Their UFOs and Ours

This review first appeared in Imago #1. To subscribe to Imago, subscribe to Locust Review.

Review: A.M. Gittlitz, I Want To Believe: Posadism, UFOs, and Apocalypse Communism (London: Pluto, 2020) 

THE DOMINANT UFO visitation myths echo popular occultism in capitalism. The individual is abducted or visited -- in a secular-but-not-secular epiphany -- enweirding their life with either trauma or good fortune, or both; even if the good and bad fortune is a mere valorization of the formerly discarded individual within a cruel social totality. This is the ufology of “normal’’ bourgeois capitalism; the kismet of the UFO encounter. Left occultism responds to everyday kismet, individualized and randomized by the precarity of the worker, with a social kismet, the realization that individual fate is interwoven with the social and collective. In contrast, fascist occultism subsumes the individual, eradicating kismet in favor of the individual’s subordination to a cosmic mythos that conceals an acceleration of capitalist relations and barbarisms. Like occultism and irrealism more generally, ufology also has its left and right variations. On the one hand there are the Posadist visitations of the “space comrades.” On the other there are secret Nazi UFO bases in the Anatarctic. The former deliver escape from the limitations of capitalist realism. The latter promise submission, new wars, and new holocausts.

In the radicalizing wake of the 2016 US presidential elections -- initially polarized between the weak fascism of Donald Trump and the weak socialism of Bernie Sanders -- opposing constellations of radical memes formed in the digital firmament.  Among the most interesting leftist memes were the “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism” memes, and the memes of the Intergalactic Workers’ League - Posadist (IWLP). Each formulate, in different ways, what A.M. Gittlitz calls “a subversion of both bourgeois futurisms and the popular conception of communism as a life of digging ditches on a dusty farm,” (184) -- pointing beyond the abject failures of imagination that have brought us to the precipice. The Posadist memes, counterposing alien communist intervention -- the help of the “space comrades” -- to the “LARPing” (live action role playing)  of revolutionary sects, evoke the mostly forgotten legacy of the Argentine Trotskyist J. Posadas (1912-1981) in a manner that points outside the limits of capitalist realism, while also hitting a note of tragedy. 

Until recently, Posadas was remembered among the sectarian left mostly for his purported belief in communist UFOs, socialist dolphins, and most of all for the absurd idea that atomic war could be a catalyst for socialist revolution. Of course it should be noted that time and sectarian competitors have exaggerated and decontextualized some of these points. His actual writings on UFOs are sparse and speculative. His initial position on atomic war resembled Ernesto Che Guevara’s response to the Soviet Union’s unilateral withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Cuba. Regardless, the socialist ufology of J. Posadas has been resurrected multiple times on multiple continents, among the Zapatistas in Mexico, among autonomists protesting corporate globalization in Italy, and among the comrades of the present-day IWLP, not as a joke per se, but as performance against capitalist realism and the faltering hesitations of the socialist movement. 

The actual history of J. Posadas is less fantastic and more tragic than these memes and performances might imply; and toward the end, really existing Posadism was an embodiment of the very sectarian LARPing that today’s IWLP mocks. Posadas, born Homero Rómulo Cristalli Frasnelli in Argentina, joined the radical socialist movement in his youth after a brief stint as a professional soccer player. He gravitated toward Trotskyist intellectuals; people he could easily out organize in practical work, at least in his younger days, but who, from Gittlitz’s account, he often felt bitterly competitive. Posadism, as a distinct current, was born of the vacillations of the Trotskyist movement as it related to the rise of Argentine Bonapartism in the populist presidency of Juan Perón. Perón became President of Argentina in 1946, ruled until 1955, and returned briefly to the presidency in 1973, drawing both fascist and working-class support, balancing each against the other, and confusing much of the Argentine left. The socialists who denounced Perón as merely another fascist found themselves isolated from the working-class. Recognizing the contradictory dynamic of Perón’s populism was arguably J. Posadas’ biggest political contribution, allowing his followers to weather the initial storm that battered much of the Argentine left.

