J. Posadas and Posadism?

[Blanquist]

Does anyone have any info on him? There are some sites of his works but they are in Spanish.

Who was he? Did he have any worthy ideas?

I know he was a Trotskyist but I don't see his name mentioned on a lot of Trotskyist sites I have visited, nothing comes up in 'search' on their sites.

I have only glanced at the wiki and am interested.

[Sasha]

He turned cookoo with all kinds of alien (as in from outer space) communists visiting us crap so other trots are rightly a bit embarrassed. There are several earlier threads on this board, so use the search here..

[Leo]

The wiki article is a good summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Posadas

A detail the article missed is that Posadas was initially known as a pretty good militant actually, and all these stuff about the aliens and eventually the dolphins started coming out after he was quite heavily tortured in prison.

The real mystery is why everyone else kept following his line after he came out of prison.

[Jimmie Higgins]

The real mystery is why everyone else kept following his line after he came out of prison.With Stalinism and US-capitalism dominating the world and seemingly really stable (and dividing up Latin America), the whole revolutionary left was disoriented after WWII. Stalin supporters were confused by developments in the USSR, Trotskyists and Anarchists were marginal in most places where CPs dominated what working class militancy still existing, and so many former Marxists turned to non-working class oriented ideas about socialism: everything from viewing oppressed nations to college students to the unemployed as the motor for social change to post-marxism. Many former marxists came to believe that class struggle was sort of off the table - the Posadasists just thought it was off the table for 1000 years.

This is just my general impression though because I don't know much more about the group than the wikipedia page has to offer. If someone knows more about the development of this UFO-cult, I'm curious about the political changes in post-war Latin America and how the social-democratic movements as well as the reaction may have played into some people becoming attracted to these strange ideas.

Defeats for class struggle often result in wacky ideas. After the French Revolution became Napoleonic Wars, there was a turn away from politics and humanism by intellectuals and middle-class revolutionaries towards spiritual ideas and romanticism. Lenin talked about intellectuals at the end of the century in Russia turning to mysticism when the populist movements were declining. After WWII, intellectuals turned to post-modernism and many Marxists also drifted in that direction (and away from Marxism - although this was often a rejection of the USSR's views of the world). After the New Left of the 1960s we got the LaRouches and a lot of new age and self-help crap.

When there's no viable revolutionary movement, then revolutionary explanations of how the world works are kind of on an equal playing field with all sorts of other minority-views of the world and so it's not too shocking that some strange ideas grab some people. Pasadaism is definitely strange, but if people can gather around crazies like Manson or Larouche or Glenn Beck, then why the hell not?

[Leo]

Well, when you put the Posadas movement in league with the followers of men like Manson, Larouche or Glenn Beck, then sure, why not.

Evidently, for an organization which is truly solid and revolutionary, one would expect it not to blindly follow the rather crazy positions of a man who went through a tragic process, no matter how much of a leading militant that man might have been.

If we are to accept that there wasn't anything solid or revolutionary left in the Posadas faction or indeed the Trotskyist movement itself, however, then yes, of course it does make sense.

[Comrade Jandar]

He was the true heir to the Fourth International. Shame he died.

[A Marxist Historian]

He was true heir to the Fourth International. Shame he died.

His most characteristic position was his advocacy of a Soviet nuclear first strike on the USA. The UFO thing, though definitely there, was always a speculative thing for articles in their press, not something that was their main argument or that they recruited people on. You could probably be a Posadista and disagree with Posadas on that and not get kicked out.

Made sense if you were Cuban, which is why the Cuban Trotskyists liked the idea. After all, that's pretty much how Fidel and especially Guevara felt during the Cuban Missile Crisis, so Guevara hired the Cuban Posadistas onto his staff, after they apologized for dumping on Fidel and talking about "political revolution," and they got let out of jail.

But somehow it didn't get a lot of traction outside Latin America, where at one point they were pretty big in a lot of countries. Certainly not an idea that ever got any US adherents.

Now, with the USSR no longer in existence, it's pretty hard to be a Posadista these days.

-M.H.-

[Lenina Rosenweg]

There's a small US Posadist group which apparently is a split from the ISO.Here is the site of the Pasadist 4th International. Much of Posadas; writings are there in English. Unfortunately they don't have his musing on extraterrestrials.

http://www.quatrieme-internationale-posadiste.org/

[Blanquist]

There's a small US Posadist group which apparently is a split from the ISO.Here is the site of the Pasadist 4th International. Much of Posadas; writings are there in English. Unfortunately they don't have his musing on extraterrestrials.

http://www.quatrieme-internationale-posadiste.org/

I can't find his English writings on that site. It's just the names of works that I can see.

[Leo]

The UFO thing, though definitely there, was always a speculative thing for articles in their press, not something that was their main argument or that they recruited people on. You could probably be a Posadista and disagree with Posadas on that and not get kicked out.

I am... not so sure about that.


But somehow it didn't get a lot of traction outside Latin America, where at one point they were pretty big in a lot of countries. Certainly not an idea that ever got any US adherents.

Well, they did have a section in England which was practicing entryism in the Labour Party. They must've been keeping the nuclear war thing to themselves when talking to the Labour Party people.

[GoddessCleoLover]

The theory of vanguard extraterrestrials was unique. Must have been a Sixties thing. Posada seemed to be more than a little extreme by advocating a Soviet nuclear first strike. Somehow I don't see the working class marching behind the Posadistas to attain the Great Intergalactic Proletarian Revolution. ROFLMAO

[A Marxist Historian]

I am... not so sure about that.



Well, they did have a section in England which was practicing entryism in the Labour Party. They must've been keeping the nuclear war thing to themselves when talking to the Labour Party people.

Actually, I don't think they were. And their English group included some coal miners, not insignificant.

After all, Posadas was for nuking America, had no particular desire to nuke England.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I am... not so sure about that.



Well, they did have a section in England which was practicing entryism in the Labour Party. They must've been keeping the nuclear war thing to themselves when talking to the Labour Party people.

Actually, just look at the English language section of the website. Nothing about extraterrestrials, but you do have a line in there about how Posadas was the guy who explained "the inevitability of atomic war."

That's how he justified the line, namely that it was inevitable anyway, so the USSR should strike first.

Like I said, the extraterrestrial thing is amusing, so everybody talks about it, but it wasn't really what they were or are about.

I think the extraterrestrial thing is actually derivative of the nuclear war thesis. Not being stupid enough not to realise that this would leave much of the planet unlivable, Posadas was hoping for socialist ETs to rescue us afterwards and clean up the mess, or maybe short circuit the whole problem with their superior technology, wiping out the imperialists without radioactivizing Earth.

-M.H.-

[Lenina Rosenweg]

At different times in the 60s Bertrand Russell (perhaps suffering from dementia at the time) Che and Jean Paul Sartre advocated the Soviet Union nuking the US.Mao said that China could survive and "win" a nuclear war.Not saying this isn't crazy thinking of course

The site did have a lot of articles in English by Juan Posadas. They seem to have been taken down. This page has some basic texts by him.

http://quatrieme-internationale-posadiste.org/QIP/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1&Itemid=6&lang=en

[ed miliband]

british posadists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Workers%27_Party_(Trotskyist)

the whole thing is obv very dated (written well before i was born) but it's a funny read: http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/critiques/sullivan/fourth1.html#rwp