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:

[FONT=Microsoft Sans Serif]

Quote:

---

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.

---

[/FONT]

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

<<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.>>

yes, absolutely.

Those are the most interesting polemics I had with him:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/reformism-...ht=redstar2000

http://www.revleft.com/vb/lenin-sex-...ht=redstar2000

I think they are quite demonstrative of his politics.

Luís Henrique

Generally I would sum it up as Marxism that abandons dialectics as well as Leninism. There were certainly anarchist (and other) influences as well.

I started reading his site back when he still posted, when I was still very new to leftist politics. Certainly a huge influence on me personally, as I had arrived at similar thoughts about dialectics, religion and Leninism (for the most part). So it was nice to have a more theoretically versed person express those views better. Naturally many leftists have significantly different ideas but I still think his writings are worth a read. If nothing else, his multiple arguments as to why communists should oppose religion are pretty necessary.

Being dependent on the social workers at his nursing home now, his views have softened a bit. :lol: That and my being one and sharing my day in the trenches of fighting for rights of those who cannot speak for themselves.....

Hes often felt sympathy for the overworked orderlys and the social workers just trying to get necessities for all the people in the facility....

I know this is just a personal observation but I wanted to share insight from my being face to face with him almost daily in the beginning now not so much.

And his writing as much more cynical than the real man, with incredible blue gentle eyes and real compassion for his fellow man.

So, quite unhappily, it was not me who learnt something on the issue.

Thanks for that, Debora.

Luís Henrique

I sat there with him as I watched him cry and yell solidarity at the television during Egypts recent uprising. If nothing else, he saw a glimpse of what hes worked for all his life. I cried with him, as I held his hand. It was such a moving experience.

I've just spent the last few hours reading through some of his site and the impression I've come away with is how Refreshing it is to read someone not just discussing the failings of previous movements but thinking about solutions in how to overcome these problems and not sticking to some rigid plan for revolution which did not succeed. In general we have too many ideologues and not enough people thinking for themselves, Red Star certainly seems like the latter.

Unfortunately some of his particularly good post collections are down on awards space, but you can find them if you look hard enough.

The link to the other pages are here.

I may have already said this elsewhere, but CotR, I think it's great what you've done/are doing for him. I can only imagine how much it must mean to him.

and a great sense of humor.

Which is much easily interpreted by reading than being face to face with him. He has such a poker face when expounding wit, I often have to look him in the eye before laughing just to make sure the joke isnt on me. :lol:

Why is this in the history forum? Seems like you're writing him off.

Not at all, its history in the making.

So, by very definition, not history then.

History in the making plus 40 years of his life. Somewhere in that is history.

There is no such thing as "history in the making", it is a cliché that people with a misplaced sense of topical optimism use. Rather history is the product of cultural memory made long after the fact and very much conditioned by the culture producing it, and often (given the inherent problem of trying to describe something you cannot actually observe) with only passing relevence to the events described. Given that Red Star is still alive, calling him history strikes me as rather like the kind of comment made by a 1950s comic book villain prior to unveiling a devious scheme to destroy the hero as well as a rather tasteless act of board hagiography. Though I do find it wryly amusing to see a thread on Red Star hovering directly adjacent to one on Stalin. I'm sure Redstar enjoys the irony of that too.

That's a very nice observation IZ. Ill be sure to share it with him.

Sent from my DROIDX using Tapatalk

i read this to him on my phone, and he had quite a chuckle at it. :)

To be honest, all the references to calling him history made me think he was dead until I read this post.