Wednesday, May 10, 2017

A Constitution for Mutual Aid

Resources and services for mutual benefit depend upon the reciprocal exchange of volunteers.

From humanity's ancient past communal societies were universal - mutual aid is intrinsic to human culture.  Individuals and groups benefit from the exchange of labour and resources.

Civil society, cooperatives, and trade unions are advanced by mutual aid.

Mutual aid groups rely on voluntary activity and are free to join and participate in.  No external professional or financial support is necessary as resources are controlled by the members in a non-profit, non-bureaucratic, non-hierarchical organization.

Members organize and lead.  Cooperative decision-making, power-shared leadership, egalitarian member status, and participatory democracy characterize the group.  Participation confers group status.

Mutual aid groups place an emphasis on voluntary cooperation.  Self-determination of an individual's adaption creates tension; self-confidence, high awareness of possible situations, and radical openness to the life perspectives of others brings about insight to overcome this tension.

As a mentally ill older adult I have experienced mutual aid principles and practices in action, where the important helper / helpee principle is a cornerstone of the movement.

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Posadism: UFOlogy and Socialism.

Capitalism can only be destroyed by nuclear war, according to the Posadists.

Alien intervention by way of establishing socialism is a held belief of the organisation known as The Fourth International Posadists.  They take their name from their founder, Juan Posadas, an Argentinian Trotskyist.  He posited that UFOs could be the political allies of socialists and developed an ideology to support this.  The prerequisite for revolution on Earth could be established under the guidance of alien comrades to form a communist movement.  Homero Rómulo Cristalli Frasnelli (1912-1981), writing under the pseudonym of Juan Posadas, posited his ideology that was relatively widespread in Argentina due to his appeal to the working classes.

Trotskyism was very influential in Argentina at the time, circa. 1962., when the Posadists split from the Trotskyists to form their own organisation.  But, it was back in 1959, when Posadas began arguing with The International Secreatariat of the Fourth International (the main Trotskyist body of which they sprouted from), claiming that nuclear war was the only way that capitalism could be destroyed.

Posadas claimed that there was human existence elsewhere, due to the logic that since there are billions of galaxies there must be billions of planets in them.  As advanced communists, the Posadists claimed that due to aliens being advanced they would have embraced communism and therefore want to communicate with the Posadists.

The Posadists claimed that the development of technology could bring about interplanetary travel but only under socialist conditions serving as the means for humanity to cooperate in this endeavour.  So, the existence of socialism on a different planet was synonymous with and connected to the emergence of alien life.  Based on their experiences of communism on distant planets the aliens would instigate a revolutionary socialist plan on Earth.  The Trotskyists who resisted these views claimed that the splinter group were less educated than they were.

Despite this, the Posadists had an orthodox vision: that the workers would gain control of the state and that their revolution would destroy the bourgeoisie.  They looked to the Soviet Union as their contemporary model, where the state has a monopoly on trade and exports, a well-organised economy, and a rehabilitated media.

Because the Posadists are no longer active and such theories of UFOs and socialism are not accepted by the educated European classes, but, they remain a focus for Trotskyist historiographers and an interesting topic of debate for lefties who appealed to science fiction.

SOURCES:

http://quatrieme-internationale-posadiste.org/EN/about.php