But this would not last. The contradictory nature of Bonapartism meant that there could be no consistent long-term policy towards Perón. Eventually a “movement of critical support for Peronism”  could no longer be “a base for a revolutionary movement,” (cited in Gittlitz, 50).  When Perón returned to Argentina in 1973, fascist Peronists orchestrated an attack on the left-wing Peronist Youth Organization that was waiting for him at the airport, killing thirteen people and wounding nearly four hundred, furthering a right-wing political turn. After Juan Perón’s death in 1974 he was succeeded by his wife Eva Perón. She would be overthrown in the 1976 coup that led to Argentina’s military junta, its “Dirty War,” and the systematic murder and disappearance of at least thirty thousand Argentine comrades. In the years between the two Peronist governments, Argentina was plagued by repeated coups. Dozens of Posadists were arrested, imprisoned, and forced into exile. After the 1976 coup this repression became more intense. Posadas had become increasingly dictatorial and abusive to his followers, implementing cult-like controls over interpersonal relationships, and engaging in abusive sexual relationships with comrades. Such actions were justified with Bolshevik-sounding phrases like “tightening discipline.” This control and abuse grew worse as Posadas and his supporters fled to Italy.

In the trajectory of Gittlitz’s book, the tragedy of Posadas seems to be that he may have been a good organizer in his youth, and may have been a kind of poet, but he was no theorist. This is the most generous reading one can give to the historical figure given how abusive he actually became. Posadism devolved as its founder’s world receded. As the dwindling cadres of Posadism met at their Italian compound, as Posadas moved closer to death, “[e]ven the birds outside his window were having meetings, he said,” (155). He wrote in his final text: “In the workers’ state, the flowers lie without worry, because they are not stripped uselessly, they are not mistreated,” (154).

But what about the UFOs? It seems that the infamous article by J. Posadas, “Flying Saucers, The Process of Matter and Energy, Science, The Revolutionary and Working-Class Struggle and the Socialist Future of Mankind,” first published in 1968, may have been in large part a transcription of Posadas trying to talk down a fellow comrade who had become a UFO enthusiast; its subjective tangents more or less concessions to the unknowable. If there are UFOs, if there are aliens, if they could use the energy needed to visit Earth, they would be so advanced they would have to be communist. There would be no other way to overcome the Fermi Paradox. Such aliens would have solved the problem of death itself. And thus Posadism became socialist ufology. Later, like a UFO visitation, Posadism reappeared as an imaginary symbology for new generations of activists and socialists, beginning with a handful of Italian comrades who nurtured the most iconoclastic aspects of Posadism after the death of its namesake, influenced by the ideas of the 19th century Russian Cosmist, Nikolai Fedorov, as well as the technological utopianism of the early Soviet Union. This eventually led to the unlikely intervention of left-wing ufologists in UFO conventions, anarchist UFO contingents at the European anti-capitalist protests of the late 1990s and early 2000s, nods to intergalactic organizing from the Zapatistas in Chiapas, and the contemporary Posadist memes. 

If Posadist ufology became a small but rich vein of left cultural expression, appealing to the ideal of a freed subject, neo-Nazi ufology blandly remade the historic tropes of fascist glacial cosmology. As Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke outlines in Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity, a post-war conspiracy arose among neo-Nazis holding that the Third Reich, and possibly Hitler himself, were operating a secret UFO base in Antarctica. This Nazi UFO base held elite Aryan soldiers waiting for the opportune moment to restart world war. “The fearful nature of the Third Riech and the burden of its defeat are thus deflected in a science fiction vision of German technical and racial superiority,” Goodrick-Clarke writes, “as the huge saucers rise above the brilliant white snows of an icebound Shangri-La.” The spread of satellite photography seems to have dampened this particular iteration of Nazi myth making. Not even Hitler’s UFOs could hide, it seems, from Google Maps. Nazi UFOs have become faded memories. The Posadist UFOs kindle new imaginations. Nazi UFOs are buried under the melting ice of Antarctica. Posadist UFOs continue their comradely visitations.

In the end, the most maligned part of the legacy of J. Posadas -- his overture to the possibility of alien communism -- turns out to be the thing that was most worth keeping. It pushes against the limits of capitalist realism. The worst part of his legacy -- his sectarian and abusive organizing -- went mostly unexamined by the rest of the sectarian left; a left that preferred to snicker in positivist certainties about UFOs. 

Aelita Cain Torrent is an artist and writer living in an undisclosed location. They were born in a town that was redacted by corporate restructuring. Their parents worked at a redacted factory that is now a brownfield with a much smaller factory at one end that employs fewer people at a lower wage making fewer things.