Rev Left Radio - Posadism: Trotskyism, Latin American Communism, and... Aliens

Episode Date: May 16, 2020

A.M. Glittlitz joins Breht to talk about the Trotskyist sub-tendency of Posadism and discuss his new - and genuinely fascinating - book "I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs, and Apocalypse Communism" Check out more of Glittlitz's work  Follow him on Twitter And check out his podcast  Outro music 'UFOF' by Big Thief   LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, we have AM Gitlitz, a.k.a. Andy from the Antifada podcast and Protocol on to talk about his new book, I Want to Believe. It's a fascinating sort of wild ride through history centered on a subsect of Trotskyism known as Pasadism. Many of us are probably at least peripherally aware of Pasadism. through a big wave of memes that were really popular in like 2016-2017 era and a lot of us don't know much about that movement other than through sort of semi-ironic or fully ironic memes and so this is an episode that we've been sort of hounded by listeners for a long time to have

especially in the early days when we were really focused on starting rev left through a deep dive through multiple left-wing tendencies people were constantly saying you should do one on Pasadism. Never quite got to it. I never at that time, especially, even really knew what it was outside of just an interaction with the memes. Once I heard Andy was writing a book on it, I had to dive deeper into it. And this is what this discussion is about. So lots of interesting stuff. We talk about dolphins, nukes, and UFOs. But we also talk about Trotskyism, the Cuban revolution, the historical struggles, the fourth international, and lots of other fascinating stuff. we talk about Carl Sagan and his wife's sort of flirtation with Marxism and socialism,

which is also a fascinating aspect of this. And at the very end, if you wait until the very end, after the outro music of this episode, is me reading the intro to Andy's new book, I want to believe. So if you like this conversation, stick around past the outro music, and you will get a sort of audio reading of the introduction to this book, which highlights a lot of these fascinating historical strains and brings these interesting sort of historical threads together. So without further ado, here is my conversation with A.M. Gitlitz about his new book, I Want to Believe.

Enjoy. Hi, I'm A.M. Gitlets. You might know me as AP Andy from the Antifada. And I am the author of I Want to Believe J. Pasadis, UFOs, and Apocalypse Communism. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Always a pleasure to talk to you. I'm glad to have you on the show to talk about this topic.

something I've wanted to have you on and talk about for a while now. You have that new book coming out, which I got a little sneak peek at and I'm really excited for. Oh, no, it's out. Oh, it's out now, okay. Yes, well, bookstores aren't open, but you can get it from Pluto Press. You can get it from Topos books in New York. They're mailing them out, and, you know, anywhere else you like to buy books online. Wonderful.

Definitely link to that in the show notes. So I guess the beginning question or a nice way to get into this conversation is, how did you come to get interested in Trotskyism and Pasadism and what compelled you to write this honestly fascinating, well-written, and eccentric book? Thank you. Yeah, I wasn't interested in Trotskyism so much. I had to learn about that after the fact. But basically, I've always heard the story of Posadas and was always really intrigued by it.

I think, like, not everybody, but like anyone who hears about it kind of wants to know a little bit more. And at one point, myself and a friend, a comrade communicator from the Intergalactic Workers League, Pisadas, which is based out in Coney Island here in Brooklyn, we were talking about working on a project together, a zine, and I thought I'd write a sci-fi story, something along the lines of the Illuminaw Trilogy, some kind of like socialist-themed conspiracy fiction, because that's, you know, I enjoy reading that stuff. I thought it'd be a fun story. But as I researched, I kind of got a little bit more interested in what was really going on and found that a lot of the story, although we know the most idiosyncratic things about Pasadis, the interest in UFOs, dolphins, and nuclear war, we didn't really know the story about his politics and how the movement came to have those idiosyncratic qualities and how it came to be this Trotskyist cult in the 70s and what that really meant. So that sent me over about two years of traveling in South America in Europe, going to archives, talking to ex-Pasadists, talking to current Pasadists, talking to other kinds of Trotskyists, and euphologists. And I put it all together into a book that I think captures both those kind of silly aspects of Pasadism that people really like. and also the true history, including its kind of tragic and ugly sides. Yeah, absolutely. For those who don't know, and you don't have to be too deep into this,

we do have an episode on Trotskyism sort of in our back catalog. But can you, like, kind of briefly touch on what Trotskyism basically is and then maybe more importantly, what Pissadism is in relation to that broader tendency on the communist left? Well, Trotskyism really defines itself around the formation of the Fourth International. And Straussky was an important revolutionary figure for decades before that, of course, with major theoretical contributions. But around the beginning of World War II, he believes that over the course of the war, the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union is going to be defeated. Hitler is going to be defeated.

The imperialist powers are going to defeated. There's going to be this apocal leveling. And a big role in that is going to be this world revolution, like at the end of the war. World War I in the Soviet Union. The proletariat is going to be so upset by what happens in World War II that they're going to overthrow this world order and they're going to want to create socialism or communism on a far larger scale, possibly the entire world, and they're going to need leadership because Trotsky is still a Leninist and he still believes in a vanguard party to lead the world revolution. So he forms the fourth international in 1938 with the

the remnants of the international left opposition. So this is a very small group of Bolsheviks on the left, closer to Trotsky's positions, as opposed to Stalin's. And they don't consider themselves Trotskyists at first. I get into this in the book, that Pessonists did not start as a Trotsky's. He started as a sort of dissident socialist. But as the Fourth International forms, Trotsky is very insistent on his program, the transitional program.

and his vision on how the militants of his new international should act. And so this is where Trotskyism begins. So it includes many of Trotsky's iconic theories, the transitional program, which I think is actually very relevant, very excellent text, even to today, the idea of permanent revolution, which I think is very good as well, as well as other texts who's writing around that time analyzing the world situation. and how communists ought to relate to very complex, you know, unstable global order. The second part of your question is, where does Pasadism come from that? Pasadism was the major Latin American tendency of Trotskyism in the post-war. So in the course of the war, Trotsky is killed, of course, and a lot of the Trotskyist cadres are killed, I think almost all of them. And so after the war, the Fourth International reforms even smaller than it was before.

