J Posadas is a major South American Trotskyite figure of the 50s and 60s who is currently experiencing a semi-ironic revival due to his esoteric beliefs about extraterrestrials and dolphins. Despite visions of a cosmic left, the Posadists devolved into a cult living on a compound with their leader birthing a "star child". Writing our main segment and then guesting on the podcast this week: A.M. Gittlitz, author of 'I Want to Believe: J. Posadas, UFOs, and Apocalypse Communism' (also known as Andy from the Antifada podcast).
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Welcome, listener, to the 90th premium chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Posadism, Extraterrestrials, and Dolphins episode.
As always, we're your hosts, Jake Rokotansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Today, we are covering Jay Posadas and his Argentine communist movement, Posadism.
Posadas and his followers stood out for their novel take on utopianism, extraterrestrials, and dolphins, which they integrated into their working class ideology.
Posadas once played a prominent role in 50s and 60s Latin American Trotskyism, but by his death in 1981, Posadas had become little more than a cult vulnerable to a variety of brain worms.
To get to the bottom of this rabbit hole, our guest this week is A.M.
Gitlitz, the author of I Want to Believe, Jay Posadas, UFOs, and Apocalypse Communism.
In the first for the podcast, A.M.
actually guest wrote our main segment to give you the most informed take possible on this fascinating and colorful subject, and we'll be interviewing him afterwards to go deeper.
So here's what he had to say to introduce Posadism in today's context.
For decades, Posadist was remembered only by a few rival Trotskyists for his extreme catastrophism
and other bizarre features, most notably his appeals to solidarity with extraterrestrials
and dolphins. In the 2000s, when the youth returned to the streets to protest globalization
and imperialist wars, rumors of Posadism spread among leftist train spotters in remote regions
of the internet, or merging into the meme mainstream during the political chaos of 2016.
Today he has been rehabilitated as one of the most recognizable names in the Trotskyist canon, at times even rivaling the inventor of the historical dustbin himself, Leon Trotsky.
To this generation of semi-ironic revolutionaries, Posadas is the folkloric forefather of cosmic socialism.
A patron saint of maniacal hope against rational hopelessness, whose futurist strain of apocalyptic communism and radical xenophilia represents a synthesis of barbarism and socialism, tragedy and farce.
Jay Posadas was born Homero Romulo Frasnelli Cristalli in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
What?
Yeah, that's a lot of names.
A lot of flourish.
It was on the summer day of January 20th, 1912.
It's important to note that this was a summer day for two reasons.
One, because the southern hemispheric summer attracted millions of immigrants from Europe to work year-round.
making Argentina's population about half foreign-born by the 20th century.
And because seven-year-old Posada's earliest memories were watching a near-revolution on
the hot streets of Buenos Aires in January of 1919. The Cristalli parents were shoemakers
from the south of Italy. When they arrived in Buenos Aires, they joined the Federación Obrera
Regional de Argentina, the FORA, an explicitly revolutionary anarchist communist union that
between 1900 and 1910 was the center of the workers' movement.
The culmination of their efforts to establish Argentina not as a capitalist nation-state but as a communist region run by workers' councils was extinguished Before the young Homero Cristali's eyes when gendarmes fired on the crowd and patriotic mobs attacked Jewish and Catalan areas in the city in a counter-revolutionary wave today known as the Semana Tragica, the Tragic Week.
Despite the defeat, Cristali lived the rest of his life believing that the workers would one day triumph and the revolutionary wave that began in Russia in 1917 would spread worldwide.
He spent his youth singing protest songs in a local choir or solo in the popular tango style for cookies and croissants.
We made songs.
Mostly attacks.
Complaints.
Protests.
Mostly about the trash.
Because the trash was never taken out and the people loved it.
Real down-to-earth issue.
Real local kind of problem.
That's right.
The trash.
It's not getting fucking taken out by these corrupt bastards.
Why are the politicians not talking about the trash?
Imagine QAnon trying to settle for something that pedestrian and normal to be like, fill in the potholes or, you know, whatever, like fund our schools better.
They did do that.
Forget it.
Remember when there was that like right wing dude who went around just like cleaning up trash and like Chicago and shit.
And he was like, I'm cleaning up Chicago's trash because they won't do it.
Right.
These filthy liberal cities.
He dropped out of school after two years to pursue a career in professional soccer.
Eventually, he became a backup midfielder for Estudiantes La Plata in 1928, one of the great teams in the rapidly professionalizing sport.
Tight.
In 1930, a strike led by anarchist soccer players led to the formalization of the league.
So anarchists are making the leagues formal in 1930s soccer Argentina.
Anarchists are creating structure to the league.
Romero did not make the cut and was forced to return to his old neighborhood, a celebrity, although a poor one.
He took up a job as a metal worker until he lost two fingers on a mechanical lathe.
He then made ends meet doing odd jobs and distributing the youth section of the Socialist Party's newspaper.
Eventually, Cristali worked his way up and became the secretary of his local chapter.
One of the initiatives of the socialist youth at the time was supporting the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, which included liberals, communists, and anarchists against the anti-democratic forces of General Franco, with support from the fascists and Hitler.
According to a song he wrote on the subject, he was summoned to Buenos Aires Café to meet with a group then calling themselves the Bolshevik Leninists, soon to be known as the Trotskyists.
At the time, they were a thoroughly bourgeois bohemian group of surrealist poets, modernist artists, and Hegelian philosophers.
And in Cristalli, they saw an exit to distance themselves from the working class.
After proving himself loyal, they sent him to the interior of the country, Cordoba, to organize a shoemaker's union.
He survived for months on stolen meals from the hospital while he agitated and pamphleteered outside the union gates, eventually succeeding in organizing a massive union that went on strike in 1937.
We had ten cents.
We drank one coffee between us.
Look, this is what I struggle for.
He proposed to her in a cafe.
We had 10 cents. We drank one coffee between us.
He said. In place of a ring, he offered her Trotsky's transitional program.
Look, this is what I struggle for. This is the objective of my life.
He told her.
I have many things to learn.
We are going to be very hungry.
We are going to be persecuted.
They can kill us, but we must live for this.
There are many things that I don't understand, that I don't know, but we are going to learn along the way.
I invite you to live with me for this.
This is the objective of my life.
Shortly afterwards, he wrote his first political pamphlet, Revolutionary Youth or Patriotic Youth, a criticism of the antifascism of the socialist youth movement on the eve of World War II.
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