi's Paradox) had to be investigated, and Gitlitz does this with great passion. This is why a history of anonymous collective personas or collective name-places attracts - because it highlights these alien, unexpected (by no means exaggeratedly galactic) alliances, the very act baptismal of activist/cultural/troll handle from the age of videocracy to "meme magic"(memetic warfare) & Spock Block LARPing politics.
In its Marxist alienist revisionism, neo-Posadism goes to reveal even the Carl Sagan-Iosif Shklovsky "space bridge" started in the early 60s as an important missing link. The whole SETI enterprise stops being what we thought it was: an apolitical aimless and looney enterprise, and gets the aura of a galactic equality crusade, of seeking beyond the inevitability of inevitable civilizational collapse brought about by imperialism & dead end capitalism.
Taking the position of the Italian MIR 1990s seem to offer a double reading of the alien phenomenon - on the cinematic blockbuster scale, Gitlitz opposes the alien exploitative perspective of Independence Day to the universalist progressive outlook of Star Trek: First Contact.
In this galatic line of thinking, SETI rings true during the Cold War as a commons of interrelated set of values, an optimist belief in the universality of reason/intelligence across species boundaries, not only on earth or East-West but across the universe. Each exobiology search and alien communication attempt aims to see much farther than the gathering clouds of the nuclear holocaust. 'Big Filters' are to be seen via this eschaton of the failed expelled Posadists. At their worst & their best, they offer another instance of 'evolutionary futurism', an abortive, uncomfortable & at the same time more generous version of transhumanism. What is perhaps missing is the Maoist perspective, whose post-atomic, post-nuclear holocaust perspective itself esposes a bizaree survivalist arithmetic, by Mao's own reckoning, if half the world population died then"the other half would remain while imperialism would be rayed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist".

While the current entrepreneurial elite of "Star Settlers" (as Fred Nadis calls them in recent book) Elon M, Bezzos & Virgin Galactic & their ilk seem to adhere to a completly exploitative ethos of platinum travel business class in space, Posadism offers a compelling, zany and embarrassingly sincere counter narrative.
After Posadas death in 1981, obscure ex Posadists as Dante Minazzoli (in Italy) and Paul Schulz (in Germany and after 1990 Berlin), each separate, each nearly forgotten, because such cosmist visions and UFO Trotkyst missions seem so out of date as to be completly abandoned. Disconnected in space in time, other heretic voices make an appearance - "tektological" proto system theorist Bolshevic Alexander Bogdanov (who fell out of grace with Lenin) and fellow Russian cosmists (Fedorov, Tsiolkoski) also make an important appearance in I WANT TO BELIEVE and constitute a sort of yardstick or possible evolutionary futurism rethoric line (more aking to what Andrew Pilsch Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopiauncovers) that unites all of these forgotten and rediscovered undercurrents of Sci-fi politics & revolution on earth and in outer space, where the earth revolution is intimately bound with the galactic- flight of imagination. Just thinking that there might be a delicate thread btw Posadism & Romania in my case, makes me jittery. Hope it will get translated soon into other languages. It makes you wonder what other unexamined & unexplained phenomena of extra terrestrial leftism are still out there to be told anew.

[melancholinary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent biographical story of Posada, his cult personality and his followers. Very informative on the resurrection of Posadism and recent public interest to their unique approach on communism, which brought forward somehow by Luther Blissett in the 90s (this is very interesting!). Anyway, I'm actually a bit disappointed. To be frank, I expected more Trotskyist ufology and the exploration of 'apocalypse communism', as suggested in the title.

The whole history of Fourth International Posadist and their eccentric, peculiar approach to Trotskyism (roughly 75% of the book is actually about this) is interesting, but I think someone needs to write an in-depth analysis of Dante Minazzoli's interest in science fiction and ufology that contributes to Posadist's ideology. Only a small part of the epistemological war between Bogdanov's Empiriomonism versus Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-criticism mentioned in the book, as well as a brief mention of Fedorov's 'common task.' I assume amongst science fiction, these ideas of early 20th-century Soviet imaginations and philosophical trait greatly shape Posadist's worldview.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly recommended. Most, like myself, will read this out of sheer interest based on the memes surrounding Posadas and his more ridiculous behavior (particularly later in his life), but more than that it’s a cautionary tale for leftists of all stripes. Posadas, like so many others, started out as a true believer in the Trotskyist mission, but devolved into egomania and became a victim of his own carefully curated and constructed cult of personality.

Gittlitz gives a fair and measured account of the Posadist movement, documenting its legit contributions to the cause of socialism while also being brutally honest about what it became. Not at all the read I expected, but definitely the one I needed.

[Matt Creasey · Rating 4 out of 5]

AM Gittlitz has written a fantastic and easy to read biography of Posadas that is funny, tragic and entertaining. It also offers an interesting exploration and critique of Latin American Trotskyism and the 4th International in the 20th Century after Trotsky's death. that is useful for someone like me who is not well versed on the topic. It also gives great insight into Utopian and cosmonaut Soviets and their role in influencing some of the thought of the Leninists who expelled them from their parties in the 20s and 30s.
The book also critiques Leninism as a whole and offers a sympathetic view of anarchists and Libertarian Communism.
Some of the most interesting topics covered in the book come at the end where the use of internet memes and irony (specifically Neo-Posadists memes about dolphins, aliens and nuclear destruction giving birth to utopian communism) by present day leftists is explained as a reaction to hopelessness of continual seemingly never ending neoliberalism and impending climate disaster.
It also discusses how these jokes can encourage others into political action that left me feeling both that much of leftist activism is impotent and doomed to fail and that it is also the only source of hope that we have and therefore is something to take pride in.

