I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism by A.M. Gittlitz

Nov 29, 2020 Michael Burnam-Fink rated it it was amazing

Shelves: politics, 2020, history

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 con 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! ...more

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Sep 10, 2020 Will rated it liked it

Shelves: political-philosophy, argentina

"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.'" ...more

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Jul 22, 2020 Eric Lee rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history

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 bu ...more

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Jul 27, 2020 Ştefan Tiron rated it it was amazing

Shelves: reviewed-books, theory-philosophy-fabulation, aesthetics, capitalism, animal-studies, bureaucracy, multispecies, afrofuturism, cosmism

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. 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 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. ...more

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Nov 04, 2020 André Bonk rated it liked it

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. ...more

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Oct 14, 2020 Matt Creasey rated it really liked it

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 pa ...more

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Feb 19, 2021 Kevin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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 ...more

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Jan 09, 2021 Lucien Ryan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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.

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Sep 17, 2020 Joachim rated it really liked it

Very informative

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Jul 01, 2021 Natú rated it really liked it

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 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. ...more

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Jan 19, 2022 Craig Johnson rated it really liked it

Fun little book

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Oct 08, 2020 Jay rated it liked it · review of another edition

"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." ...more

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May 12, 2020 Emilio rated it it was amazing

Shelves: amigs

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 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. ...more

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Mar 15, 2021 Riar rated it liked it

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 t ...more

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Feb 05, 2021 Kriegslok rated it really liked it

"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. "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? ...more

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May 09, 2020 Phil Herbert rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: resolution-2020

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 i ...more

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Sep 23, 2020 Tom Buchanan rated it it was amazing

This punches FAR above its weight!

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Sep 14, 2020 Viola rated it liked it

“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 r ...more

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May 07, 2021 Nathaniel Flakin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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 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. ...more

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May 28, 2020 Aarav Balsu rated it it was amazing

Shelves: leftwards, scifi

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-apocal ...more

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Dec 24, 2020 Peter rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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 ...more

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Jun 21, 2020 Rhi Carter rated it really liked it

Shelves: own-it

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 memo ...more

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Oct 17, 2020 Chris Drew rated it really liked it

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 c ...more

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Jan 15, 2021 Karl Diebspecht rated it really liked it

Gittlitz follows the revolutionary career of Homero Cristialli aka. Juan Posadas and how a Trotskyist Monsieur Hulo, who in best Tati fashion slapstickically, naively and awkwardly stumbles from one clandestine circle to the next, becomes Doc Ancle from Tiger King, leader of a homophobic, straight-edge sect that is against both childbirth and abortion because both might cause the revolutionary goal to be lost from the vision of the movement's members.
The anecdotal descriptions of Posadas' eccent ...more

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Apr 21, 2020 Tyler Williams rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: leftist-theory-and-history

So this is a great, highly readable book, and it's worth a go even if you're not a socialist like me. It sheds a great deal of light on a historical Marxist sect that nowadays tends to be a punchline, as well as more generally providing insights into Marxist organizing in postwar Latin America.

I really enjoyed Gittlitz' observation that the historical Posadas was kind of a funhouse-mirror reflection of the left at large- all of the weird foibles of his sect (exploiting the centralism in 'democr ...more

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Jan 15, 2021 Ben Emlyn-Jones rated it liked it · review of another edition

An interesting book. However, Posadas was not unusual among UFOlogists, even if he was among communists. He missed the essential element in all the dialogue: the extraterrestrials themselves. To my knowledge, at no point has any alien ever approached a human being and introduced themselves as an intergalactic communist. Extraterrestrial contact reports often do include communications with the aliens in which they actually explain the purpose of their expeditions to earth. However, these messages ...more

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Aug 17, 2020 Glenn rated it did not like it

From the title and blurb, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a book about UFOs, dolphins, and other 'crazy' Posadist theories. Beyond the clickbait title, it's actually a much broader history of a very confused and insignificant sect, in which UFOs and all the rest feature only very little.

I did enjoy reading about Posadas' life and the Posadist movement, as well as the broader context (particularly focusing in Latin America and the various Trotskyist organisations), and about 'cosimists' and u ...more

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Mar 27, 2021 El rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read2021, genre-non-fiction, personal-books-i-own, genre-nf-politics, genre-nf-history, genre-nf-class

This book won't be for everyone because it's mostly a recollection of all the ways 20th century leftists fell out with each other but personally I found the content really interesting and it was definitely helped by the analysis at the end of the book as to why neo-Posadism has gained relevance again in a very niche part of the Internet. The commentaries on class and relation to a post-apocalyptic landscape (whether through nuclear war or climate breakdown) were something to think on, as was the ...more

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Jun 22, 2021 Kai rated it it was amazing

compelling, fast summer reading, an up-and-down history of J. Posadas' truly unsettling life which provides a vantage point for considering Trotskyist sectarianism, the problems facing anti-colonial revolutionaries, Argentinian populism and class struggle, and the role of the imagination in communist and anarchist struggle. though Posadas emerged most recently in the 2016 meme wars, the details of his actually life are somehow as strange as the UFO and dolphin stuff would lead you to believe. it ...more

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Aug 26, 2020 Harry Allard rated it really liked it

Thorough account of J. Posadas' rise and fall. Thankfully takes the time to reappraise how the Posadas myth, stripped away from the man's personal history, serves as a potent revolutionary folk hero for the current era. Breaking from the more ossified aspects of Marxist-Leninist thought, the bizarre optimism of the myth-Posadas can be repurposed in the face of today's looming climate doom, misery, and increasing isolation. ...more

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