Who was J. Posadas and who is he now? This might be taken to be the animating statement of A. M. Gittlitz’s valuable and necessary text I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs, and Apocalypse Communism. Long maligned on the left by ‘rational adults’ as a bizarro doomsday cult (or even just as the apotheosis of Trotskyist conspiring, given the tendency’s emphases on entryism and secrecy), Posadism is now cropping up, much as Enver Hoxha did, on the internet as a sort of kitsch leftist hero; where Hoxha had his bunkers, spectral pictures of UFOs are used to excoriate, more or less seriously, the ‘terrestrialist left,’ promising a future of ‘fully automated luxury gay space communism,’ an internet version of the idea of fully automated luxury communism, mainstreamed by Aaron Bastani in his book of the same name.
Gittlitz does an excellent job answering the first part of our question: “Who was J. Posadas?” But he leaves somewhat fallow the latter half, despite some admirable gestures towards the future. I do not believe this is a fault of the author or the book, although it can barely be said to earn the reference to UFOs in the title and cover except for one or two chapters (it might be hard to market the book without meme references, in all fairness); I hope, rather, to slightly broaden Gittlitz’s scope here. I’m not hunting for faults (if there can be said to be any recurrent issues, they are in copyediting, especially with regards to commas), but trying to seek out areas of potential, particularly with regards to the ‘fiction(s)’ of J. Posadas – a figure who has broken the orbit of history, similar, in certain ways, to that other great Space Ager, Sun Ra, on whose birthday I am now writing this.
Consequently, I believe the value of this book to be located in:
- its nuanced and well-researched biographical account of the man we know as J. Posadas, who was a key figure in much of the South American left
- its opening up towards an understanding of what Posadas means.
* * *
Let us say that there are, provisionally, 2 Posadases – Posadas the man and Posadas the fiction. Gittlitz does a superb job of looking behind the curtain and furnishing what must be the most exhaustive account of his actual, historical life. Homero Cristalli (“Posadas” was a “party name”), born 1912, was a life-long committed Trotskyist. Son of proletariat Italian immigrants in Argentina, he sang and played soccer before becoming an organizer – a task at which he excelled because of his manic work ethic and absolute dedication to the cause. Through early victories, he became known to some of the Trotskyist groups in the area, and he steadily became a more important figure, despite his pugnacious nature that led to many splits and expulsions over the years. (This, of course, is nothing unique. Trotskyist groups at the time and, indeed, today, are known for splintering, as the movement tends to be riven by conflict and susceptible to division, the enforced secretiveness leading to a paranoiac worldview.) Cristalli and his comrades assisted a variety of causes throughout the years and were cordial with Guevara. They had cells all across the South American continent, and, as Posadas became more important in the movement of the 4th International, across much of Europe, as well. For a while, Cristalli was one of the central figures in radical South American politics. However, over the years, his support collapsed, and his group was left behind in the 1968 uprisings, until he and his group gradually faded into obscurity – though not before leaving a lasting legacy in radical politics.
Indeed, far from the doomsday prophesying, UFOs, and cetaceophilism that accompany his legend, most of Cristalli’s life was dedicated simply to the cause. This is borne out through the text, as well; Gittlitz spends the majority of the book going into great detail about these events, keeping an admirable focus on our subject throughout the internecine vagaries of the Trotskyist movement. As such, anyone interested radical politics of the 20th century, especially in South America, will find this book invaluable for the history alone. Yet, if Gittlitz can provide us with such a sober and serious accounting of Cristalli’s influence on the left throughout various historical events, why is there an alien on the cover?
This is related to the ultimate collapse of the Posadist movement. Over the years, Cristalli became increasingly paranoid, the demands on his recruits, increasingly intense. There was to be no drinking or pre-marital sex (in many cases, there was no post-marital sex either). Homosexualism was viewed as capitalist degeneracy; being out would lead to being kicked out. Cristalli’s fights, always acrimonious, led to more and more denunciations, leading to increased marginalization of the Posadists on the global stage. Through it all, Cristalli was always right and always making promises. The natural conclusion arose: Posadism became, for all intents and purposes, a cult, “a result [Michel Pablo, old comrade of Cristalli, noted] ‘not unique in the international labor movement.’”[1] As circulations of their various papers declined and recruitment stagnated, the movement, always barely democratically organized, became completely centralized around Cristalli, who, towards the very end, purged almost all the old guard, leaving him with no one but his most fervent followers, who would hang on the edge of his every esoteric pronouncement, which became frequently about the potential for plants and animals (especially, yes, the famous dolphins) to become comrades in a world that would arise out of the ashes of nuclear catastrophe. Upon his death, the movement, more or less, died, excepting a few holdouts. (Posadiststoday.com still is up on the internet but seems to be almost entirely inactive.)