[Ese Francisco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es una muy entretenida investigación sobre la figura de Posadas, la 4ta internacional y las sectas de izquierda. Además esboza como se construyen movimientos que reivindican la satira, como los autonomistas de Luther Blissett y la AAA (Asociación de Austronautas Autónomos) con su proyecto de:
"five year plan for building a world-wide network of local, communitarybased groups dedicated to building their own space ships".

[Bret Mohlenhoff · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm trying out a new nonfiction book club. I didn't care for this book. Most of the book felt dry, fact-packed, and academic to me. It was mostly political history and wasn't nearly as weird as the title suggested. It assumed I knew a lot of things that I was pretty ignorant on. I did learn a few things, but I was hoping for something more accessible.

[Lucien Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating account of one of the strangest political movements of the 20th century. Gittlitz recounts the story of Posadas, his years as a charismatic socialist leader, and the renewed interest in him (largely achieved by memes). He uses Posadas’s story to reflect on the state of the global left and the cataclysmic challenges we as a civilization currently face.

[Joachim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative

[Benjamin Britton · Rating 5 out of 5]

“This book, about subjects many regard as marginal, cultish, weird, and silly (UFOs and Trotskyism), is written in the belief there is a something valuable in these confused insurgent desires. They represent a flash of hope amidst the climate crisis, massive displacement of refugees, the return of ethnonationalist myths, fascist strongmen, and senseless nuclear proliferation”

“This desperate dumpster dive has uncovered the works of J. Posadas – the working-class Argentine revolutionary who led Latin American Trotskyism in the fifties and sixties with a program of staring down capitalism and imperialism into and after nuclear war. When that “final settlement of accounts” never came, his movement faded into an irrelevant cult until his death in 1981”

“In the 2000s, with the youth returned to the streets to protest globalization and imperialist wars, rumors of Posadism spread among leftist trainspotters in remote regions of the internet, emerging into the meme mainstream during the political chaos of 2016.”

“Although the more orthodox Leninist aspects of his program are usually ignored, his unlikely reincarnation perhaps foretells an imminent reencounter between the masses and ideas which, like first contact with aliens, have been long-regarded as equally ridiculous, impossible, or insane: mass action, revolution, and communism.”

“Alien invasion, after all, is less science fiction premise than historical fact”

“In the sixteenth century generations of indigenous Argentinians circulated stories of strange ships appearing in the distance”

“Locals fought them off, taking heavy casualties from their futuristic weaponry before zipping away in retreat. Suddenly what appeared to be their mothership hovered on the Rio de la Plata horizon, and a small fleet of landing craft approached the shore”

“the Querandí greeted them like kin with bushels of meat and fish”

“Over the next two weeks the gifts continued as the visitors constructed a base camp with a name alluding to the hospitable climate of this new world: Buenos Aires.”

“After two weeks the welcoming delegation decided to stop coming, and the alien commander, a syphilitic Prince unable to leave his bed, sent messengers to the native camp demanding that the supplies continue. It was an insult beyond any excuse of cultural unfamiliarity, an act of dominance and war implying that the strangers were to be given tributes as gods”

“After decimating their hosts, the visitors went back into their strange ship to drift further up the river and repeat the process again and again, their mud city left to disintegrate in the rain”

“The conquistadors soon determined that they had little interest in the vast expanses they named Argentina”

“They established a neo-feudal colony run by caudillo warlords and their gaucho knights overseeing hacienda plantations staffed by native peons and African slaves. Throughout the nineteenth century a mercantile bourgeoisie based in the Buenos Aires ports overthrew the Spanish aristocracy and battled the caudillos for unitary rule.”

“They further demonstrated their liberalism by abolishing slavery and conscripting the freed men as soldiers to further subjugate the caudillos and cleanse the remaining native tribes from the pampas”

“By the second half of the century, Argentina was open for business, it just lacked workers.”

“At first the miserable conditions and lack of housing kept their stays seasonal, but as Buenos Aires expanded, and political and economic turmoil in Europe deepened, many put down roots.”

“The economic crisis in the 1890s worsened the already bleak conditions of life for Argentine workers cramped into conventillo tenements and toiling in small shops without standards for pay, safety, or security”

“they overcame divisions of language, ethnic origin, and religion to organize the Argentine Regional Workers’ Federation (FORA) in 1901”

“Unlike the recently organized and tiny Socialist Party, they did not seek to negotiate a social peace between the ruling class and the workers or win state power through elections, but instead an anarchist and communist revolution that would leave the region classless, stateless, and governed cooperatively by a spirit of solidarity and mutual aid their alien predecessors so casually exterminated.”

“In our apocalyptic era it’s hard to remember that a century ago capitalism seemed like humanity’s revolutionary coming-of-age rather than its senile final hours”

“The combination of new science and speculative fiction created an imaginative sandbox for a not-too-distant future where humanity would no longer be bound by necessity, mortality, or even the Earth itself”

“Advanced telescopic lenses surveyed the face of our neighboring planets for the first time.”