It was already very small. Now it's smaller. And also Trotsky's prediction of this world revolution occurring did not occur. So instead of grappling with that situation, admitting that this was a defeat in some capacity, some of the Trotskyists, including Michelle Pablo, who came to lead the fourth international after the war. said that the war hadn't really ended or that it was about to start again, that capitalism was about to collapse. It was totally dependent on the colonized and semi-colonized world because the economy was so ruined in Europe.

And before capitalism could collapse, there would be the resumption of hostilities between the Soviet Union and Western Europe and the United States, which would be the continuation of World War II or World War III. And of course, as we get to the end of the fourth, 40s, the Soviet Union is nuclear armed. So Michelle Pablo predicts this will be a third world war. And so this is the Trotskyism in which Pasadis comes to leadership of the Latin American sections of the Fourth International. And from there, he creates his own tendency as

kind of an extreme version of this Pabloist prediction of World War III. Wonderful. So I think we'll get more into that. And obviously, we're going to touch even more on the fourth international and how that formed and so we'll circle back around to some of that stuff you put on the table there but i do have a question this is sort of a personal question as i was reading through the text and i'm just sort of curious how do you personally relate to trotskyism and posadism politically and intellectually is there some ironic detachment there is there genuine sincere support or some combination of both how do you i just want to see how you sort of relate to this whole thing yeah i mean i i don't like the idea of irony so much but i would be

lying if I said I didn't have some ironic detachment to the subject matter. But I try to, I try to stay honest with how I feel about it. So my political background is, I was involved more an anarchist and ultra-left stuff for, for most of the, you know, my political activity. And we always saw Trotskyists as like a joke. Like, we thought it was silly that they were selling the newspapers. We thought that their positions were too conservative. But I, you know, I, I, I, I didn't really pay them the respect that they were due. Like, even though after reading a lot of Trotsky and understanding what Trotskyism is, I don't really have much more desire to become a Trotskyist or anything like that.

Yeah. I think that what I was missing is that they have a concept of militancy that we really lacked. They have this complete devotion to a program. They have a respect for the discipline of a revolutionary organization, of being in a cadre. of democratic centralism. And although, you know, I believe in in the book, I point out that these situations can lead to abuse and, like, cultish situations and, you know, can be counterproductive or, you know, in a number of ways.

I came to understand what's valuable about that kind of organization. For sure. And then what about your relation to Pasadism? How do you think about that with regards to your own politics? well I think that the alien stuff is the best stuff he's written actually like I I really agree with his flying saucers essay and I found a handful of other things that he wrote that I like kind of think are you know like rhyme with some things I believe in like for example his vision of communism was like as utopian as possible like he he believed in like the you know the collapse of subject and object and total harmony between humans and animals and nature and stuff like this. And, you know, not that I believe in that, because I, you know, I try to resist utopian impulses. But I think if you are going to be utopian, you might as well just imagine it as like a complete break with the normality of the presence.

And of course, the way that he expects to get there is through nuclear war and this like heavily idealist conception of how socialist the masses are that they'll just want to create this world. almost instinctively, but I like that he represents that extreme futurist utopian pole while still have, while acknowledging that to get there, there needs to be like a total destruction of the world as we know it. Yeah, that's really incredibly interesting. I know it's easy to, and it sort of becomes a meme in itself on the left to shit on Trotskyism or especially on the ML or MLM left to just shit on Trotsky as a person. But obviously Trotsky at times was a ardent revolutionary.

and had genuine contributions to make to the world workers movement. Just before we move on to the next question, what do you sort of like most about Trotsky as a person, as a revolutionary, as a theorist? Anything stands out to you. You don't have to obviously be a Trotsky as to find something in Trotsky, the figure that you find compelling or interesting, right? Well, Trotsky, I think, had one of the best reads on the situation in the 30s. He understood that, you know, the workers' movements that the Bolsheviks,

and the socialist had placed so much hope on was spiraling away from a position to take power and that fascism was on the rise and that the need to fight fascism should not simply be superseded to these popular fronts between revolutionaries and liberals. And this was the Stalinist position at one point and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, of course,

was also predicted by Trotsky. He believed that Stalin would, aligned with Hitler and divide Europe and then go to war against one another. So his predictions were incredibly astute and his idea that there needed to be a proletarian revolution to actually fight fascism and imperialism, I think was also the correct political position. He wasn't the only one saying things like this, but he was probably the person who was most serious about putting together. a program to make it actionable in the Fourth International. And the transitional program talks a lot about how revolutionary should interact in the workplace, for example, forming shop committees.

I actually haven't read it in a little while, so I'm not going to try to sum it up. But I found it actually, you know, surprisingly a pretty good text that people, even if you're not a Trotskyist or Bolshevik or whatever, you might enjoy some of the methods that he proposes. But even more than I'm interested in Trotsky, I think that Posadas, for, you know, everything that he's known for, for how weird he became, he organized an incredible network of militants around Latin America, not, you know, not himself alone, but he was a central figure in these militant industrial organizations in Argentina and Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Chile, And I go through the book, like examples of how he would just kind of send a handful of militants or just one person to a place to start an organization.

And that organization ended up influencing the trajectory of the workers movement in Brazil, for example, for a decade. So there's a lot of heroism in that element of Assadism that's, you know, just because politically he ended up. being in a strange place that I can't really get behind is remarkably admirable. Yeah, definitely. And sometimes the more interesting or extreme elements of his entire life or politics outshines and covers over some of the actual real organizing that he did. So it was nice to have that perspective, which you gave in your book. And it leads well into this next question because I've always sort of wondered this. I haven't looked into this enough myself, but I've always seen and always thought of Trotskyism broadly as, you know, taking a hold in Latin

America in a way that it might not have in other places. And I just wondered what your thoughts on that were. So can you talk about the successes and the struggles of Trotskyist movements broadly in Latin America and why you think it did take hold so well on that continent specifically? Wow, there's a lot to say there. Well, first, the Second International did not find a good purchase there in the late 19th century. They had an idea that since most of South America was, you know, mestizo or indigenous, it hadn't been properly proletarianized. So they actually, I think they only had a section in Argentina and maybe in Chile and Uruguay at first.

