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Because the Posadists are no longer active and such theories of UFOs and socialism are not accepted by the educated European classes, but, they remain a focus for Trotskyist historiographers and an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

#5

#5

The praxis of the transition to socialism has the apporpriate form of assuming the terrain of the historical, it does not abandon the praxis of ideas that recognize the historical subject of the proletariat. “{T}he crucial character of the transition to socialism is not that it is a change in the economic base but that it is a revolutionary change in the relation of base to superstructure.”¹

Charles R. Smith, writing to us from 1974, explains the nature of this superstructure, that it is the “socialist ... {l}iterature and art ... which serves {the economic} base{.}”² State communism in China, from the time when Citizen Smith writes, had the bureaucratic agency, the New China News Agency, to mediate its spectacle's transmission. Where state communism is primarily concerned with propaganda versus censorship, Kapitalismo-sozjietie is concerned with the mediation of consumption. 'This is what you shouldn't consume,' says the spectacle of mediation in its red beret, whilst, 'this is what you shall consume,' says the spectacle of mediation in its blue necktie.

Citizen Smith tells us: “the People's Daily and Red Flag Magazine, the party's theoretical journal ... {led a} criticism campaign against the ancient sage Confucius,” proving that the censorship of art in the communist state of China had reached the same proportions as Plato's republic. The question of art toeing the party line was raised by Chu Lan, “believed to be the pseudonym of an important party official ... with particular emphasis on who should be portrayed as heroes.” What is feared by these iconoclasts? It is the “omnipotence of simulacra ... and the destructive, annihilating truth that they allow to appear – from this came their urge to destroy the images.”³ Chairman Mao replaces Confucius in the temple for the sole purpose of changing the canon.

Citizen Smith reports Chu Lan as saying that the literature and art of state communism, which form part of the superstructure of state communism, are not in harmony with the socialist economic base they serve. Could the same be said for Kapitalismo-sozjietie? What is its harmony? T.V. Tele-visual, talking virtually. Division and separation, universally. Universally: digitally.

1MacIntyre, cited in Blackledge, P. (2005) “Freedom, Desire and Revolution.” History of Political Thought, Vol. 26, No. 4; p.704.

2Smith, C. R. (1974) “Chinese Art Doesn't Toe The Party Line.” Ludington Daily News, Sep. 17.

3Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra & Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press; p.4.

©Elijah Nathaniel James.

#1

#1

Representation recedes directly; the intermediary draws away from actuality. The spectacle of mediation accumulates an immensity of production under the condition of domination.

Socialism coexists with the production of the commodity; {C}. Kapital {K}, abstractly, is the commodity.

Kapitalismo-sozjietie is a “social formation in which the presence of commodity production reflects the struggle within the bureaucracy and between the bureaucracy and the proletariat.”¹

Victor Riesel writes from 1970 concerning wage labour, portraying the immiseration of the Kansas City labourers union of unskilled workers. Citizen Riesel uses the term proletarian explicitly, a term not anachronistic to 1970. Citizen Riesel writes from a time when strikes in The United States of America spanned across 22 states. Rather than the mobilization of the sickle and the hammer, Citizen Riesel's comrades lay down their arms. America's “endemic rebels,” according to Citizen Riesel, redistribute the capital of their expropriation by means of the strike.

George Shultz and then-president Richard Nixon author the apology of capital's representation. The proletarian, the immiseration, the expropriation. Citizen Riesel assigns power to the radicalism of rebellion with a juxtaposed view of an establishment that considers the strike to be “militant.”²

In a 1970's America, those who built the structures owned the houses whilst those who did the talk wore the trousers, the labourers were the lower classes remaining expropriated and immiserated in their masses.

A rise in wages means a rise in commodity exchange value which has lead to a rise in the number of bureaucrats serving the bureaucracy that upholds capitalist domination. If each and every one who considered themselves a bureaucrat, thereby recognizing themselves as the proletariat – Citizen Smith addresses ye, o people of the telephone call centre, the mill worker, the night-shift shelf filler – and walked out «en masse» on bank holiday Monday in the month of May then each and every one of us would get their own way, put it to a vote, let each and every one have their say.

That is what Kapitalismo-sozjietie does.

The collectivity, extending to all members of the commonality, share a belief-system brought about by cohesion. Between individuals consensus is established. “At the same time, their voluntary consensus links up with a coercion imposed upon them 'from within' – that is, by the collectivity greater than their sum.”³ Conscience collective describes the process of coercion by consensus. “Or, to reformulate, conscience collective is the norms, constraints, moral or religious sentiments, and all manner of symbolic representation that express a society and legitimate both its institutions and the actual behaviour of the people in it.”

°There must be something wrong with society if I'm behaving badly° thinks Citizen Smith.

The freedom to make choices falls under the illusion of external forces that nullify any determination of individual behaviour. Depressions mark the oscillations of liberal culture, the very thing that determines our behaviour, liberal culture. Material circumstances delimit the determinations that give us real choices.⁴

“Consciousness of the material origins of culture and its relation to material progress, the history of the material struggle of classes is disprivileged. This favours an appeal to 'man's history' in which the unified subject 'man' has progressed. It is 'in our day' that this progress is said to be challenged.”⁵

1Gillette, C./Raiklin, E. (1988) “The Nature of Contemporary Soviet Commodity Production.” International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 15, No. 516; p. 65.

2Riesel, V. (1970) "Nation Disdains Much Authority." Rome News-Tribune, Jun. 23.

3Shevtsova, M. (1989) “The Sociology of the Theatre.” New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 18; p.182.

4Wallis, M. (1994) “Pageantry and the Popular Front: Ideological Production in the 'Thirties'.” New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 38; p.140.

5Ibid., 141.

©Elijah Nathaniel James.