I Want to Believe

Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism

A.M. Gittlitz

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786806208
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Comunismo, post-comunismo e socialismo

Advocating nuclear war, attempting communication with dolphins and taking an interest in the paranormal and UFOs, there is perhaps no greater (or stranger) cautionary tale for the Left than that of Posadism.

Named after the Argentine Trotskyist J. Posadas, the movement's journey through the fractious and sectarian world of mid-20th century revolutionary socialism was unique. Although at times significant, Posadas' movement was ultimately a failure. As it disintegrated, it increasingly grew to resemble a bizarre cult, detached from the working class it sought to liberate. The renewed interest in Posadism today - especially for its more outlandish fixations - speaks to both a cynicism towards the past and nostalgia for the earnest belief that a better world is possible.

Drawing on considerable archival research, and numerous interviews with ex- and current Posadists, I Want to Believe tells the fascinating story of this most unusual socialist movement and considers why it continues to capture the imaginations of leftists today.

PART I

The Tragic Century

1

Commentaries on the Infancy of Comrade Posadas

In 1919 the world was near revolution. From the window of his Boedo rowhouse seven-year-old Homero Cristalli, who would one day be called J. Posadas, had a front-row seat. “There were two days in which we couldn’t leave,” Posadas recalled in his final days, “because [the neighborhood] was occupied by the firemen, the police, and the army.”¹

The unrest had begun earlier that summer with a seemingly routine strike at the nearby Vasena metalworks. Unwilling to negotiate, management brought in replacement labor. The strikers responded by blocking the factory gates and fighting the police sent to clear a path. Shoving escalated to shooting. One cop and five workers were killed. A funeral procession through central Buenos Aires turned into a mass demonstration, then a riot when the police once again opened fire. Workers, armed or otherwise, responded throughout the city. Radical and apolitical unions alike issued a call for a general strike. Production halted for days behind streets barricaded with overturned trollies. Workers raided armories and burned government buildings, shattering an era of social peace under populist president Hipólito Yrigoyen. As the state felt control slipping away, the spirit of the revolutionary workers’ movement that had dominated the county a decade prior reawakened in scenes that invoked the words of its anarchist-communist forefather, Mikhail Bakunin: “The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!”

Their more recent inspiration, however, was the previous year’s revolution in Russia. A wave of uprisings had spread from there to Hungary, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, Finland, Mexico, and Egypt. Workers occupied factories, mutinied against their officers, organized mass strikes, formed workers councils, and assaulted colonial authorities. Now Homero watched the workers gather in defiance of police orders. They came first in tens, then hundreds – men, women, children, creoles, Italians, Spanish, French, Slavs, Africans, indigenous. Suddenly it was a single mass, an insurgent crowd, almost entirely unarmed except for a fire in their eyes ignited by the murder of comrades they had never met, whose language they perhaps couldn’t even speak. The moment that made it all possible in Russia, Homero’s socialist father told him, was the defection of the armed forces to the side of the people. He now believed history to be repeating itself as the police refused their orders to fire.

Then he saw new faces, “posted in the corners, watching the demonstration.” These were sinister armed units sent in to finish the job: “They first shot in the air and later … against the people.”²

Hundreds were killed throughout the city, eighteen of them, Posadas said, right on his street. What could have been called the “Argentine Revolution” instead descended into a spiral of proto-fascistic violence and state repression now called the Semana Tragica (Tragic Week), when patriotic hooligans inflamed by conspiracy theories raided Russian, Jewish, and Catalan neighborhoods to drag innocent immigrants from their homes and slaughter them in the street. The violence ultimately led Yrigoyen to settle the Vasena dispute in favor of the workers, using the ensuing calm to arrest nearly 50,000 suspected rioters.³ Buenos Aires returned to business as usual, but Homero Cristalli was forever changed.

Posadas’s other childhood memories were far less dramatic. Most were scenes of humiliating poverty. His parents, Emmanuelle and Elvira Cristalli, were cobblers from Matera, the poorest region of southern Italy. They arrived in Buenos Aires and its fatally cramped conventillo tenements at the turn of the century, quickly becoming militant workers in the anarchist Argentine Regional Workers’ Federation (FORA). With at least seven children,⁴ Homero the middle, they worked their way up from assembling the rubber-soled canvas espadrilles, worn by nearly every worker in the country, to a higher-paying job making boots for the oligarchs, and their own home in Boedo. They left the FORA and joined the Socialist Party, whose distaste for revolution and violent tactics made them a safer choice for many workers.

