Interplanetary Marxism and the 4th International - Posadist

Paper number

IAC-22,E1,9,16,x70919

Author

Mr. Axel Straschnoy, Finland, Finnish Astronautical Society

Year

2022

Abstract

In 1967, J. Posadas declared to his audience at the Fourth International’s Eighth World Congress that life could exist on other planets. Posadas was possibly the most prominent leftist leader in Latin America, known for being behind a series of armed insurrections throughout the continent. So why was he suddenly talking about extraterrestrials at the most important congress in the region?

Posadas’s interest in intelligent lifeforms was part of a larger current within the left, for which the promise of a better future embodied in Communism also included the stars. Aleksander Bogdanov, disillusioned by the failed 1905 revolution, wrote Red Star--a novel in which Martians achieved what earthlings hadn’t been able to. Like many intellectuals and scientists active in the early years of the USSR, he had been influenced by Cosmism: a philosophical current founded by Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov that advocated for the colonisation of other planets as part of the execution of the Common Task.

Space and its imagined inhabitants have been a mirror onto which human societies have projected their earthbound fears and hopes, their ideas of themselves and others. Space exploration and research take place against the backdrop of this social imaginary. Illuminating it allows us to understand better the search, scientific or not, for our place in the Universe.

In this paper, I analyse the influence of space on leftist and Posadist thought and how it has shaped their discourses. I consider arguments about space travel and the presence of intelligent life on other planets from their Cosmist and Trotskyist lineages and concentrate on how the Other appears in their discourse both as an extraterrestrial and as a Trotskyist sent to enlighten the workers.

Abstract document

IAC-22,E1,9,16,x70919.brief.pdf

Manuscript document

IAC-22,E1,9,16,x70919.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).

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