And the Communist Party had a little bit more influence in certain places. but they just weren't very strong. These weren't very strong as they were in Europe throughout South America. So anarchism was huge in South America, especially in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. And that's the situation Pasadis grew up in. His parents were immigrants from Italy. They're part of the fora, this major anarchist union that was really could have taken power at one point in the 1900s. And then after that, they, you know, fell victim to repression and hyperpatriotism and pogroms and that sort of thing.

And the Socialist Party started to gain more influence, but it was never a very, it was never really a revolutionary alternative. And by the time the PCA, the Communist Party of Argentina, really established itself. It was also had this kind of line of just being the, you know, the center of foreign policy for the Soviet Union. So a lot of people in Argentina and throughout South America didn't really have a revolutionary alternative to the socialist or communists. And the best example of that actually is in Bolivia, where there is almost no presence for the third international or the second international. So Trotskyists, even though there weren't very many of them, there were only about like a few hundred of them. And many of them had been in exile in Argentina and had worked with Pasadis and his comrades there became a major influence in the nationalist revolution of the early 50s. Somebody who was part of the Pasadis Latin American Bureau was writing speeches for the president of the country after the revolution.

So the Trotskyists in a lot of places in South America actually found themselves, even though they were. always very small, having major positions of influence because they had, they had the ability to find people who believed in revolution and didn't have any other avenue to express it. I see. I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, and you might not know this, but doesn't Maduro come out of a sort of Trotsky's background? I don't know too much about Maduro's background, but I think he was in a bus driver's union or something like that. Yeah. But you'll find it throughout Latin America, it's different in different places, but Trotskyists and even like very small Trotskyists sects tend to find like a foothold in individual trade unions. So like the Pissotists now in Argentina,

there's almost none of them. They're they're all very old. They're not recruiting or anything, but they still have some influence in like high school teachers, I think, in the capital area of Buenos in a nurse's union. It's waning now. But you'll find, like, you know, in Argentina, they have, like, a very large Trotskyist party in the 80s when democracy returned. And they had a, like, kind of a big United Front. And that exploded, I think, in like 88 or 89. I'm probably getting in the history a little bit wrong. That exploded into, like, a hundred different parties. But all of them have, like, a little bit of influence in the political establishment all around the country. But I know that Chavez had actually very tight connections with Leon Cristali

Passadis' son to the extent that some people thought that Passas' son, Leon Cristali, was like the most important representative of the Bolivarian regime in Argentina for a time, that the Pasadis headquarters was the Bolivarian embassy. I don't know how true that is. That's what people say. But I know the two were friends and comrades and had a tight relationship. And at one point, Chavez declared himself a Trotskyist and called for a fifth international. I don't know how serious he was about those things, but Christali was very excited about it. Yeah, fascinating. I did not know that at all. All right, so I know we talked about the Fourth International a little bit and a few questions back, but I was hoping you can go a little deeper into it, maybe just talk about the origins of the

fourth international, the sort of conditions that it came out of, and then the splits that occurred in the Fourth International, which have ultimately gave rise to the Posadaist version of a Fourth International. So I know it's a big question. You can take that any direction you want, but just a little bit more information on that would be awesome. Okay, well, like I said, after the war, the Fourth International had to reestablish itself for their historical mission, which was leading a worldwide proletarian revolution. And they always had this idea. And I think this is also actually an interesting component of Trotskyism, that although that they were very small, that since they

had the right ideas and they could organize themselves in like the correct way, that that small influence would just radiate outwards, expand virally to the point where they were a worldwide force. And, you know, they say, well, this is what Lenin did. So we're following that model. So in the 1950s, the Fourth International really reestablish. it's itself, but it's based in Europe. Michelle Pablo is the secretary in France, and it's got section, Latin America is a really major section, also not super big, but, you know, a lot of, like, dozens of chapters led by Pisadas, but there's also sections in North Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia.

So as the 50s move on, there begins to be a split with this idea that World War III is coming, that capitalism is about to collapse. And that's a split between Pablo's international secretariat and the International Committee, which is led by the U.S. SWP, and then also sections from the U.K. and France and Moreno and Argentina as well. There's like Pissas's arch enemy at the time. But Pablo still has the vast majority. But as the decade goes on and capitalism is recovering in Western Europe, this idea that, you know, Western Europe is totally dependent on the third world, which puts them in this position of power to, you know, to have these anti-colonial revolutions and create workers' states, that starts to fall apart a little bit. people start to think that nuclear war is not such a good idea. There also starts to be criticism of the Soviet Union as they move to a policy of peaceful coexistence. People start to get more interested in China, in the People's Republic of China and Maoism.

And most importantly, at the end of the decade, there are these successful colonial revolutions in Algeria, or Algeria has become successful in the early 60s and in Cuba. So moving into the 60s, the Pasadist faction comes to the Fourth International World Congress in Europe and says, hey, Europe is no longer the site of World Revolution. It's now the third world. So leadership of the Fourth International should be transferred to the colonial and semi-colonial countries. And by the way, we're the majority of those sections.

So basically, let's move the fourth international to Montevideo, where the Pasadis Latin American Bureau is based, and let's have Pasadis be in power. This is what the Pasadis faction came to the Congress arguing. And at this point, Pablo, who was his closest ally, was in prison because he had begun making arms and forging documents for the FLN in Algeria, and he was caught. He was imprisoned in the Netherlands. So I don't think Pablo would have sided with Pasadis anyway, but Pablo's representative voted against Pasadis, gave power to Livio Maitan. The headquarters was moved to Italy, and this is when Pasadis broke off from the Fourth International.