“H.G. Wells was one of the first to explore this modern neurosis in his 1897 novel The War of the Worlds”

“The novel became one of the most popular books worldwide, inspiring dozens of similar works. Among these was Red Star, in which a young Russian participant in the 1905 anti-Tsarist uprising is abducted to Mars.”
“civilization was both technologically and socially advanced”
“Factories were fully automated, erasing scarcity and the need for money since anyone could consume as much as they wanted”
“automated labor was done voluntarily”
“Everything was shared”

“Red Star’s author Alexander Bogdanov was no mere fabulist”

“He participated in the 1905 uprising as a member of an organization dedicated to creating socialism on Earth – the Bolshevik Party”

“one of its most prominent and well-respected figures for his broad and innovative writing on politics, science, and philosophy his utopianism put him at odds with a more conservative figure in the party, Vladimir Lenin.”

“1908 the two sat down for game of chess on a Caprese terrace overlooking the Mediterranean”

“game took on the tensions between the two leaders”

“Bogdanov argued the party should stay underground,”

“agitating the workers towards class consciousness”
“offering a positive vision of the fantastic new reality they could create”
“believed the collaboration inherent to the labor process of the industrial capitalist factory would break down the authoritarian structures of feudal and capitalist society”
“intersubjective conception of reality”
new socialist epistemology

Russian futurists
“science and religion would merge to fulfill the most fantastic messianic prophecies”
abolishing death
“traveling to the heavens”

Lenin
“the party should instead be monolithically organized”
“clear hierarchy of responsibilities”
move towards legality
“seeking representation in the Russian parliament”
“suggested Bogdanov was essentially a mystic”
“stick to sci-fi.”

“Bogdanov won the game but lost the party.”

Lenin published… polemic
“Bogdanov’s materialist religion cryptoidealist”
“his socialist epistemology solipsistic”
“Reality was objective, material, and best understood by a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries led by a militant intellectual core”
“The cultural revolution Bogdanov proposed could only occur after the party seized state power and revolutionized production on behalf of the ignorant masses”

“confidence of its brutal denunciation”

Bogdanov
“marginalized from Bolshevik leadership.”
“mass education project dedicated to the creation of a “proletarian culture” autonomous from the state or party, the Proletkult”
“Bogdanov believed socialism could be breathed into existence with the help of a politically imaginative mass party”

“One appreciative reader of Bogdanov was the iconoclastic Leon Trotsky”

“he believed feudalism evolved into capitalism and then communism through a series of definite stages”

“Trotsky believed that workers and peasants in backwards countries could have a revolution that pushes it past the stage of liberal democracy to the sudden expropriation of the state and economy from the bourgeoise – proletarian dictatorship”

“glimpse of this in 1905”

“initially anti-Tsarist demonstrations in some Russian cities led to advanced formations of insurrectionary proletarian struggle throughout the empire – workers councils, or soviets, outside of and against the state”

“permanent revolution,” a “constant internal struggle [in which] all social relations are transformed … the economy, technology, science, the family, customs, develop in a complex reciprocal action which doesn’t permit society to achieve equilibrium.”

“unorthodox theory for the time. . . overly optimistic”

“As the absurdity of the war dragged into its third year mutinies and strikes spread in France and England, but nowhere with more intensity than Russia in February of 1917.”

“That April Lenin arrived from exile to St. Petersburg. For his heroic prediction that the war would lead to revolution, a crowd of his professional militants and citizen admirers gathered to meet his arriving train like disciples awaiting the messiah”

“The bourgeoisie were too terrified of the workers to be trusted, he said, so power should be taken from them, their war ended, the police abolished, and the transitional government replaced with a dictatorship of the proletariat led by the soviet councils”

“His fellow Bolshevik leaders were appalled, many wondering aloud if he had become a Trotskyist, an anarchist, a German agent, or simply gone insane.”

“Even Bogdanov called the April Theses “the raving of a madman.”

“But its most potent thinkers, the ones whose heads would be added to the canonical totem of profiles, were able to transform that technocratic pragmatism into wild-eyed millenarianism at the crucial moment to preach a violent revolution in service of imminent utopia.”

“Trotsky and Lenin organized an insurrection to seize power in October.”

“socialists who decried it as a coup were removed from power.”

“You are miserable, isolated individuals,” Trotsky shouted
“You have played out your role. Go where you belong: to the dustheap of history!”

“The police force for whose abolition Lenin had previously called was replaced with another, which enacted a Red Terror to counter the White Terror of the Tsarists”

“the dictatorship of the proletariat turned into the dictatorship of a vanguard party over the proletariat.”

“the true failure of the Bolshevik permanent revolution was outside their control”

“proletariat in wealthy Western Europe. . . time was still not right to push towards communism. . . failed to follow their example”

“On a visit to Russia in 1920, H.G. Wells, although a critic of Marxism, was impressed by the progress towards a communism Lenin recently defined as soviets plus electrification, and the inspiration Lenin apparently drew from his work”

“that human ideas are based on the scale of the planet we live in … If we succeed in making contact with other planets, all our philosophical, social and moral ideas will have to be revised, and in this event these potentialities will become limitless and will put an end to violence as a necessary means to progress.”

“enthusiasm for a technosocialist future”

“promise of space travel.”

“Cosmist and rocket science pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky”
“possible to travel to space in a matter of only a few years”

“At the space hysteria’s peak, a near-riotous gathering of workers believing a manned trip to the moon was imminent was suppressed by Moscow police.”

