The secret history of Marxist alien hunters

[Ninshub]

I posted a few things this weekend in the political discussions sub-forum (I solemnly swear that I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Communist Party), but I've just happened on this by chance (?):

The secret history of Marxist alien hunters

The branch of UFO investigation they don’t want you to know about.

A.M. Gittlitz, Jul—14—2018

Though Ufologists tend to possess an anti-authoritarian streak (it’s hard to be pro-“The Man” when you’re convinced The Man is also lying to you about alien visitors), their singular focus on the truth being out there tends to overlook things like political economics. After all, wouldn’t the revelation of extraterrestrial intelligence be revolution enough? It’s hard to imagine that the global order — let alone the hierarchies of nationality, class, race, and gender — would remain the same after such an occurrence. But they also ought to question what it means that this new vanguard of Ufology appears far more interested in securing funding and turning a profit than bringing liberatory truth to mankind. (...)

There were also Marxist Ufologists, mainly from the exiled Bolshevik tradition of Leon Trotsky. After Stalin consolidated power, Trotsky was exiled and became a fierce critic of the bureaucracy that swallowed the revolutionary foundations of the Soviet Union and turned the communist Third International into an agent of Soviet foreign policy. Trotsky’s followers declared a Fourth International that continued to push for the communist future envisioned by the early Bolsheviks. The handful of Ufologists among them took Tsiokolvsky’s assessment that “Time must pass until the average level of humankind’s development is sufficient for nonearthly dwellers to visit us” as a messianic prediction. The aliens, like communism, linger in the air, waiting for us to make the world ready for them. (...)

While his writing on the subject made him an object of ridicule amongst his already dismissive fellow Trotskyists, this unorthodox view — along with an optimism that nuclear war would clear the way for the revolution and a strong interest in communicating with dolphins — has since earned him the status of a memetic folk-hero. In the last two years, neo-Posadist groups have emerged, including the Intergalactic Workers League — which includes a Posadist meme page and has polemicized the terrestrial left at two consecutive Left Forums — and the Democratic Socialists of America’s Posadist Caucus, which organizes fundraisers for disaster relief. The satirical reincarnation has made Posadas one of the most recognizable names in the history of Trotksyism.