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!