“Soon Tsiolkovsky and his fellow cosmists and immortalists were repressed as well, their utopian visions thought to conflict with the practical goal of achieving Soviet stability”

“Lenin ordered Bogdanov’s Proletkult absorbed into the state ministry of education”

“opened a clinic devoted to proving the viability of the parabiosis practiced by the Martians in Red Star”

“died after making himself a test subject”

“When Lenin died in 1924,”

“preferred successor was Leon Trotsky”

“Josef Stalin succeeded in maneuvering to marginalize Trotsky as a loyal “left opposition” to a Communist Party and International increasingly under his control”

“Trotsky was exiled, and”
“forced to move from country to country under pressure from Stalin’s agents in the international movement”
Latin America
“started a Fourth International”

“new organization represented a spectral hope for the return of international and interstellar revolution.”

“Posadas discovered Trotskyism as an alternative to the counterrevolutionary positions of social democracy and Stalinism”
union organizer
propaganda-pusher
Fourth International
“Secretary of the Latin American Bureau”
“split his sections into his own International based on the Latin American workers’ movement and emerging guerilla struggles”

“peak of Posadas’s influence, and it overlapped with the most ardent period of the space race”

“In no other era were the destructive and creative urges of humanity so obviously aligned as when intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to destroy distant cities were instead pointed upwards to take humanity to new heights, and one could credibly read golden-age science fiction about utopian space colonies while huddled in a fallout shelter.”

1961
“informal conference in Green Bank, West Virginia”

“convened by Frank Drake,”
astronomer
astrophysicist
“emerging science of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).”

“Eleven scientists were chosen”

“five Nobel Prize winners”

“N = R*fp ne fl fi fc L.”

“N meant the number of civilizations in our galaxy with whom we could plausibly communicate”

“conservative estimate of each term”

“produce a value for N greater or equal to one”

“exobiology, a new field of speculative science studying the possibility of life forming on other planets based on what is known about how it formed on Earth”

“average rate of star formation per year (R*)”

“fraction of those stars with planets (fp)”

“average number of the planets that develop an ecosystem (ne),”

“fraction of those planets that develop life (fl).”

“they determined. . . . were many inhabited planets.”

“fraction of that life that become intelligent (fi),”

“what does it mean to be intelligent?”

“neuroscientist John Lilly made a convincing argument that intelligence could be common on inhabited planets based on some of his unique research”

“attempts to communicate with the dolphins in their own language of clicks and whistles, and told stories of dolphins rescuing sailors lost at sea”

“The display convinced Lilly that dolphins were a second terrestrial intelligence contemporaneous with humans, capable of complex communication, future planning, empathy, and self-reflection.”

“theory of convergent evolution (that similarities in environmental conditions led isolated populations to evolve in similar ways), the conference optimistically placed the chance of intelligence arising on 1% of the planets with life.”

“fraction of that intelligent life that develops the ability for interstellar communication (fc)”

“average length that those civilizations persist with that ability, their longevity (L).”

“The only question left was how long a communicative alien civilization would survive.”

“shaggy haired 27-year-old astronomer name Carl Sagan, who offered the most vocal defense of longevity”

“agreed on a vast quantity of alien civilizations,”
“variety of results”
“Some civilizations could be like ours”
“But others would surpass or even avoid that moment altogether”

“secret to interstellar travel and immortality.”

“That gave them a result of about 10,000 contemporaneous communicable civilizations in our galaxy, and the conference ended with a toast to longevity – ours and theirs.”

Sagan
“collaboration with Soviet astronomer Iosef Shklovsky”
“In 1965 they published Intelligent Life in the Universe, which asserted there are between 50,000 and 1 million advanced civilizations in the galaxy,”
“Shklovsky closed the Russian edition of the book by making clear his belief that it would take the eradication of capitalism and the construction of communism to make human civilization sustainable”
“hoped new systems could emerge more advanced than Karl Marx’s still unfulfilled vision”
“steered SETI towards the explicitly political and implicitly anti-capitalist goal of organizing human life towards betterment and sustainability.”
“anti-war, anti-nuclear, and environmental activist”
“love for the planet and humanity”
“The messages were “vaingloriously utopian,” Billings wrote, “exclude[ing] references to such entropic human failings as crime, war, famine, disease, and death.”

1996
“But this came at a time when federal funding for SETI was being slashed, alongside all public scientific and social spending, to nearly nothing. That research is today left to the mercy of private donors unlikely to see any return from a search that could take millennia.”

“The idea that we are being visited, abducted, or simply monitored by a vastly superior intelligence creates a sense of what the political theorist Jodi Dean called the “extraterrestrial gaze,” a perspective that undergirds “capitalist realism;” the idea that liberal-democratic capitalism represents the end of history, and nothing better can exist.”

“Now that it’s just as realistic to fantasize about a queer commune on Mars as drinkable water in Flint, jokes about “fully automated luxury gay space communism” communicate that if nothing is possible, then at least we can demand what we really want, since it remains equally unattainable as our more “pragmatic” concerns.”

“Posadas’s extensive catalog of unfulfilled prophecies”

“The joke will disappear,”
“1976.
“In twenty or thirty years jokes will be old fashioned … they are the result of these relations of private property to conquer difficulties, to struggle, to dispute … in socialism there will be no necessity for humor.”