And from that point on, he really wanted to represent himself as the sort of third world or colonial world or proletarian tendency. in the fourth international against these, you know, careerist politician, degenerate Europeans who, you know, still had faith in Western Europe leading the world revolution, even though de Gaulle was coming to power in France. And, you know, the French left had no idea what to do about Algeria, even though it was so obvious that they should just support it. And Pasadas sort of marketed himself as like a Guevara kind of figure because the

Pasadists had been fighting in Cuba. So a lot of Europeans at this point saw Pasadism as the path that, like, if they weren't Stalinist, if they weren't Maoist, if they weren't anarchist, if they were more attracted to Trotskyism for whatever reason, Pasadis was like a Guevara kind of figure to them. So earlier in our conversation, you used the word cult when you were describing Pasadism. And you mentioned that he was doing real organizing work. And obviously, we just covered the fourth international. So I was hoping that you could just talk a little bit more about, you know, how and why it eventually sort of became a cult, in your opinion.

Actually, this works well from the timeline where I left off. You know, the Pasadis International becomes its own thing. In the early 60s, it starts to attract new cadres in Europe and in Latin America as well. It's actually growing after he breaks away. And he's, You know, they still have a lot of influence in Brazil and Argentina, in Cuba, and in Mexico, and they're leading this guerrilla war in Guatemala at it, basically at its start. But things really start falling apart for a couple of reasons. First, they run afoul with the Cuban regime because they want to push the missile crisis into a world war. They expect that's going to be the kickoff of this, they call it the fight. final settlement of accounts, and they were, you know, dissent against Castro and the Soviet Union

for reversing course on that. At the same time, their operations in Guatemala with the MR-13 insurgency meet the birth of counterinsurgency tactics in which, you know, entire villages of indigenous people who had, they had previously armed and organized, are being killed by the thousands. And the same sort of thing starts happening in Brazil, where a dictatorship overthrows a kind of center-left regime and starts rounding up the Pasadist operatives in Brazil, who were organizing Campesino workers in the Northeast, and some of them end up being tortured and killed. And at the same time that, you know, this wave of repression begins in the mid-60s, Pissadas is really insisting on this line of monolithism, where he is the sole leadership of the movement.

There's basically no democratic centralism. It's just him. And the people around him, you know, the intellectuals of the movement, who are, you know, very serious Trotskyist intellectuals, very serious Marxists. They have some influence over him, but really everything is up to him. And the newspaper really reflects this, because almost every text is by. him. They end with the phrase long-lived Pasadis. And of course, there's also something going on in the left where young people are starting to be more influenced by what becomes the new

left positions, more anti-authoritarian, more libertine kind of ideas. And Pasadis is still a very orthodox Trotskyist, very really strongly believes in supporting the worker states, especially the Soviet Union. And so young people are faced with, you know, being tortured and killed. They have to follow wholeheartedly this unitary leader who's kind of a strange guy, even though they might like him and his ideas. And they start criticizing him in Brazil, in Mexico, in Argentina. And he doesn't tolerate any criticism. He kicks them out, expels them, calls them CIA agents and that kind of thing. And so this expansion

that started the beginning of the 60s begins to turn into a contraction. And it continues to contract for the rest of Pissas' life and afterwards. So he dies in 1981 and between the mid-Sixies and 1981, the Pissadist International

goes from having hundreds of cadres all around the world to being really a small collective of people who just live to fulfill the wills and vision of Pesad.

And in the 70s, it really starts to take on the character of what's going on in Pisadas' house and the way that he treats the people immediately around him to the point that in 74, 75, he kicks out all the intellectuals from the movement, including his wife, which is a really sad story, takes up a young woman in the movement as his new wife has a child with her. And the focus of the movement from this point on is raising the child to be the messianic air of the movements. So we're talking about, you know, literally things that look more at home in a cult than in a Marxist-Leninist sect. That said, that was not unique for Marxist-Leninist sects at the time. There was always this character of the smaller they get, the more they presume that they

need to fine-tune the discipline of the cadre in ways that are very cultish. Like, you know, if you don't do enough work, then your punishment is more work. And if you do well with the more work you do, then your reward is more work. And, like, the only joy you should get out of your life is by spreading the revolutionary word because, you know, the revolution is coming and we need to influence it. We're the only ones with the right idea. So, you know, the similarities with cultism in general is very obvious. obvious, but Pasadism, I think, is like a very clear example of something that's, you know,

literally a cult. And, you know, other things can be maybe judged against it. Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating. And just diving deeper into Pasadism here, because many contemporary communist, leftist, socialists, myself included, understand Pasadism almost completely through a wave of memes that really took hold a few years back. We associated with a deep sense of irony as well as the imagery of dolphins and nukes and UFOs. I was hoping that you can talk a little bit about these images and the ideas behind them and how they became such a huge part of our conception of Pissotism. Well, the dolphin was a very small part of Pissotism. Like really, he really only got into it in the last year or two of his life. He was interested in water

birthing and one of the pioneers of water birthing, Igor Tchaikovsky, who was a Soviet dissident new age midwife believe that dolphins were natural midwives and they had a second connection with humans and that if children were born underwater and a dolphin helped that they would have these superhuman abilities. So I think Passage has read about this in a tabloid or something and really liked the image. But what I think he was getting at with his interest in dolphins was it was a symbol of this cosmic unity that he believed in, where humans would no longer see themselves as totally distinct from their environment, from space, from the animals around them. And the dolphin was the symbol of like tying everything together.

