Machismo, Misogyny, and Hypocrisy in Posadism

J. Posadas (1912-1981)

The Posadist Fourth International, founded by the Argentinian eccentric J. Posadas, became notorious for its leader’s enthusiasm for nuclear war and willingness to incorporate ufology and pseudoscience into his Marxist philosophy. By the 1960s, Posadism was exhibiting characteristics of a cult, with the cruel and charismatic but not particularly intelligent Posadas revered as a figure of mystic insights. “Any signs of individualism, in behavior or opinion, were mercilessly critiqued,” writes A.M. Gittlitz in his recently published book I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs, and Apocalypse Communism. “Even one comrade telling Posadas that he was ‘the best of all us’ drew a rebuke since he was not an individual, but the prime mover and sum total of parts.” [1] Posadas’s ego played the major role in the movement’s trajectory, however; and what may surprise the reader of Gittlitz’s book more than the talk of extraterrestrials or communication with dolphins is the extent to which Posadas evinced what today is characterized as “toxic masculinity” – a trait that may be inseparable from the movement’s Latin American roots.

Posadas, who had played soccer competitively as a young man, used to mandate cadre participation in matches after their congresses: “Posadas took great pride in showing off his skills in these demonstrations of the importance of teamwork, sometimes elbowing or tripping opponents to show the need to be tough.” [2] Giving expression to this machismo, one of Posadas’s representatives at an international congress of Trotskyists chastised “insane” political nemesis Ernest Mandel for “being a pussy who doesn’t believe in thermonuclear war!” [3] Further:

Homosexuality, considered capitalist degeneracy, was entirely banned. Anyone found to actually be gay, such as Peruvian section veteran Ismael Frias, was immediately expelled. Rivals, especially Ernest Mandel, were repeatedly referred to as “faggots”. Closeted members of the movement learned to suppress their feelings or at least keep them a secret. [4]

Sexually conservative – at least publicly – Posadas denounced the looseness and frivolity he perceived in his Cuban counterparts’ activities: “The congresses which they (the Cubans) hold are genuinely shameful. For example, many youth are attracted to them by women and dances,” he complained. “The meetings are simply an excuse.” [5] Those who criticized him he dismissed as “sexual degenerates”. [6]

Posadas believed “advances in technology, social organization, and human reason would destroy basic bodily urges” and that people in the future would “only desire sex for procreative purposes.” [7] “Militants were constantly criticized for showing signs of immorality,” Gittlitz notes [8], and he sometimes demanded that spouses separate in order to better concentrate on party tasks. Having moved his headquarters to Italy, Posadas invited militant Guillermo Almeyra to join him in a gesture that “was both an acknowledgment of his importance to the party, and a punishment – his wife Ana Teresa was ordered to stay in Buenos Aires so his libidinal energies would be focused solely on the party.” [9]

Is the homophobic Posadas spinning in his grave?

Gittlitz relates a British Trotskyist’s memories of Posadism’s austere morality:

David Douglass remembered him [i.e. Posadas’s disciple Adolfo Gilly] teaching at a cadre school in England. After the long day of lectures, he was disgusted to see Douglass and his comrades opening beers, criticizing them for “lumpen drinking”. Later that night, as the cadre got ready to sleep, Gilly became even more agitated. “[W]hat was going on?” Douglass remembered Gilly asking, “Male comrades and female comrades, together? In the same room together? … This isn’t a hippy festival, we can’t have mixed sexes together, all together, this is degenerate.” [10]

The party’s irascible leader at times displayed hateful attitudes toward women, exhibiting a “cruel coldness” toward Italian member Piero Leone’s wife, for example. [11] “In Uruguay, a militant couple left the party after Posadas accused the wife of committing adultery and ordered them to release a self-criticism statement,” Gittlitz recounts. [12] Suspicions of infidelity would come to occupy an increasingly prominent place among Posadas’s preoccupations during the 1970s.