“It turned out to be a type of internet joke, the “meme,” that served as the Genesis Device of neo-Posadism”

“It was not just his bizarre beliefs that continue to make Posadas a joke, but that he believed anything at all. While the Posadists may be popularly remembered as brainwashed Bolsheviks or socialist Scientologists, their commitment to class struggle was very real.”
“fought in the Sierras of Cuba”
“Guatemala with Castro and Yon Sosa”
“organized factories in
Argentina,”
Uruguay
Britain
France
“frontlines of student movement in Mexico”
“organized a mass movement of peasants in Brazil”
“spent combined decades in prison”
“disappeared in the torture chambers”
“thrown from the helicopters of the Condor dictatorships.”

“In Sagan’s and Druyan’s final book The Demon Haunted World, they revealed a strange hobby of smuggling Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution to their counterparts in the Soviet Union so they could “know a little about their own political beginnings”

“It’s hard to keep potent historical truths bottled up forever. New data repositories are uncovered. New, less ideological, generations of historians grow up.”

“dead and defeated past. . . failed revolutionaries. . . much to tell us about our future.”

“Insurrection or first contact could come any day, Marxists and ufologists both tell us, but both are far more likely if we desire them, embracing a sentiment enigmatically expressed in a meme come before its time, a poster on the wall of rogue FBI agent Fox Mulder in the ’90s sci-fi noir The X-Files: hovering alongside a grainy image of a comically unconvincing flying saucer, the words I WANT TO BELIEVE”

[Logan Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very fun read about the strand of Trotskyism that was completely out of their goddamn minds: Posadists. I definitely recommend some familiarity with Marxist theory and leftist history before jumping into this one.

[Natú · Rating 4 out of 5]

I try to review books using the lens of what I think a book is, rather than what it is trying to be or what we may assume it to be at first. This book, for example, is not a piece of historical materialism, Trotskyist theory (thank goodness), or political economy, but rather, a popular history of a niche figure within a niche subsection of a niche movement (at least relative to mainstream mid to late 20th-century Marxism-Leninism). It is meant to entertain, elucidate, and even draw some lessons from what to most is the shadowy figure in those memes from nearly a decade ago. In that sense, it is a great book. I thoroughly enjoyed myself while reading it.

On Posadas himself, Gittlitz does a great job reconstructing historical set pieces to bring to life such an enigmatic character and movement, though I will leave the actual anecdotes to the book itself, since they are best enjoyed that way. Like many cultish figures, Posadas's idiosyncrasies, even the more offending ones, are initially sources of charm and endearment. However, as his influence grows and he increasingly weaponizes his own magnetism to lure in genuinely revolutionary individuals looking for a movement to call home, Posadas becomes less a quirky old curmudgeon and more a grotesque and manipulative villain; though, as Gittlitz implies, it is doubtful that Posadas's revolutionary zeal was anything less than genuine. As a popular history, this book spends a lot of time explaining historical occurrences and introducing individuals under the assumption that the audience will not know them. Gittlitz does with admirable concision and detail, especially with the Gordian knot that is 20th-century Argentine history, the occasional overeagerness to use the local lingo notwithstanding.

The author is, to my understanding, not a Marxist himself, but rather a cultural critic within the leftist liberal tradition, focusing on the countercultural and subversive sides of political discourse in the 21st century. It is unsurprising, then, that he finds kindred spirits in many of the figures in this narrative, who criticized the socialist experiments of the 20th century using largely the same playbook as liberals and conservatives, but ostensibly from the "left" rather than the right. While I will not go into any direct criticism of Trotskyism or anti-USSR arguments here (go on ML Twitter any day of the week to see countless threads debunking the Holodomor or citations from "'Left-Wing' Communism" if you must), it was a little grating to see the regurgitation of screeds against "Stalinism" and "authoritarian communism" rooted in counterrevolutionary "common sense" arguments rather than the numerous, principled and fact-based critiques to actually be made about the Soviet experience.

That said, the book shines in its flashes of lucidity regarding the failures of many socialist movements and organizations to adequately address the conditions of the workers and peasants of the Third World. This book is right to point out how the refusal of the Third International and the USSR itself to give adequate focus to Latin America drove many people into the arms of Trotskyism out of frustration with the vacillating and opportunist CPs throughout the continent. When workers looked for allies in the revolutionary movements of their countries, it was often the Trotskyists and not the opportunist and revisionist Communist Parties who seemed willing to put in the work. This is a reminder of the necessity of becoming one with the masses, practicing the mass line, and other advances to revolutionary theory drawn from the Chinese experience in particular.

Finally, I would say that the final section on post-Posadas Posadism stood out to me as the weakest. While the story of Posadas and the movement he built around himself straddles novelty and history in an interesting and engaging way, this section on left-ufology, anarcho-intergalacticism or whatever other absurdities born of internet-age alienation reads like a Vice article trying to squeeze significance out of flash-in-the-pan footnotes of Reddit history. I understand that it had to be there, since the revival of Posadism through the medium of internet humor was undoubtedly the catalyst behind this book, but I think it would have been better relegated to an appendix or even incorporated into the introduction as a hook.

When all's said and done, I think if this seems like an amusing read to you, you should read it, because amusing it is.

[Craig Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun little book

[Jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

"At first excavated from the dustbin of history for comic relief, Posadas’s distorted visage has become more endearing, even inspiring, with each mushroom-cloud meme."