And this is also a bit true in his continued belief in aliens. You know, he writes this essay in a 67, 68, the Flying Saucers essay, which everyone's familiar with, but he never really talks about aliens after that. It was really another guy in the movement, Dante Minizoli, who was very interested in the UFO phenomena and approaching that from Marx's perspective. I think Pisada saw aliens again as this symbol of how humans are going through socialism, through unification as a species, also unify with nature, with our home, and we'll find our home within the cosmos. And this would be achieved through breaking down not only class, but nationality, distinctions of human and animals, distinctions of

sentient beings and objects. He believed in like something called the communist association with the object. So it was a very radical vision. And the aliens and dolphins, although it wasn't important to his political program, it represented that unity. Where does the mysticism or that this weird sort of aspect of Pissadas come from. Is there anything in his childhood or anything that you have some sort of mystical experience? Because all this talk about merging with nature and the collapse of subject and object is very, you know, it's like hallmarks of mysticism. Do you know anything about where that stuff originally sort of came from or how he originally got into,

just the vague ideas of that stuff? He does write some stuff about reading, you know, books about indigenous religions in South America and that his father might have been into some kind of naturalist, you know, new age for the time kind of things. But I think it was really very instinctive. One thing that is very unique about Pist is compared to most other Trotskyists or even communist leaders in the West is that he really came from a proletarian background. He only went to school for a couple of years. He was trained in theory only for a few years that he was in a cadre. in Cordoba. He wasn't an idiot. He was a very smart guy, but he was very improvisational with his

theories. And I think really where the mysticism comes from or where at least he opened the door to it was through this belief that comes from Marx that existence determines consciousness, the material reality, the social relations comes first and then consciousness arises out of that. And, of course, this is an important part of Leninism as well, and its rejection of idealism and ideology. He explicitly reverses that. He believes that after the Bolshevic revolution, after the revolution in China and, you know, these other worker states that have been established, the masses of the world are consciously socialist. They have the socialist idea in their minds. He believes that, like, even children are, like, kind of born socialist.

And he, you know, this is his, he has this big fascination with, with children participating in, like, the Vietnam War. But, yeah, in protests in general, you know, he sees this, there's this kind of purity to the masses that he sees being, like, corrupted and perverted as people get older, as people learn to be more capitalist. And he sees the structures, like even literally the architecture of the entire world is being made to represent class relations. and it's it's all you know it all now exists in in contradiction to this socialist consciousness that everybody has so this is part of where you know nuclear war comes back into it is that everything needs to be level everything needs to be totally destroyed for there to be this complete victory of this consciousness that everyone has and what that becomes is just you know basically pure mysticism because socialism and communism aren't just ideas that you just you just just like you get the opportunity. This is something that Marx was very against this idea that you can just, you know, have the blueprint and build it. It has to be achieved through class struggle.

And since Pissades lost his working class cadres in the 60s, he couldn't do class struggle anymore. All he could do was give these speeches and rights and tell his militants what to do and send them off to world leaders. And he believed that he had this influence amongst the leaders of the Soviet Union and China and Yugoslavia. So it became pure idealism. And I think that's where the door is opened for mysticism.

I see. I see. That is so fascinating. I did not know how all those different lines connected. And so I hope that helps educate a lot of our listeners on how those images of dolphins and nukes and UFOs come into it. And I know you had a conversation with Douglas Lane on Zero Books, more focused on the UFO aspect of this for anybody that wants to dive deeper into that. But going on to the next question, and you mentioned this, maybe a... a few questions back about the role that Pasadists played in the Cuban Revolution. So I was hoping

you could talk about that and then maybe talk also about the tensions that developed afterwards between figures like Fidel and Che and the revolutionary Cuban government and Pasadist and Trotskyist broadly. So Trotskyism has a long tradition in Cuba, but there weren't very many left at the time of the revolution. But some of the few that were left were active participants in Castro's guerrilla war. One of them was on the grandma yacht that sailed from Mexico to Cuba, beginning the insurrection. And then there was a cadre that was fighting with Raul Castro in the Guantanamo province. So when the revolutionary state is established in 1959, it initially doesn't have like a strong political line. You know, Castro calls himself a humanist. He's

more of a national populist figure. Guavara has some interesting political ideas that aren't fully formed yet, but they basically let all the, you know, friends of the revolution into the creation of the state. So this includes the Trotskyists, although they are very small. The Trotskyist party in Cuba establishes itself after the revolution. They align with the Pasadis Latin American Bureau. Pasadis comes in visits pretty quickly and, you know, his representatives are allowed to go on state radio and announce their Congress. But it also includes the Popular Socialist Party, the PSP, which is the Communist Party. They're aligned with the Soviet Union. And the PSP wants to crush the Troskiists, like almost immediately.

And they move to ban their press to, you know, imprison their members. But Guvara and Castro defend them because these are revolutionaries. They don't understand this sectarian feud at first in 1960 and 1961. And actually, the PSP is pushing Castro to be a little bit more moderate. They don't want Castro to nationalize everything and prompt the United States to invade. They want Cuba to be a good Soviet satellite state. And Castro actually chooses the line that's closer to the Toskiists of nationalizing dozens of industries in 1960.

So the PSP, again, sees the Trascus as a real threat, and they get more ammunition for this after the Bay of Pigs invasion and after the missile crisis, because in these instances, the Basadists are pushing for conflict. And Guvara and Castro initially are also pushing for deeper conflict. Guvara makes these statements that if Cuba was destroyed by nuclear weapons, it would be for the greater good of the world socialist movement, that, people would always remember Cuba as an example to live up to. He says something about nuking New York, you know. And there's evidence that after the Soviet ships turned around, when Cruzeff reaches a deal with Kennedy, that Castro smashes a mirror in his office because he's so upset. So they might have agreed with this line, but they certainly didn't agree with the Trotskyists opposing the leadership of Castro. And so after the missile crisis, the PSP gets a freer hand to suppress them.

They're almost all arrested and put in prison. But even then, even though Guevara has shown no evidence of likeing them personally or politically, he makes time to go and visit many of them in jail and release them. And actually one of the last things that he does before he disappeared, appears from Cuba to go to, well, at first he went to the Congo, then he went to Bolivia, was he went and freed a Pasadis prisoner and had them agree to disband the party for the foreseeable future. But like I said, Guevara resigns from the Cuban government and leaves Cuba, but he doesn't tell, he doesn't do this publicly. So no one knows where he went. And a lot of people believed that

he had been killed by Castro or put in an asylum, a lot of people thought that maybe he had become a Trotskyist. This was like a popular rumor at the time. And so Castro put him in prison or an asylum for becoming a Trotskyist. And Posadas fans the flames of this by publishing in his press all around the world that Gravara had been assassinated under pressure of the Soviet Union for his support of Trotskyism, because the Pasadist implied that Guevara was a Pasadist. So fascinating. Which is nonsense.

