AMG

I wanted to write a science fiction story, something like a communist Illuminatus! Trilogy, with Posadism as a main part. But as I researched, I became far more interested in the actual history — little of which has been written about in English.

I visited the major archives of the movement’s internal documents in Amsterdam and London, and found additional materials in Paris, Stanford University, Mexico City, Montevideo, and Argentina. While in Buenos Aires I knocked on the door of León Cristalli, now secretary of the small International, but he refused to talk to me. Later I heard he bragged about rebuffing an imperialist agent from the New York Times. The secretary of the Uruguayan section was also reluctant to talk to me, but was so friendly he couldn’t help himself, and we ended up chatting off the record for a couple hours. I was also fortunate to meet an original Cuban Posadist at the Trotsky conference last May in Havana. Although most veteran Trotskyists I met described Posadas with little more than nasty jokes, they all had a lot of respect for the original militants of the BLA.

Through Sebastian Budgen I talked to an ex-militant of the Italian section, Luciano Dondero, who alluded to particularly intriguing untold parts of the story, like the sex scandal that served as a pretext to the expulsion of the intellectual core, and the daughter that Posadas had late in life, groomed to be his messianic heir. Other personal details of Posadas’s life, from his earliest memory witnessing the near-revolutionary Semana Trágica of 1919 unfold from his window in Buenos Aires, to his direct support for guerrilla insurrections in Algeria, Cuba, and Guatemala, his failure to recognize the importance of the ’68 uprisings, the movement’s repression in the Operation Condor dictatorships, and the sad demise as a marginal authoritarian cult, served as a poignant story — an example corresponding to the arc of revolutionary socialism’s failure in the twentieth century.

At the same time, I became fascinated with Trotskyism — which I had never really taken seriously before. Their conception of militancy was far different from what I was used to growing up in the anti-authoritarian anti-globalization milieu. I found that commitment to program a really admirable tradition my generation lacks. It also seems obvious that the dozens of global uprisings we’ve seen in the past years would be stronger with some level of international coordination, and a guiding conception of what it means to be anticapitalist, how the working class can take power, and what to do afterward.

This is not to say a resurgent Fourth International or FORA (the anarcho-communist union of which the parents of Posadas and Minazzoli were part), or any new attempt at an old model, would work. But it is important to understand what they were trying to achieve, why they were established, and why they failed. In the 18th Brumaire, Marx wrote about how revolutionaries who find themselves in hopeless situations look to conjure figures from the past in hopes of coming up with new ways to move forward. It is ironic enough to resurrect Lenin, Stalin, or Mao for this purpose, and Trotskyism always had this strange tone of self-defeatism. With Posadas, at least, there is no mistaking the irony inherent in the necessary task of creating something radically new from the ruins of history.