I Want to Believe

A.M. Gittlitz

Description

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.

List of Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

PART I: THE TRAGIC CENTURY

1. Commentaries on the Infancy of Comrade Posadas

2. Revolutionary Youth or Patriotic Youth?

3. The Death Throes of Capitalism

4. The Origins of Posadism

5. Where are we Going?

PART II: THE POSADIST FOURTH INTERNATIONAL

6. The Flying International

7. The Role of Anti-Imperialist and Revolutionary Militants, the Role of Trotskyists, the Program, and Tasks During and After the Atomic War

8. The Macabre Farce of the Supposed Death of Guevara

9. Flying Saucers, the Process of Matter and Energy, Science, the Revolutionary and Working-Class Struggle, and the Socialist Future of Mankind

10. The Accident

11. Hombrecitos

12. Volver

13. What Exists Cannot Be True

14. Arrival of Comrade Homerita to the House

PART III: NEO-POSADISM

15. Historical Sincerity

16. Why Don’t Extraterrestrials Make Public Contact?

17. UFOs to the People

18. On the Function of the Joke and Irony in History

Timeline

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Social History
• Nuclear Warfare
• 20th Century
• Extraterrestrials
• Modern
• HISTORY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Liborio Justo
• León Trotsky
• Flying saucer
• Cults
• Post-war
• Modern history
• Soviet space program
• Futurism
• Military
• Fourth International
• Oral history
• Nuclear weapon
• Leon Trotsky
• Historiography
• Extraterrestrial life
• Religion
• Cult (homonymie)
• Billy Meier
• Flying Saucers
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Nahuel Moreno
• Léon Trotski
• Fidel Castro

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 avril 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786806208
• Langue: English

Extrait

I Want to Believe
This book has it all: Trotskyist drama, South American revolutions and aliens from inner and outer space. What s not to like?
McKenzie Wark, author of Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?
A provocative and clear-eyed account of communist lunacy, its costs, and why we might need it anyway.
Malcolm Harris, author of Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials
An absolute treat. As well as a brilliantly researched biography of Posadas, and a very witty one, it does far more than lampoon him. Rather, it uses his story (and its legendarization in meme culture) to provide really valuable reflection on revolutionary hope, cults, and the role of irony and despair in the millennial-left milieu.
David Broder, author of First They Took Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy
A deeply researched, intricate look at a moment of profound flux in the history of Marxism, and the eccentric movement that was born out of it. While Posadism is often treated as a political curiosity, quickly set aside, Gittlitz skillfully paints J. Posadas and his followers in all their depth and complexity: paranoid, idealistic, cultish, fractious, bizarre, proud, far-reaching dreamers. In their own ways - sometimes bizarre and sometimes revolutionary - they fought for a more just world, one that could finally join the ranks of a far more advanced fraternity awaiting them in the galaxy.
Anna Merlan, author of Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power
I Want to Believe
Posadism, UFOs, and Apocalypse Communism
A.M. Gittlitz
First published 2020 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright A.M. Gittlitz 2020
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material in this book. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions in this respect and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions.
The right of A.M. Gittlitz to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4076 0 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4077 7 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0619 2 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0621 5 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0620 8 EPUB eBook