Yeah. And Castro is so upset by them spreading this rumor. He also probably just hates them in general anyway, that he denounces them at the Tri-Continental Congress in 1965, which is like this major Congress of, you know, the colonial, semi-colonial world, the largest of its kind. He denounces Pasadism specifically for this rumor and for their actions in Guatemala. And then he denounces Trotskyism in total. He says that, you know, Trotskyism was once, you know, this great movement, but now it's purely an agent of imperialism implying that they might literally be CIA agents or at least doing that work for them.

And, you know, of course, this is a major reason why the Posada's International starts collapsing because, you know, they loved Castro. Like, they had criticisms of them, but they didn't want that kind of bad press. And a lot of young people just left the movement at that point. But that's basically the end of Pasadism in Cuba, although they still retained a small network. But it was underground. Damn. Absolutely fascinating.

I did not know most of that. So that is just, like, hilarious and interesting. And, yeah, appreciate that. I want to switch gears here because. You talk about in your book, Carl Sagan, and you talk about his involvement, not only in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which sort of dovetails with some aspects of Pasadism, but also of him and his wife's semi-concealed interest in Marxism and Trotskyism. And this was news to me as someone who has always been very fond of Carl Sagan personally and learned a lot from him. So I was hoping that you could just talk about those connections for us and sort of help us understand what those connections exactly were. So in the introduction of the book, I go into the formulation of the Drake equation, which is this, you know, way to this way to kind of speculate on how many civilizations exist in the galaxy that we can possibly communicate with.

And Sagan was the one at that conference who was really arguing that there was a, you know, thousands or, you know, hundreds of thousands of civilizations. Other people at the conference, including people who had worked on the Manhattan Project, said, you know, that's not very likely because, you know, we've reached this level where we could potentially communicate with another solar system, but we're also on the verge of wiping ourselves out with nuclear war. And Sagan's argument is, well, if we get over this point, which we have to, then we could possibly live for many millennia, many thousands of millennia as a civil. civilization. And he believed that if these hundreds of thousands of alien civilizations exist now, that they will have had to exist for a very long period of time. And how could they reach that level of sustainability? They would have had to have gotten over this self-destructive impulse or this extractivism that's just going to cause all of our ecosystem to reject us. So he was basically saying that they would have reached a higher stage of society. And for Marxists, this is socialism and communism. And Sagan wasn't exactly disagreeing with that. He worked with a Soviet astronomer named Josef Schlaaski in the 60s to write a book called Intelligent Life in the Universe, where he expands on this argument. And Schlaaski in the book says, yeah, this higher form of civilization for us is Marxist communism. And Sagan writes an addendum to that

saying, well, you know, maybe it'll be something else, but, you know, he doesn't disagree with it. He's basically saying like, well, you know, we still have a ways to go and maybe Marxism isn't like the completed vision. But for the rest of his career, he does little things that indicates he is more or less a socialist. He was asked point blank about this in an interview. I forget who the, you can find it on YouTube. He says, are you a socialist? And he kind of just grins and like says, well you know i think uh everybody should get everything that they need and you know he gives an answer that's like he doesn't say yes but doesn't say no um and uh his wife and jurian who was a co-writer of cosmos a co-writer of a lot of his books uh was a donor to the brecht forum uh which was a openly

communist uh group uh you know venue in new york um and i also found something i couldn't believe when i found it in his last book their last book they wrote together demon haunted world. He writes that him and his wife would sneak copies of Trotsky's history of the Russian Revolution into the Soviet Union for their Soviet counterparts. He says it's basically like an act of rebelliousness against authoritarianism. He doesn't say it's because I like this book or I like Trotsky, but he implies that this suppressed history of the Russian Revolution were it to come back and were people to re-encounter it could reignite a revolution, which is just the same thing that Trotskyists say. They say like, you know, the Soviet bureaucracy, the Soviet populace

has always been socialist and they just need to re-encounter their revolutionary roots in order to regenerate. So that's a very Trotskyist idea they were running with, huh? You know, they never say explicitly that they like Trotsky or that they're socialist and that's why they're spreading this stuff, but I don't think it's a coincidence. And I also, I think that there's something very socialistic about this optimism towards meeting another species. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, very fascinating. That was one of the things that jumped out at me at that book is just because of my long history of being interested in cosmology, astronomy, and obviously Carl Sagan's role in that. And so that was really interesting and cool to see come to life and learn about.

Since we're on the topic of cool, interesting things, I just want to, like, sort of zoom out and just ask you, what is something else maybe that was particularly interesting or amusing or mind-blowing or otherwise surprising that you discovered in your research for this book? It doesn't have to be central or even very important, but just something that stood out to you that you didn't know before that you were very interested to learn about. Well, in the last part of the book, I talk about how although Pisadas died in relative obscurity and the militants who remained in the organization, to this day, don't have a very large influence, it came to be that he returned as one of the most iconic figures in the history of revolutionary socialism. And I did a Google analytic search of just a Google search terms search of, you know, Posadas against all of his rivals in the Fourth International, all these people who, you know, never took him seriously and swept him under the rug, and he split from them, like Ernst Mandel, Michelle Pablo,

Livia Maiton, Nal Moreno. And although all these people went on to be, like, more important to Trotskyism, Pasadis was, you know, a much larger search term than them, at least in the United States and in England. Not only that, but in 2016, when the Pasadis memes really started kicking off, Posadas at times was more searched for. than Trotsky himself. Wow.