[Emilio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most people will have come to know about Posadas and Posadism purely as a meme. Some older folks may identify him more as a weird, kind of sad warning for the fate of trotskyist sectarianism. Both aspects are certainly present in Gittlitz' book, but there's also far more than just that, serving as both an in-depth look at the personal life of Posadas the man and a general primer on the history of 20th century latin american trotskyism.

Relying heavily on primary sources, Gittlitz reconstructs as accurately as possible the early life of Homero Cristalli and the millieu he was born in, showing us how the stage was set for an argentinean youth with almost no formal education to become J Posadas, leader of arguably one of the major tendencies in world communism, as well as his later descent into cultishness and obscurity.

The more outré stuff - dolphins and UFOs - occupies only a relatively small section of the book, but is dealt with seriously (and it was in fact never a main aspect of Posadas' thought) and ably linked with the major corpus of his brand of catastrophist trotskyism (catastrotskyism would have made for a good adjective) and its theoretical evaluation of the course of world history. It's in a similar subject where a weakness emerges: a capitulation to the trotskyist version of 20th century history that pops up here and there. While understanding it is important to be able to place oneself in the posadist worldview, there doesnt seem to be any indication that this is a particular point of view espoused by the subject matter and is just presented as fact. This is, however, neither something that appears very often nor does it taint the main arguments presented throughout the book.

The book closes with an exposition on the afterlives of posadism, both its decline into obscurity and it'´s strange revival via radical-ufology. The book also shines in these sections, showing how elements from past communist struggles can be repurposed and refashioned into something new, how the dustbin of history can perhaps be conceived more as a recyclebin of history while at the same time warning of the potentially paralysing effects of too much ironic detachment.

On a stylistic note, the book is engaging throughout, without relying on jargon but without falling into oversimplification. Definitely a worthwhile read.

[Nathaniel Flakin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The latest #book I read: a new biography of J. Posadas, full of reflections on #posadism and #neoposadism. I note, with more than a bit of jealousy, that @plutopress published two short books on #trotskyist history in one year.



The first, my biography of #martinmonath, was all about: heroism, perseverance in the face of despair, internationalist solidarity, and revolutionary optimism. The interest was, to put it euphemistically, moderate.



The second, this book on #posadas, is instead focussed on: bizarre cults, delusions of grandeur, and abandoning all revolutionary traditions in search of something supposedly "new." The interest was enormous.



I do not want to discount subjective factors here: the Posadas biography was certainly better-written than the Monath biography. But this nonetheless says a lot about the age we live in: revolutionary self-sacrifice can feel trite. Our attention tends to focus on the arcane and the downright weird.


I wish I could dedicate all my intellectual energy to the study of Marxist revolutionaries. But I spend a lot of my free time reading about L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, and Shoko Asahara. This book is somewhere in between, closer to the latter than the former. 


Posadas's life story is ultimately not that different from that of 1,000 other cult leaders profiled in podcasts or sensationalist books. But he did start out as a revolutionary, albeit an eccentric one. I was surprised how well-known Posadas was in his lifetime: Juan Perón blamed political violence in Argentina on "a guy living in Paris named Posadas"; Posadas was invited to Moscow to speak with a leading member of the CPSU; even Che Guevara seems to have been influenced by Posadas's ideas on nuclear war.

In the book's final chapter, the author tries to present a handful of Posadas-related meme pages as some kind of groundbreaking challenge to existing leftist dogmas that offers a new perspective for how to beat capitalism. This is not just disappointing. If he's being serious, it's pretty sad.

I did learn a lot, and the complex history of the Fourth International after World War II was presented more or less accurately. This book would have been better if it were more honest: this is obviously not about searching for a left-wing perspective for emancipation. It's just another book about a cult, written for the lulz.

[Kriegslok · Rating 4 out of 5]

"At first excavated from the dustbin of history for comic relief. Posadas's distorted visage has become more endearing, even inspiring, with each mushroom-cloud meme."

I did not quite know what to expect from this book, my experience of the Posadists was limited before reading it. I first encountered them in south London during the anti-Poll Tax campaign where they would turn up at meetings, declare the need to form workers militias to replace the police and generally annoy and scare off people. My other experiences were indirect in the form of Dave Douglass's recollections of his flirtation with Posadism (discussed in his excellent autobiography The Wheels Still Spin) and then that infamous article in Fortean Times.
Rather than being just a biography of Posadas this book is necessarily a detailed overview of the political history of twentieth century Latin America and the global growth and decline of Trotskyism. Posadas seems to have been very much someone in the right place at the right time who was able to make the most of the opportunities that cropped up and made up for his lack it intellectual foundation with a boundless energy and a willingness to do as he was told until he finally reached the point where he was able to lord it over his own minions and tell them what to do. Of particular interest perhaps was Posadas's relationship with Peronism. Unlike many on the left Posada recognised the popularist appeal of Peron and so embraced the Peronist movement on the grounds that was where the workers were and the actions of Peron in favour of workers created an opening to peddle a more revolutionary message and so the classic entryist approach to the Peronist movement was adopted, ultimately with tragic consequences (although given the conditions in Argentina it probably seemed a better position than that of outright opposition to Peronism at the time).

