Although a handful of Posadists continued, and still continue, their militancy, the movement largely faded from even its small relevance within Trotskyism after Posadass death in 1981. But the UFO essay and his enthusiasm for nuclear war remained legendary among Trotskyists and train-spotters of small revolutionary left sects. Among these was Matthew Salusbury, an intern for a magazine of the paranormal, the Fortean Times. He pitched an article that the British Posadists of the Revolutionary Workers Party were a Trotskyist UFO cult.
Although it hyperbolically leaned into the UFO angle, and unearthed, for the first time, Posadass late-life obsession with dolphins, it became the main referent for Posadass Wikipedia page, piquing many imaginative discussions on leftist message boards. In 2012, you translated the UFO essay into English for Marxists.org, which showed his interest in aliens was more than just a legend. Then, in 2016, as the insanity of the US and UK elections radicalized bizarre corners of the internet, Aaron Bastanis concept of Fully Automated Luxury Communism took off as a leftist meme.
Space was added to the schema, and a cartoonish Posadas alongside mushroom clouds, whizzing flying saucers, and dolphins leaping into space naturally followed. The Intergalactic Workers League Posadist was probably the most successful spin-off meme page. To date, its produced hundreds of memes, earned tens of thousands of followers, and its administrators occasionally venture out to a May Day parade or leftist event in character.
As a result of the memes, Posadas has become (in the Anglosphere, at least) one of the most notorious names in the pantheon in the history of revolutionary socialism outpacing his rivals and, at times, even overtaking Trotsky himself in terms of Google searches. Some have criticized the enthusiasm as cruel, citing a false rumor that Posadas was driven mad through torture, or that the Posadas memes do not take seriously the history of a movement that made heroic contributions to the South American labor movement and saw dozens of its militants killed and tortured.
Its a fair point, and thats part of why the bulk of my book offers a sober history of the Posadist Internationals origins and politics. But I also see a side of that is more positive. Young leftists today find themselves in between a century of counterrevolution and a future that seems destined to continue slowly sinking into dystopia. Posadas, who came to prominence in the 1950s as the spread of colonial revolution made it common for revolutionaries to believe a nuclear third world war was imminent, was the most extreme catastrophist thinker believing the war was both necessary and desirable, and that utopia was on the other side.
So, one way to read the Posadist memes, in absence of a potential world war between communism and capitalism, is that were fucked, drop the nukes, get it over with already. But theres also openness to another possibility that something strange and unexpected could happen, the emergence of a new Lenin, a mass, religious-like awakening of the working class, or a disaster that devastates the dominant order leaving the working class to rebuild the world on our own terms. Essentially, anyone who believes communist revolution is possible thinks something like this, even though to most people thats as ridiculous as waiting for the aliens.
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J. Posadas, the Trotskyist Who Believed in Intergalactic Communism - Jacobin magazine