That is, however, only the story of Cristalli. To be sure, it is a story with many morals for the left, strategic and otherwise. Trotskyism remained theoretically vibrant, but its modus operandi was flawed. Entryism leads to paranoia and is only variably successful – if at all. Groups organized around a single leader (what Cristalli called, accidentally nodding towards 2001: A Space Odyssey, “monolithism”) have a tendency towards cultish behavior. Movements organized around national sovereignty are always a hair’s breadth away from fascism (as Cristalli and his comrades learned in the tragic case of Peronism, which led to their final expulsion from Argentina, despite their important early support). These are all historically quantifiable and can be argued more or less logically on the grounds of theory. But the case present here is hardly unique;
until [the release of the documents pertaining to UFOs], Posadism was similar to most other Trotskyist groups… as [the] cult-of-personality, abuse of militants, rabid anti-imperialism, paranoia, extreme zigzagging, and catastrophism were features more or less present innearly every other tendency.[2]
Why then the fascination with Posadism? Because these are only half the story – the story of Cristalli.
The story of Posadas, on the other hand, is a story of becoming fictional, becoming text. Gittlitz does not reference this directly, instead opening up to it, as noted earlier, yet it is key to understanding where Posadism might go today. However, while almost entirely tacit, there are still numerous references to the fictionality of Posadas, who stands spectrally between the historical real and the historical imaginary.
J. Posadas was born in Argentina in 1947, as Peronism swept the land. His first words were a mission statement in the new periodical Voz Proletaria, which supported Peronism in order to remain relevant in the eyes of the masses, in contradistinction to some of the other left tendencies at the time. This Posadas was not Cristalli alone, but “democratic centralism personified into a composite penname, a collective Lenin who decisively announced the conclusions of internal debates” – the editorial board of Voz Proletaria itself, speaking from one mouth.[3]
The name was as mysterious then as it is now. Could he be some organic intellectual from Posadas, a village in Argentina’s north once known as an anarchist stronghold, but for little else since? Or could the name refer to one of the several Posadas streets[?] … And what did the ‘J’ stand for?[4]
Posadas started life, in other words, not as a party name, not even properly as a pseudonym, but a sort of phantom figure speaking out through text, instead of with actual words – a fictional character, in other words. One who was engaged in serious political debate, but a fictional character nonetheless. Cristalli, meanwhile, “could barely write” and “his independent attempts at theorization were often painfully vulgar.”[5] In an argument with a competing sect, Cristalli, the central organizational figure of an editorial board that was rapidly attracting recruits and making waves in the Argentine scene, said he “read six” volumes of Capital.[6] Could this really be the same as the historical Posadas? I read this inaugural authorial invention as the start of the process, which would eventually consume Cristalli, of becoming fictional.
This process would continue as Posadas began to explore the style of stream-of-consciousness in the late 1950’s. In the intervening years, Posadas began to exercise stronger control on his group, expelling members who did not toe his line. Perón’s ouster and the subsequent barring of Peronist sentiments forced greater secrecy on the part of Posadas and his comrades – even more so than the usual strategy of entryism required – which led to “the formation of secret factions in factories,” adding another layer of disconnect between Posadas and the really existing historical situation on the ground.[7] This abstraction from historical reality continued with Posadas’s acquisition of, unsurprisingly, a piece of technology of mechanical reproduction, which would, in the same year that Sputnuik broke orbit, irrevocably split his voice from his body: a “Geloso G.255… a reel to reel [sic] recorder developed for consumer use.”[8] Posadas lost his aura as Cristalli attempting to reach the truth of things through what might even be called a trance state or improvisation; “he talked into the Italian import from dusk until early morning… hand the tape to his secretary… for transcription.”[9] No longer bound by the rules of historical rationality, “strange synchronicities occurred to him between class struggle, science, culture, and philosophy,” subjects for which, as his comrades recalled, he was woefully unprepared.[10] In particular, according to an early recruit, Guillermo Almeyra recalled that “his shortcomings in the scientific field made him believe anything.”[11] However, by the acquisition of the tape recorder, “only his voice mattered,” taking on a character of its own, written onto magnetic tape and re-written the next morning by his secretary.[12] In the subsequent transcription of his stream-of-consciousness, Posadas, one foot in reality (itself already compromised, by enforced secrecy of the movement, by his own misunderstandings of the world, and by even his name alone), one foot in text, dare we even say literature, emerges here as a hybrid figure, phantasmatic body, flickering in and out of the easily apprehendable.