This issue of the correct approach of Trotskyists in relation to WWII, Stalin and the Cold War have always been a source of tension and dispute and discussion about babies and bathwater. Posadas himself seems to have maintained a fairly flexible attitude towards the socialist states although Cuba became a bone of contention (with Posadas siding initially with the Stalionist Cuban CP against Castro, then with the Cuban Trotskyists against Castro) . The book looks in some detail at Che Guevara and his relationship with Cuban Trotskyists, especially after their effective banning. Posada believed Guevara was assassinated by Castro in Cuba and believed Che's death in Bolivia to be faked. Posadas's fantasies aside, Che's relationship with Trotskyists in Cuba is interesting. Cuba is also interesting in the Posadist cannon as Cuba is where the world came closest to Posadas's predicted inevitable global nuclear war that would usher in a bright new world of world socialism in the smouldering ruins. This was a position which was pretty much endorsed by Guevara who argued that every sacrifice was worthwhile in the overthrow of capitalism and the bringing about of the socialist transformation of world society. There was arguably a reasonably sound logic to to Posadas's critique of the leftist desire for peace which he argued represented a "capitulation to pacifism and petty-bourgeois humanism" that (as Guevara also noted) put revolutionary change on hold.

Posadas's audacity in taking on European and North American Trotskyists to the point of refounding the "real" international led by the Posadists perhaps shows his braizeness at its highest expelling the Belgians, French and Italians. One of the problems of Trotskyists has always been their tendency to split into ever smaller factions (rather than following the Stalinist method of maintaining party discipline by physically eradicating dissenters or potential dissenters) resulting in the assorted Judean People's Fronts that still just about eek out an existence today (even if they struggle to recruit sufficient members to form a Central Committee). Relatively early on the Posadist tendency seems to have adopted many of the cultish features of Trotskyist sects, Gittlitz notes that all aspects of life were subject to Party disipline and direction including employment, relationships and marriage with "non-procreative sex deeply taboo, especially out of wedlock" and "having children would need to be approved by the party" (while abortion was strctly prohibited) with Posadas separating married couples for long periods "believing the denial of sex would encourage revolutionary fervor". On top of that homosexuality was "considered capitalist degeneracy" and "entirely banned".
The upshot of the Posadas experience is that it followed pretty much the trajectory of all the other Trotskyists sects once any meaningful base amongst the working class had evaporated (or in the case of much of Lation America, had been murdered, imprisoned or terrorised into silence by the US backed fascist military regimes that came to power in Latin America under US tutilige). The self appointed workers vanguards became insular secretive controlling sects which then collapsed and split further usually following some sexual impropriety by the sexually repressed all powerful leader who realised that the revolution wasn't coming but that at least their position could be used / abused to have fun with young female followers. While perhaps not in the league of some party leaders Posadas did discover the joys of sex late in life courtesy of some young female followers. He also purged the Party of its entire historical intellectual membership. It is perhaps then especially surprising that the party he founded stumbled on after his death and has even enjoyed something of a revival based upon some of his more apocryphal interests, in particular UFOs and contact with alien intelligence. Gittlizt also picks up on something that occured to me while reading the book, while the predicted nuclear apocalypse has not yet happened, an equally apocalyptic future awaits us in the form of runaway climate change and that is an apocalypse we can be pretty sure will happen, maybe the Posadists have a post climate apocalypse vanguard future.

This really is an interesting and thought provoking book, both for its analysis of a particular period of history and as a study of the development of a cultish political organisation. Perhaps most surprising is the conclusion that suggests, and shows, that Posadism, far from being a spent force, still has something to say to us and to contribute today (although how much todays' Posadist tendency would be endorsed by the founder himself is debatable). I really wonder what Trotsky would make of what has been done in his name and just where on the embarrassment-omitter Posadas would sit?

[Phil Herbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who identifies as leftist but who knows almost nothing about leftist history, this was a fun and enlightening story of one of the more obscure sects. It's a very readable account of the sheer number of schisms and splits of parties with and without "revolutionary" in their names, the wild polemics of Posadas, and the large cast of his devoted followers.

For me, the most interesting section by far was Part 3, Neo-Posadism, specifically Chapter 18, On the Function of the Joke and Irony in History. It culminates in a discussion on unity within the working class, the need for collaboration between international leftist struggles, and absurd and radical openness towards the future.

From the book's introduction:

Now that it's just as realistic to fantasize about a queer commune on Mars as drinkable water in Flint, jokes about "fully automated luxury gay space communism" communicate that if nothing is possible, then at least we can demand what we really want, since it remains equally unattainable as our more "pragmatic" concerns.

[Tom Buchanan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This punches FAR above its weight!

[Adam Meek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gittlitz presents an informative and entertaining look at the man, the movement and the memes.

[Justin Barger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah, Juan Posadas, real name: Homero Cristalli. Through the 40s into the 70s, he became a myth who's entire sect of extreme Trotskyists centered around nuclear war, UFOs and dolphins. However, it seems to be what his undoing was his imperfect human nature, something Karl Marx denied there ever was, since individualism was the opposite of socialism and we cannot blame the actions of a whole on a single person. If I fail, perchance, we all fail, etc. Posadas became the very thing that he disdained, becoming on the level of a Joseph Stalin, who killed his mentor Leon Trotsky, in cold blood. From rubbing shoulders with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, to the increasing entryism (a tactic Trotskyists use to infiltrate parties in order to subvert them) and sectarianism - J. Posadas, as Cristalli came to be known, always supported the most capitalist Fascists he could (especially Pinochet in his native Argentina). This was very similar to the accelerationism favored by certain leftist militants that believed that by ever-increasing inequality and bureaucracy, the suffering brought down would awaken the proletariat to rebel in mass numbers against their capitalist owners. Unfortunately for Posadas, his own selfishness caught up to him, having sex with the wives of party members and expelling party members who didn't agree to his increasing wild worldviews involving aliens and Transhumanist claptrap, not to mention his belief that nuclear war would wipe out the last vestiges of capitalism. This became such a problem he ended up replacing a majority of his original party at the end of his life. And as such when he finally died he ended up with few friends. However his beliefs still live on in what we term as "internet memes" and on the fringes of UFO "Fortean culture", edgy young people who grapple with the meaninglessness of their humdrum lives with visions of nuclear apocalypse, fusions with animals and plant life and visits by those from above, much like the Christian eschatology of the second coming. Considering its roots are Marxist you would think it would never entertain such dogmatic and quasi-religious frameworks but for a brief window in 1940s-1970s Argentina, Marxism basically became religious. Didn't Eric Voeglin warn about this? Four stars.