And, you know, it's not like people were reading the work of Posadas. They were interested in this cartoonish aspect of it. And I also found that there was some influence on this kind of, you know, autonomous movement that sprung up in Europe and the United States in the 90s in its sort of cosmological themes. So what I mean by that is, although the cosmism and alien stuff

wasn't very important to the historical Pasadis movements there were two militants that even after Pasadis died, even after they left the movement, they devoted their lives full time to Uphology. One was Dante Monezoli, who

ended up, you know, organizing and talking at UFO conferences, urging them to, you know, take a Marxist line on Uphology, to not trust, information that they were receiving from the CIA, not trust any information they received that showed aliens were hostile

because this was going to be an imperialist plot to justify higher military budgets. And he did this until the mid-90s. And another guy, Paul Schultz, who was another founder of the Posadas International in Argentina. And he moved to Germany towards the end of his life.

And he believed he was receiving messages directly from aliens and wrote a journal for throughout the 90s and 2000s combining Pasadism, Marxism, and the messages he was receiving from the aliens. So, you know, but both of these were marginal figures, but the work of Minizoli inspired a group in Italy called the Men in Red, who was a cadre of the Luther Blissette organization. These were autonomists who kind of moved into the realm of culture jamming. And they would, you know, they had a journal called Radical Uphology where they described some of the things that, basically, I've been talking about, about this optimism towards alien contact from a socialist perspective. And with kind of public pranks, like they faked a UFO landing outside of a water park in Bologna.

and even after they stopped doing the men in red thing, they continued participating in social mobilizations. And they even got a little bit into the realm of meme magic in the 2000s. And one meme that I was surprised to finally started was the, have you seen this man meme of this guy who, you know, this kind of creepy illustration of a guy that people all around the world claim to have dreamed. They started that just as sort of like an experiment of like putting an image of someone out there to just see how far it can replicate. So I thought this kind of, I found the

strange convergence between, you know, Pasadis dying in obscurity, but then coming back through these these strange aspects about him to the point where he's the most recognizable figure in the history of this milieu at times as being strangely significant. significance. Yeah, so, so interesting. What do you think that that is? Like, what exactly about the, the 2016, 2017 era and the political situation? Do you have any thoughts on, on why at that time and in this culture and funneled through the meme culture, why that came back? Well, I think 2016 was a moment when it became apparent that this story that we've been told, you know, by way, I mean younger people, you know, younger than 40, perhaps.

our whole lives that that history had ended, that, you know, revolution was no longer plausible, that, you know, liberal democracy was the best and only possible system. That, that kind of, we started to see the cracks in that. So the idea that there could be a socialist running against a fascist became, you know, very exciting to a lot of people. And so you saw this proliferation of memes around, uh, around, Anders and around Trump sort of spiraling out in these extreme directions where, you know, obviously on the Trump side, you had people starting to get interested in all these esoteric fascist figures and icons and, you know, spreading them a lot online, developing like weird subcultures around that.

And then on the left, you have the same thing with people talking about Pasadis and Hosia and, you know, Stalin and what have you, like replicating these images. like a kind of playful way, but also sort of developing a kind of fondness to the images as they do it. It's not entirely ironic. And, you know, that doesn't mean that they've like, the people who spread these memes, they find like a sect or that they're propagandizing for a sect or something. There's this meme of my political journey where, you know, they have the four quadrant thing and they just like kind of drift off off of the map.

by combining, you know, hoagism with juche or Avola with Pasadism, whatever. And they just keep getting more and more extreme. And I think that tendency to become more and more extreme, well, first of all, of course, it comes from a distance from actual struggle, especially class struggle, because you don't have to, you know, communicate your ideas to like your coworker or something. you're just goofing off online so you can permit yourself to become like an anti-siv accelerationist or something like that. But also it's because

if everything is denied to us, if all political possibility is denied to us, if nothing, even like tepid social democracy of Sanders, is impossible, then why don't I just believe whatever crazy thing I feel like believing? And that's, I think,

where fully automated luxury, gay space communism comes from, you know, But Bastani kind of tongue in cheek, Aaron Bastani, proposed fully automated luxury communism as kind of like a provocation against the futurism of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and those types. Not that it's fully a provocation, his book takes it pretty seriously, but then adding space to it and just adding more and more to it and making into a meme and saying like, well, if we can't have social democracy on Earth, if we're just doomed to it. to, you know, perpetual degradation and immiseration for the rest of our lives until civilization falls apart, then I might as well just argue for space communism because, like, it doesn't matter. Like, I might as well argue for something completely fantastic and unrealistic because there's nothing's possible on Earth anyway.

Yeah. Yeah, that's genuinely insightful and incredibly interesting. I was very much in that milieu in the 2016 era. I was seeing these memes and, you know, the ironic rehabilitation of Posadas and even of figures, as you said, like Stalin, you know, like Stalin made the clouds not rain and shit like that. Very interesting time as, you know, the left in this country specifically and maybe broadly was trying to regain its feed and recalculate and reorient itself to a new reality after the end of the end of history. So I really like that insight and I think there's a lot of truth in it. Let me just say one more thing on this topic, because although it sounds like a very unique moment in history, Marx makes the same argument in the 18th Broomier. He's also writing at a time when it seemed like revolution was impossible when like everything had failed.

He was blackpilled, you know? And he says that in moments like that, revolutionaries look to figures in history who had failed or, you know, their revolutions were incomplete. and they put on their clothes as like a kind of, you know, seance or like conjuring of them. Not to, you know, totally reenact what they were doing, but to try to get some inspiration on like how to walk this revolutionary path in a way of not totally breaking with history, but not totally starting anew, because you can't completely start anew.