On the cusp of the 1960’s, in the shadow of the Sixth World Congress, where Posadism would make its most brazen power grab over the Trotskyist movement, the literary Posadas soon emerged as the more central figure of the uneasy dyad.
For years the texts submitted under the name “Posadas” contained some overexuberant claims, but were always written or carefully edited by the movement’s intellectuals. In internal documents there was a clear difference when referring to Luis or Luigi [yet more party names of Cristalli]… and the collective, spiritual Posadas, to whom Luis always referred in the third person… [N]ow [Luis, unedited, was] speaking through the Posadas penname with unrestrained fury.[13]
As we can see, the various figures known as Posadas were beginning to collapse under the single signifier of the pen name, as Cristalli fractured into Luis and Luigi, as well. The writerly name was itself the creation of an author, originally, perhaps Cristalli. No longer a shared fiction, Posadas came to own itself, emerging as an essentially “graphosomatic” figure, to borrow slightly from Avital Ronell, where the body and the literary are nearly coincidental.[14] The subsumption of the historical reality by the fiction was beginning to occur ever more rapidly, as the difference between the two began to haze in a stream-of-consciousness speaking itself, as a spiritual figure, in the word of Gittlitz, taking ownership of itself. If Cristalli was rigidly organized and graspable like his family’s namesake, Posadas was the alluring fire of the red crystal in Herzog’s Herz aus Glas – only if it entranced the glassblower himself.
Gittlitz, then, is quite right to note that “the mystique of Posadas” serves as an excellent recruitment tool; Posadas, that literary character, reality’s anacoluthon, as de Man might have called him,[15] had been seen by few, according to Gittlitz, but we might say that he had been seen by none, only heard and read.[16] In the imaginary, the recruits’ “mental images ran wild based on his self-aggrandizing,” which is to say, fictional, “writing and the rumors of personal heroism.”[17] Posadas
was a soccer star and manual worker, tragically sidelined by industrial disfigurement and forced to a life of full-time militancy. He organized Argentina’s shoemakers to a major strike that finally brough the previously bourgeois-bohemian Latin American Trotskyist movement to the masses. He then spread his influence throughout the continent, inspiring the Bolivian miners’ insurrection, and directing a guerilla operation that liberated the Guantanamo province… Perhaps he was [like Che] a bearded mestizo freedom fighter.[18]
All of these were more or less true, if exaggerated, except the final facial comparison to Che, but they were usurped by Posadas from Cristalli, transformed by “his thrilling optimism” – tales of derring-do spectrally present in history. Nowadays, to these tales are added his catastrophism (today, nuclear war is replaced by environmental collapse), his emphasis on harmony with nature (exemplified by the dolphin), and, yes, UFOs. With regards to the latter, as Minazzoli, a committed Posadist, asserted,
the belief that humans were the only intelligent life in the universe represents the same type of bourgeois idealism that holds capitalist class society as natural and the best of all possible worlds… [As such,] the Posadist International should recognize in the popularity of UFOs a socialist impulse. The mass fascination with the phenomenon demonstrated a desire to reach the heights of our alien visitors,[19]
to truly encounter the other – the hither side of reality, which would reveal “the capitalist system as backwards.”[20] Just as Posadas had crushed Cristalli, the encounter with the ultimate other – space – “produced an ontological shock that would crush the ‘egotism’ essential to the logic of private property, individualism, class, nationalism, and all the separations produced by capitalism.”[21] It was an overcoming of what Bini Adamczak referred to as “all-too-terrestrial individuals.”[22] The ontological shock that Posadas saw in the cosmos was enacted in his own ontological disavowal, his becoming fictional – not tangible, only a figure of revolution. Gittlitz refers to this revolution as “unimaginable,” but it is clear that Posadas found it deeply at hand, perhaps even in his own decrystallization.[23]
Posadas reached his apotheosis as this decrystallized Posadas when he finally purged his inner circle, some of whom had been his comrades for decades. In this purgative moment, Cristalli became simply Posadas; there was no one to recognize him as the former any more. Empirical reality had been thrown up. As his writings became more manic, he himself became more poetic, in a graphosomatic sense. If this figure of madness was “irretrievably divorced from real movement for socialism,” riven by conflict, birthing sectlet after seclet, all the better – it nevertheless showed that another world was possible.[24] If Posadas was, to some extent, always a caricature, always a fictive element, the final pronouncement declaring him divorced from reality only serves to underscore the necessity of reading Posadas as text. To some extent, Posadas the character was aware of the great sacrifice he made of Cristalli. “His political texts quickly lost their focus to disjointed reveries of his youth,” and “anecdotes of the history of the International often digressed into stories of the contributions of Minazzoli, Almeyra, Labat, Sendic, and Sierra [the old guard] – strangely sweet memories tinged with regret.”[25]