[Aarav Balsu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this does a great job of charting the rise of Posadas (Homero Cristalli), his ideology, and his cultish movement. The book traces Posadas's origins, the nature of the Fourth International movement, and its decline (until the late 2010s, when it was revived with meme magic, see: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3932...). Posadism advocates for cataclysmic (nuclear) war in order to hurry up the process of capitalist contradiction, so that communism will inevitably rise from the post-apocalyptic ashes.


I especially found Posadas's interactions with his cohort interesting: a lot of emphasis was placed on one-on-one coversations where members would be expected to spill their deepest fears and secrets to him, which he would then analyse (tying it to the broader issues of Marxism and radical communist militancy). Following this analysis, the members would walk away under the impression that he knew them better than they knew themselves. This behavior can be seen in how Scientologists and other cults operate: a charismatic figure 'unravels' an impressionable person's personality and manipulates them into thinking that he knew something that they didn't about themselves. Combine that with the ascetic Posadist practices of living together in shared living, no sexual relationships, etc. and you had a group dedicated to realizing his ideology.

I went in expecting a more fleshed out exposition on Posadism, but this book doesn't claim to do that; it's a documentation of the movement itself, the mercurial leader, it's development throughout the 60s and 70s, and it's eventual decline in the 80s (after the death of Posadas). In that respect, I think it did a great job.

A bonus for me was the contextualization of the overall South American (specifically Argentine) labor movements in the 1930s to 1970s. I had very little historical knowledge of these movements, so I appreciated it.

[fire_on_the_mountain · Rating 4 out of 5]

The premise hooked me-- UFOs and apocalypse communism? yes please-- but it was the careful, respectful, thorough research and Gittlitz's dedication to placing this in context, and drawing the external connections needed to answer the big "why" of this book: because theory and aspirations matter, not only to inspire the true believers, but also to show your enemies just how deadly serious you are.

Also, just under the surface, it's a powerful warning of what happens when a cult of personality and a dedication to grudge and infighting can derail a movement. This is a case study with multiple applications. I imagine a very niche audience is the one that will find their way to this book. There's probably no way around how you probably need a workable appreciation of Marxist theory, and the kind of familiarity with leftist infighting that unfortunately accompanies that knowledge, to grasp the full scope of the Posadist experience. But you probably do if you're cracking this one open.

Overall, I think Gittlitz nails the thesis: if we are organizing for what comes after the apocalypse, if the best we can hope for is a cataclysmic settling of accounts, then what does that mean of the current moment? It's an analytical framework that should free us from what came before, and allow us to dream bigger dreams, and the willingness to act on them. I can get behind that.

[Rhi Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

J. Posadas was a truly dialectical figure. A man who seemingly had no idea what he was talking about but could inspire hordes of people to join the revolution. A man who played guitar and sang songs for his cadres but banned sex. A man synonymous with UFOs despite it being a disappointingly minor focus of his, and the secondary dolphin association being way more bonkers than I ever could have imagined.

AP Andy, after digging through countless Spanish dispatches, British red rags, and Italian memoirs, has used this obscure Trotskyist cult to tell an evergreen story about leftist sectarianism. Watching a promising trade union organizer at the height of the labour movement drift father and farther from relevancy through ideological split after ideological split is enough to make the most cynical ideologue join the DSA in shame. Starting with parallel development of science fiction with socialism and ending with the resurgence of the left in the late capitalist meme wars, this book is as materialist history as it is great man history.

While maybe not the at the top of the list of books to read about leftist history, this book has something for everyone and Gittlitz knows how to tell a story and spin a narrative.

[Chris Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was more then I expected. I love how a case study can provide perspective for understanding the greater historical movements and context, and I think this book does a great job of that. It uses the story of Posadism to tell the story of the Trotskyist, communist, and anti-colonial movements of the 20th century in really intriguing detail. The man who would be J Posadas lived a life of organizing workers from a young age and was heavily involved as a Trotskyist from before the spanish civil way until the movement was long pass real strength in the 70s. How this long, stressful, and winding path of radical faith transformed him into a cult like egoist is used as a backdrop for the path of communism from the brink of world revolution to violent retreat into the margin of the neo-liberal order of the Reagan and Thatcher era. The resurgence of communist and socialist thought and organizing in the last decade is again mirrored in the rise of Posadism as a half-joke meme in leftist internet circles. Gittlitz does a good job of tying this all together into a narrative of one man's life, but also a narrative of leftist cultural exchange and transformation, and the grand scheme of global politics.