Their modest movement towards the middle class abruptly ended when Elvira died of a heart condition around 1917. Suddenly the large family was on the verge of starvation. Emmanuelle gave the children a box of green bananas to eat for an entire week as he took odd jobs like peddling snakes at carnivals or getting beaten for money in cruel exhibitions of old-world regional pride reminiscent of the boxing scene in Chaplin’s City Lights.⁵ Any other nourishment came from begging neighbors for spare eggs.⁶

Through it all, Emanuelle insisted they stay true to working-class ethics. In one incident, Posadas recalled stealing fifty cents from his father to see a movie. A few days later, his conscience nagging him, he confessed. “I never stole again ... my father taught us to say the truth, to confront the truth. We learned well. It was a matter of socialist pride, as when he told me: ‘Never betray a strike.’ This was the sentiment of the militant condition.”⁷

By the age of ten Homero found a method of joyous survival amidst the despair. With a group of local kids he formed a murga, a roving carnival-season choir, whose satirical songs about life in proletarian Boedo were rewarded with croissants and cookies. “We made songs … mostly attacks, complaints, protests, mostly about the trash, because the trash was never taken out, and the people loved it!”⁸

Homero developed the propagandist troubadour act into his teens. This was the decade of encriolllization in Argentina, a cultural renaissance in which children of the immigration wave mixed their various heritages with a bohemian flare that came to define the porteño culture of Buenos Aires – and Boedo’s creatives were particularly known for their socialistic zeal. Down the street from Homero was the Café El Japones, where the Boedo Literary Group developed an assertively leftwing style opposed to the apolitical Florida Literary Group’s slogan of “art for art’s sake.” In nearby San Nicolás, the French-Argentine folk musician Carlos Gardel combined the sultry rhythms of brothel anterooms and porteño poetics about its lonely johns to create the first tango hits. With the help of his neighbor, minor star of the genre Enrique Santos Discepolo, Homero learned to cover Gardel with half his tragic lyrics converted to supportive verses about local strikes. Everyone who heard it agreed the impression was uncanny.⁹

Too poor and restless for formal education, Homero left school after two years to pursue a career in the only criollo phenomenon more popular than poetry or tango – soccer. Here too was politicization. One team was called the Mártires de Chicago (today the Argentino Juniors) in honor of the alleged bomb-throwers hanged after the 1886 Haymarket riots, and the Chacarita Juniors were founded by anarchists in a libertarian bookstore on May Day.¹⁰ In later years, Homero would often write that the sport encouraged the sort of teamwork, solidarity, and common exertion necessary to coordinate class struggle.

Initially, Cristalli played for his neighborhood team San Lorenzo before making the cut for Estudiantes La Plata in 1928.¹¹ It was one of the best teams in the country, containing five still legendary players nicknamed “Las Professores.”¹² Like the Yankees’ “Murderer’s Row,” their offensive prowess brought a celebrity aspect to the sport. Regional identities developed at pace with the abilities of the teams – different neighborhoods of Buenos Aires against one another, and teams from the interior against the best of the capital. Cristalli was an alternate midfielder, a position that defends against oncoming attacks and passes the ball back to the offensive forwards. Although he only appeared on the field in 17 out of 70 games, scoring three goals in the 1928 and 1929 seasons, he felt himself to be part of something immense as matches moved from parks to stadiums in front of tens of thousands of fans.¹³

To much of the older generation, however, soccer and the tango were dangerous signs of depoliticization. The FORA newspaper La Protesta adopted a strangely socially conservative tone as they noticed youths skipping their Sunday political picnics to play a match or showing up hungover after a long night of dancing, denouncing the sport as “pernicious idioticization through the stamping of a round object.”¹⁴ Finally recognizing the big business and mass spectacle of the sport, anarchist players called for a strike before the 1930 season, demanding regulated conditions and a players’ union. Their victory meant the end of the amateur era. Larger teams earned enough money from spectators to retain or buy better players, leaving smaller teams – and smaller players – in the past.

The strike was part of a new wave of labor militancy that emerged alongside the international economic depression. Concerned oligarchs responded by installing a harsher disciplinarian in the presidential Casa Rosada, the fascistic General José Félix Uriburu who ousted Yrigoyen. After the coup, anarchist players were blacklisted, and the FORA was almost completely driven underground.¹⁵ After thirty years of repression, in which anarchists and their allies received 500,000 years of prison sentences with 5,000 killed, this was the final knockout blow for Argentine anarchist-communism.¹⁶

Many revolutionaries fled to Spain, where the youthful dream of the early twentieth-century workers to establish a classless and stateless the infancy of comrade posadas society still seemed possible. Homero, on the other hand, entered his twenties still fantasizing about that big game – the wild crowds, the collective struggle, and the decisive moment on which all efforts are focused – suddenly without a team.

2

Revolutionary Youth or Patriotic Youth?

His short-lived soccer career at an end, Homero Cristalli returned to his neighborhood like a minor god fallen from Olympus. Street credit, however, bought little in the Boedo bodegas, and returning to his working-class station also proved difficult. The hunched drudge of endless sewing repelled restless Homero from the family trade of shoemaking. He moved on to his more frenetic life as a metalworker, a common profession in Argentina where expensive machines imported from Europe often called for locally produced replacement parts. Here, too, the piecemeal production of tiny widgets was excessive, the hours unceasing. Before long a misuse of an industrial lathe cut his career short, along with half his right pinky and forefinger.¹

He then switched to the nebulous career track of oficios varios, odd jobs. He tried his damaged hand at bricklaying, carpentry, and travelling sales,² until he found a calling in the frequently available gig of painting homes and walls. Brush in hand, Cristalli became an artist of efficiency, strategizing with his coworkers to fill the blank as quickly as possible so they could return to their true passions.

For him, it was politics. He joined the Socialist Party’s youth group, the Socialist Youth (JS), where he earned a reputation as a dauntless newsie. Each day he skipped the tr...