It is this Posadas that survives.
Uninterested in the banal tyrannies of Homero Cristalli, the neo-Posadists [of today] preferred to revive Posadas as a folkloric prophet of catastrophe, socialist futurism, and epochal unity. In so doing, they negated the cycles of negation between the individual and the collective, consciousness and existence, and tragedy and farce, to free the true spirit of Posadas.[26]
Gittlitz here approvingly cites Benjamin from the Theses on the Philosophy of History, which I will extend here: “To articulate the past historically… means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger.”[27]
I would like to append to this quote another from Benjamin, this time from his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities:
Critique seeks the truth content of a work of art; commentary, its material content. The relation between the two is determined by that basic law of literature according to which the more significant the work, the more inconspicuously and intimately its truth content is bound up with its material content. If, therefore, the works that prove enduring are precisely those whose truth is most deeply sunken in their material content, then, in the course of his duration, the concrete realities rise up before the eyes of the beholder all the more distinctly they die out in the world… The history of works prepares for their critique, and thus historical distance increases their power. If, to use a simile, one views the growing work as a burning funeral pyre, then the commentator stands before it like a chemist, the critic like an alchemist. Whereas, for the former, wood and ash remain the sole objects, for the latter, only the flame itself preserves an enigma: that of what is alive. Thus, the critic inquires into the truth, whose living flame continues to burn over the heavy logs of what is past and the light ashes of what has been experienced.[28]
The binding of the truth content to the material content can be viewed, in my eyes, precisely as the life-project of Posadas. Cristalli has been sacrificed on the funeral pyre, his body remaining an object, as Posadas rises, metamorphosized into the flames of truth and materiality – and thus a preservative – a fiction, a true work of art. Gittlitz’s book attempts to be something of both critic and commentator, although it most excels at being the latter, but, of course, this is precisely its strength. Just as Posadas prepared himself for his critique, his final sacrifice of his friends and even family cutting his lingering tether to reality to become text, this book delivers the textual Posadas to us, tracing this process until we can only be left with “the poetry of Posadas.”[29]
“Posadas doesn’t exist,” noted Posadas while arrested in Uruguay.[30] This is correct – Posadas never existed tangibly, just as fire does not exist to modern science, per Bachelard. Perhaps that is why Perón, upon his return to power, chose to specifically denounce him, “strategically shifting the blame to an external and marginal figure,” and, in the process, “turning Posadas into a pop-cultural figure”; “Voz Proletaria,” the Posadist organ, “became widely referred to as Voz Planetaria.” It is precisely when he merged entirely into fiction, a pop-cultural meme, that Posadas was deemed to be most powerful by the capitalists, fulfilling the function of the marginal in philosophy as Derrida understood it. It was an attempt to marginalize the left, but the left, especially the Trotskyists, had done a fine job of that themselves; after 1968, “Trotskyism was largely revealed to be paralyzed by pugilistic splits, isolated within increasingly small sects.”[31] And the history of the New Left and its failure to combat the rise of neoliberalism should need no recapitulation; the same can be said of almost all leftist-led colonial insurrections, which were either quashed, themselves turned into cultish governments, or, most often, both. So it is, ironically, that the fiction brought forth a new reality: what Gittlitz refers to as “maniacal hope.”[32] This persistence of ideological revolt continued through stories and songs, changing, as fiction does, around the curvature of recent events. When Peronism made its final transition to deadliness, it is this fictional Posadas who survived and carried on the banner of hope against a backdrop of catastrophe; by becoming literature, he survived and continues to survive, as a preservative flame, a perpetual spark of revolution.