As events would reveal, Posadas fell far short of his own ascetic sexual ideal:

One night an Argentine comrade staying at Posadas’s villa awoke to find his girlfriend was not in bed. His search of the house led to the master bedroom, where he turned on the light to find her performing fellatio on Posadas. The young comrade’s shouts awoke the rest of the inner circle, who gathered in the kitchen to argue about what had occurred.

It was clear Posadas had broken his own moral code, but in the weeks that followed he deflected his crime against his inner circle by accusing them of the same promiscuity. It began with his driver, a man from Florence who shuttled blindfolded militants between Rome and the Villa. One day the driver was banned without explanation. Then Posadas began to make vague criticisms against [his wife] Sierra. Leone gathered Posadas was accusing her of infidelity, but it was unclear if he was being literal or metaphorical. He remembered her responding “with an almost autistic attitude: silence, very little eating, no admission of guilt, but no defense against the accusations.”

Telling his militants that he refused to be a cuckold, he sent Sierra to live in the German section. His “farewell” speech for her was just as vague as the accusations and disturbingly as cold as all his rare references to her in internal documents. […]

As he pushed out his wife, Posadas developed an interest in a young Argentine militant named Ines. He accused her husband, Marcos, of indiscipline and sent him away, leaving Ines at the Villa to do everything Sierra had once done, Leone realized: “wiping his back after football matches, preparing the mate, and so on.”

Soon he came to make the same vague criticisms against Ines that he had made against Sierra, and, in the final weeks of 1974, a full year after these obsessive speeches on sexual impropriety, began to expel his inner circle one by one. During the process he finally made his accusations clear. He believed Sierra and Ines had been “fucking more or less all the men [who had been expelled],” Leone wrote. Posadas knew this was happening because he could hear an unmistakable coital creaking of furniture from his bedroom. [13]

“Posadas announced his partnership with Ines in a lengthy speech” after she “admitted her faults (the many acts of adultery), and thanks to that had been forgiven,” Leone remembered. “The necessity of a compañera is not a sexual problem,” Posadas defended himself. “I don’t need a compañera for this. I can get by.” Instead, he said he needed her “to have a method to elevate the affective life” and “develop my capacity for feelings of conscience, my capacity for organizing.” [14]  

Ines bore Posadas a daughter, Homerita, for whom he eventually hired a tutor, a young woman named Rene, in 1980. “It was around this time Posadas openly abandoned his personal code of sexual morality,” Gittlitz reveals:

Sex was now, for him at least, about more than just having children. “Yes, the sexual act is procreative, together with the sexual act bringing ideas. […] And they are suggested in the moment of doing it.” By the end of the year Rene became his new romantic obsession, and his old sexual paranoiac fantasies returned. On 29 October, he held a meeting to denounce two men in the party who he claimed were sleeping with Rene, a scene so dramatic he says she threatened suicide.

More accusations came in the first days of 1981, when he awoke early to sounds he believed to be her having sex with someone in the kitchen.

Posadas declared that Rene was “evil”, though he later reunited with her. [15] His steady mental decline and cycle of hypocritical sexual adventurism and paranoia ended when he died that year; and, given the extent to which today’s online neo-Posadism overlaps with dreams of “fully automated luxury gay space communism”, the visionary’s macho misogynist program of gender regimentation would seem to have died along with him.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Gittlitz, A.M. I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs, and Apocalypse Communism. London: Pluto Press, 2020, p. 84.

[2] Ibid., p. 88.

[3] Ibid., p. 82.

[4] Ibid., pp. 84-85.

[5] Ibid., pp. 93-94.

[6] Ibid., p. 152.

[7] Ibid., p. 151.

[8] Ibid., p. 152.

[9] Ibid., p. 127.

[10] Ibid. p. 138.

[11] Ibid., p. 124.

[12] Ibid., p. 106.

[13] Ibid., pp. 142-143.

[14] Ibid., p. 145.

[15] Ibid., p. 153.