The American Leftist Redstar2000

what were redstar2000's politics anyway? he stopped posting here before i started.

Heres his page.

Just curious, does he ever still add to it?

non-Leninist Marxism is prob. the best way to describe it

How could he?

Yeah.. I was thinking like he had some sort of secretary or something.. That's really unfortunate.. :(

Unfortunately they dont supply scribes or secretaries to welfare nursing home recipients.

I was scribing for him when I wasnt working due to illness, but I've been back in the trenches myself for 2 years.

Some sort of mixture of anarchism, left-communism, and orthodox marxism.

A lot of the organizations that he had hopes for or though were potentially on the right track failed.:( I was in two of them.

yeah, I'd had the impression - no idea what it is based on - that his politics were sort of similar to Miles'. was he part of any organization?

bookmarked thanks

From syndicat:

he was a southern white communist who was on the national board of Progressive Labor Party in the '60s. he was an influential activist for PL in SDS in the late '60s (and is mentioned in Kirkpatrick Sale's book SDS). due to PL's manipulation of SDS in 1969-70, he and his PL group in New Orleans quit PL and developed a critique of Leninism. They became a libertarian socialist group -- the New Orleans Socialist Union which published a monthly paper in the big easy in the '70s, The Louisiana Worker. They were influenced by the London Solidarity group, Maurice Brinton, Castoriadis, and a reading of various council communist and anarchist authors.

In a more recent online profile he described his politics as "council communist" and I think that is a fair description. in the late '70s he moved to San Francisco and was involved in the Anarchist Communist Federation in 1978-80 (which had both councilist and syndicalist members), and wrote for their paper "North American Anarchist" and for the later independent version "Strike!". I had many conversations with him in the '80s when he was still living in San Francisco.

I don't think he was a council communist. He was too much of a stagist to constitute as one. I always thought his politics where wack tbh he gave critical support to third world nationalist movements because "capitalism needs to be developed first before communism".

"capitalism needs to be developed first before communism". that's Lenin--- and he detested Lenin.

I spent much time in the same threads as he over years.. and myself an orthodox anarchist would have put him toward council communist with huge anarchist tendencies.

He never actually stated a position here that I'm aware of.

Not recently. He had interest in/hope for RAAN and the Direct Action Tendency, which I have been a member of in the past.

I think he also had expressed interest in/affinity for the Communist League.

He called himself a communist and said his politics and writings were "communism without the crap."

He expressed interest in the Communist League when it first appeared and said:

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Quote:

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It looks to me like the Communist League is "trying something different"...and can anyone here seriously deny the need for some fresh approaches?

I will watch how they do with considerable interest -- they look to me like they are worth paying attention to.

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Here you go: The Communist League -- A Preliminary Investigation

How does anyone express internet? :lol:

He is a council communist. We have had hours and hours on the subject.

When he was young he was a hipster.

Hes also getting married.

I feel very compelled to move this to the members forum and split and rename it. lol

Please do so. This is serious subject matter and chit chat too often degrades into bullshit (fun bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless).

I suppose it depends how you define 'council communist'. If you define it as those who were in the tradition of the German/Dutch left, i.e. the historical council communists, then he clearly wasn't.

However, there is a tendency in some quarters to define it as those who argue for communism based on workers' councils, in which case it includes people like Castoriadis, Johnson and Forrest in the US, and RedStar 2000.

I think that the first definition defines what was a real defined current whereas the second serves more as a big box to put people in who developed some critique of leninism.

Devrim