So that image of this kind of larping, literally, that Marx is talking, about it's just the same thing that's going on today you know we we know that revolutionary socialism in the last century failed we have no idea how to how to restart it what to do now but maybe by like encountering these marginal figures in history we can think of something yeah yeah that's that's really interesting um so yeah i want to zoom out because we're almost at the end of this conversation and you obviously you talked about how deep of an investigation and research you put into this text, you traveled for it, etc. I was wondering if you maybe, as you

walk away from it, have any concluding thoughts on the strengths or the failures of Leninism broadly, of militancy, and sort of its connections to the current contemporary moment that we find ourselves in here in 2020. Any thoughts on that that you came away from this research with? Yeah, I mean, I don't think I have a strong conclusion, but I think that the fact that the Pasadis grew up around anarchism, and then the neo-Pasadis movement is sort of revived by autonomism, that there's some significance there. And, you know, one of Pasadis' first memories, you know, I begin the first chapter of the book with the Samana Trahika, this near revolution in Argentina in 1919, where Pasadis has a, I think he's seven, sees this revolution

crushed right before his eyes as, you know, people all over the world, you know, there's uprisings all over the world and between 1917 and 1921. And, you know, people had to watch this be defeated. And throughout the 20s and 30s, they watch communism become centralized in the project of the Soviet Union. They watch, you know, anarchism defeated in its last, its last stronghold in Spain. And after the war, this concept of revolutionary class struggle looks very different. It's no longer, for the most part, about the working class of the world as a single party struggling to take the world for themselves. It becomes this battle between different states, the worker states and the capitalist states. And then around

the time of Passaz's death, you sort of see that kind of Cold War bipolarity break down and suddenly there's this void you know there's no longer the this uh so like you can't people try to especially orthodox trowskiists try to translate it to the present day of like uh you know russia and china or the the anti imperialist states or something but but i don't think anyone really believes it so i think this um this conception of uh you know the autonomists coming back with the anti-globe movement, it's kind of squaring the circle between revolutionary Marxism and anarchism. And that's, you know, where I was politicized in the 2000s. I think there's some significance there. And although it's not something Pasadis believed in, Pasadis was not

a, you know, Pesas was not his real name. His real name was Homero Kostali. And Pesas was a name that was used as the pen name for his first group, which functioned as a collective. So the fact that people use the imagery of Pisadas in this kind of freeform way that is no longer, you know, connected to his orthodox ideas of Trotskyist, Leninism, Trotskyism, is kind of okay with me. I think we need to approach history not as something that we need to be like completely faithful to in order to, in order for it to be useful. for us or in order to redeem it. But that said, you know, I was also writing the book or finishing it up at the end of 2019

when these uprisings were spreading the world and, you know, throughout the Middle East and Southeast Asia and in South America. And as inspiring as they were and as, you know, as coherence as their message often was against authoritarianism and neoliberalism, I found a lot of. lot of the Leninist position vindicated because there's no international coordination of these. There's no central program. There's no conception. There's no analysis of what they're fighting against and what they seek to achieve. And it seemed to me that even though I see that that historical movement being a failure, I think most people my age don't have any desire

to join a Marxist-Lennist party right now. Those methods came from a recognition that these struggles need to be coordinated in some way. Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with that. And we might be a little different spots along the left-wing political spectrum. But I certainly believe that the next step of the national and international left is to try to find ways to coordinate our activities to have that sort of not overly centralized, but that sort of somewhat centralized analysis and vision of where to go from here and that international cooperation between organizations, that is something that we're lacking. And being a fractured, hyper-decentralized movement of spontaneous uprisings here and there, it can only

get us so far. So whatever your, you know, your tendency on the left is, we should at least wrestle seriously with that idea if we want to take things and advance the ball of the class struggle. One last question before we wrap up, and I always like to do this when I cover books because I like to give the author one last chance to pull out maybe a central lesson, if you will. So if readers or listeners take one thing away from your book, what do you hope it is? What do you hope at least one major lesson is from engagement with your text? Well, I think part of it might be a surprise to some people. It's that it's a critique of irony.

You know, from the cover of the book, I think a lot of people expect it to be, you know, just full of memes and jokes and if not just pure science fiction. And I don't mind that so much because it's a cool cover. It's funny. But most of the book is about the history of revolutionary socialism, of Trotskyism, of the, of the, the contributions and the failures of the Basadas movements and the significance of its returns, these things we've been talking about. But I think that if we only treat history with this ironic detachment, if we don't actually find some useful aspects of it and we don't find ourselves wanting to redeem those heroic moments

that happened, you know, like for instance, I tried to pay close attention to the people, people, the Pasadis militants who were tortured and who died, I tell some of their stories. I did my best to talk about the women and the people in the movement who weren't straight, who were abused and marginalized, although there wasn't very much information about them. I tried to, you know, represent their stories faithfully. And I think coming out of it, we can't just look at it as like this silly thing that failed and became a cult. But, you know, a group of thousands of people who believed 100% that communism was coming, and it was their duty to history, to their class, to make it happen. And it wasn't simply, it's not simply ironic to talk about them.

There has to be some act of redemption and seeing their vision through. And I, you know, I don't think anyone knows exactly how to do that. but an encounter with history, you know, like reading Trotsky's history of the Russian Revolution or, you know, unearthing some strange Posada's texts in the archives is one way to understand what went wrong and to be inspired by what went right. Yeah. Incredibly well said. And the book is fascinating.

It's incredibly well written. If you read the intro, you will be hooked. So anybody interested in any of this definitely. check it out and i'll link to it in the show notes before i let you go andy can you let listeners know where they can find you your work and podcast and this book online well thanks a lot for those kind words i'm always excited when people like the book uh i i have a podcast called antifada and a kind of a side podcast through the antifada called prolet cult where i talk about sci-fi and Futurism and UFOs and that stuff.

And you can find me on Twitter at SpaceProl. Wonderful. And then the book? From the Pluto website, I think they still have a bonus code, Posada's 20 for 20% off. And that ships, I think, anywhere in Europe and the U.S. And there's also in Queens called Topos Books. And they have it through mail order. And you can also buy it at the major retailers, if you must.

Awesome. Yeah, and if you're in quarantine, looking for something to do, looking for a fascinating book to read, definitely get this one. Thank you so much, Andy, for coming on, and definitely we'll reach out to you and we'll collab again on some other topic in the future. It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.