This, undoubtedly, is all a thoroughly irrational act – becoming only literature, destroying one’s relationships to become a pen name. However, as Jonathan Eburne reminds us, “to think wildly – even badly – is to exercise a right to creativity that underwrites rational, independent thinking precisely because it poses a threat to its self-assurance.”[33] The undecidable, graphosomatic Posadas arrives here as simultaneously as, in Eburne’s terms, outsider theorist and outsider theory itself, as a figure of “maniacal hope.” Bloch short-circuited through Nietzsche’s schizoid textuality of “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense,” promising an encounter with the hither side of history, the alterity of the future. Posadas was and is, in Sun Ra’s words, “an art form of dimensions tomorrow.”
We do well to recall here that Sun Ra was also viewed as a cult leader, making outrageous requests of his musicians; he, too, improvised on the verge of madness, writing his music and poetry onto magnetic tape. Both are figures who broke the orbit of material history, their visages calling out hope, “vibrant disruptions in the bleak history of [liberatory politics] and the hopeless banality of the present.”[34] These are not the “castles in the air” excoriated by Marx and Engels, but rather fictions that think from outside the traditional realms of rationality – modes of thought, orientations towards the world, but not programs. That is the day-to-day work for Cristalli, until its failure deemed him to be material content, only a precondition for Posadas.
I will close with an excerpt from Posadas’s last text, quoted by Gittlitz:
In the workers’ state, the flowers live without worry, because they are not stripped uselessly, they are not mistreated. They do not feel mistreated. You can pluck a flower, but in this act, there is a continuation of your life, even if it ceases to live, it causes us to live. It is part of the continuation of life.[35]
[1] Gittlitz, A. M., I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs, and Apocalypse Communism (London: Pluto Press 2020) 161.
[2] Gittlitz 110.
[3] Gittlitz 50.
[4] Gittlitz 48.
[5] Gittlitz 52-53.
[6] Gittlitz 53.
[7] Gittlitz 64.
[8] Gittlitz 69. This device, with its chunky colorful buttons and inimitable mid-century Italian stylings, is now a collector’s item, retailing for several hundred dollars. Italian design was, at that historical moment, rather futuristically inclined; 1957 also saw the release of the iconic Fiat 500, the Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa, and was the second production year of the disco volante-esque Alfa Romeo Duetto.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid. 50.
[12] Ibid. 69. Emphasis mine.
[13] Ibid. 75. Emphasis original.
[14] Ronnell speaks of the “graphosomatology of the text” in Stupidity (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press 2003).
[15] See: De Man, Paul, “The Concept of Irony,” Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997).
[16] Gittlitz 80.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid. 80-81.
[19] Ibid. 107.
[20] Ibid. 109.
[21] Ibid. 149.
[22] Adamczak, Bini. Yesterday’s Tomorrow: On the Loneliness of Communist Specters and the Reconstruction of the Future, trans. Adrian Nathan West (Cambridge: MIT Press 2021) 76.
[23] Gittlitz 150.
[24] Ibid. 152.
[25] Ibid. 153-154.
[26] Ibid. 199.
[27] Benjamin, Walter, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” trans. Harry Zohn, Illuminations (New York: Harcourt 1968) 255.
[28] Benjamin, Walter, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” Selected Writings 1: 1913-1926 (Boston: Belknap Press 2004) 297-298.
[29] Gittlitz x.
[30] Ibid. 118.
[31] Ibid. 111.
[32] Ibid. 2.
[33] Eburne, Jonathan, Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2018) 25.
[34] Gittlitz 190.
[35] Ibid. 154.
The Camo Pulpit 