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Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART I: THE TRAGIC CENTURY
1. Commentaries on the Infancy of Comrade Posadas
2. Revolutionary Youth or Patriotic Youth?
3. The Death Throes of Capitalism
4. The Origins of Posadism
5. Where are we Going?
PART II: THE POSADIST FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
6. The Flying International
7. The Role of Anti-Imperialist and Revolutionary Militants, the Role of Trotskyists, the Program, and Tasks During and After the Atomic War
8. The Macabre Farce of the Supposed Death of Guevara
9. Flying Saucers, the Process of Matter and Energy, Science, the Revolutionary and Working-Class Struggle, and the Socialist Future of Mankind
10. The Accident
11. Hombrecitos
12. Volver
13. What Exists Cannot Be True
14. Arrival of Comrade Homerita to the House
PART III: NEO-POSADISM
15. Historical Sincerity
16. Why Don t Extraterrestrials Make Public Contact?
17. UFOs to the People
18. On the Function of the Joke and Irony in History
Timeline
Notes
Index
Illustrations
1. Excerpt from December 10, 1968 edition of Red Flag , newspaper of the Revolutionary Workers Party (Trotskyist), British Section of the Posadist Fourth International. Courtesy of the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism Online .
2. Angel Fanjul at a march for human rights in France, 1978. Courtesy of Factor el Blog
3. The Partido Comunista Rivoluzionario (Trotskyista) , Italian section of the Posadist Fourth International, in 1973
4. J. Posadas. Published in the Fortean Times , August 2003
5. Dante Minazzoli, 1994
6. Memes. All courtesy of Comrade Communicator of the Intergalactic Workers League - Posadist. You Live Like This meme based on illustration by Instagram user @__eboni
Abbreviations
AAA
Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance
AAA
Association of Autonomous Astronauts
CGT
General Confederation of Labor (Argentina)
CNT/FAI
National Confederation of Labor/Iberian Anarchist Federation
COB
Bolivian Workers Union
DFS
Federal Security Directorate (Mexico)
ERP
People s Revolutionary Army (Argentina)
FA
Broad Front (Uruguay)
FALC
Fully Automated Luxury Communism
FAR
Rebel Armed Forces (Guatemala)
FIGU
Free Community of Interests for the Border and Spiritual Sciences and Ufological Studies
FLN
National Liberation Front (Algeria)
FORA
Regional Workers Federation of Argentina
FRAL
Broad Front Coalition (Argentina)
GCR
Revolutionary Communist Group (Italy)
GIRD
Reactive Engines and Reactive Flight
GOM
Marxist Workers Group (Argentina)
GOU
United Officers Group (Argentina)
IWL-P
Intergalactic Workers League - Posadist
JP
Peronist Youth
LCI
International Communist League
LOM
League of Marxist Laborers (Mexico)
MAS
Movement to Socialism (Argentina)
MNR
Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (Bolivia)
MR-13
Revolutionary Movement 13 th November (Guatemala)
MUFON
Mutual UFO Network
PCA
Argentine Communist Party
PCF
Communist Party of France
PCI
Communist Party of Italy
PGT
Guatemalan Labor Party
POR(T)
Workers Revolutionary Party (Trotskyist) (Various countries)
PORS
Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (Argentina)
PRI
Institutional Revolutionary Party (Mexico)
PRT
Workers Revolutionary Party (Argentina)
PSI
Socialist Party of Italy
PSO
Workers Socialist Party (Argentina)
PSP
Popular Socialist Party (Cuba)
PT
Workers Party (Brazil)
RWP
Posadist Revolutionary Workers Party (UK)
SLATO
Latin American Secretariat of Orthodox Trotskyism
SWP
Socialist Workers Party (US)
USEC
Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International
Acknowledgements
Organizing beneath and against the murderous repression of numerous anti-communist regimes, the Posadist movement shrouded itself in the clandestine organization style pioneered by the Bolsheviks. There are still many mysteries about the Posadists, including the International s full reach and structure, as well as the identity of militants referred to in circulars by a single initial corresponding to their pseudonymous party name, which itself changed with context or over time. My decoding of thousands of internal documents from the movement, many transcribed from Lunfardo-inflicted Argentine Spanish by an Italian secretary, was aided by a number of memoirs and interviews that got me closer to the full story. I am especially indebted to the assistance of ex-Posadists Luciano Dondero, Guillermo Almeyra, and H ctor Men ndez, and the researchers Alejandro Agostinelli, Carlos Mignon, Constanza Bosch, and Horacio Tarcus.
Since most of the contemporary Posadist movement declined to be interviewed, however, myths may at times overtake the reality. As a result there is less attention to the life and militancy of the women of the movement than I would ideally have liked, especially Posadas s wife Candida Previtera, his oldest daughter Elvira, his partner in the last years of life, known only by the party name Ines , and his second daughter s tutor, Rene. I hope that as a result of this book their stories can be told, if they wish them to be.
All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. I attempted a standard translation for texts not written by Posadas with significant help from translation software and native speakers.
Militants of the non-Spanish speaking International were told to leave Posadas s Argentine idioms and heavy redundancies intact in order not to interfere with the poetry of Posadas. We were told that Posadas in Spanish was a poet with much of his wisdom contained in his phrase, British section member Dave Douglass wrote, we couldn t just render it practical English, so we rendered it nonsense instead. Readers of Spanish and English may bristle at the translation of words like preoccupaci n to preoccupation instead of worry or concern, or master instead of teacher, but quotes like these were either directly from the British section translations, or through use of their newspaper Red Flag as a type of style guide.
I want to thank the following archives: the New York Public Library, the Biblioth que nationale de France in Paris, the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, Senate House Library in London, the National Archives of Uruguay in Montevideo, the CeDinCI in Buenos Aires, the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Archivo General de la Naci n in Mexico, and all the patient and passionate archivists I met there.
Finally I want to thank those who encouraged me to write the book, especially Sebastien Budgen and McKenzie Wark, and those who assisted me with housing, advice, translation, and proofreading during my two years of research (in no specific order): Eugene Lerner, Erik Davis, MJ Banias, Pablo Klappenbach, Frank Garc a Hern ndez, S. S ndor John, David Broder, Ben Mabie, Ross Wolfe, David Shulman, Aniela Troglia, Maria Chehonadskih, Jacob Blumenfeld, Sarah Olle, Andy Battle, Julia Judge, Stephanie Monohan, Mitchell Verter, Alex Gendler, Shyam Khanna, George MacBeth, Lily Probst, Lizzi Gage and family, Lucia Vazquez and family, Alex Cline and family, Camila and C.C., the Bricolage, Sean KB,