The Marxist roots of a fascist leader

(From Dennis King’s website)

(part two, part three, part four, part five)

The other day I ran into a tall African-American man in his early 30s in front of the Lexington Avenue subway stop on 86th Street wearing a sandwich board with words to the effect of “Stop the attack on Donald Trump”. He was passing out a one-page broadsheet titled “The Hamiltonian” that reeked of Larouche’s fascist cult. As I stopped to take one from him, I informed him that I had just read a book about his movement. “What was that?”, he asked. I responded, “Dennis King’s”. He frowned and told me that King is crazy and sells drugs.

The lead article in the broadsheet was titled “Russia-Gate Exposed as Total Fraud” and could have been written by Max Blumenthal who made identical points on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. Among Trump’s fiercest defenders against Russia-Gate were ultrarightists like Carlson but also that section of the left that looked to the Kremlin for its talking points: Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, Robert Parry, Stephen F. Cohen, Ray McGovern, et al. If you search the LarouchePAC website for occurrences of “Sarin gas”, you will find the same sorts of articles that appeared on the left describing the Sarin gas attack on East Ghouta as a “false flag”, including one dated April 7, 2014 that is headlined “Seymour Hersh Exposes Obama’s Red Line And Rat Line”.

Indeed, the article begins by citing the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) leader Ray McGovern, an ex-CIA agent who like Hersh and Theodore Postol was an “expert” that could be relied upon to clear Assad’s name. Ray McGovern has also been interviewed by the LaRouchites to prove that Russia did not interfere with the American elections. Maybe McGovern was in on the meetings that the LaRouchites used to have with CIA agents in the 80s and retains fond memories of these Jew-baiting, racist pigs.

In May, I began reading Dennis King’s Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism after slowly coming to the realization that his movement was the most powerful fascist movement ever seen in the USA, including those that existed in the 1930s. Next to what he had “accomplished”, Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos were inconsequential.

There are obviously theoretical questions about whether the Ku Klux Klan was fascist but it could certainly be said that LaRouche was much closer to “classical” fascism as understood by Leon Trotsky. Of course, the irony is that LaRouche spent 20 years in the Socialist Workers Party, a group that I belonged to as well and one considered by Trotsky to be the flagship of his ill-conceived Fourth International.

My intention originally was to view LaRouchism as a historical movement that was past its prime, especially in light of the time-frame of King’s book that ends nearly 30 years ago. But in the course of posting snippets of King’s book to Facebook and Marxmail, I received an email that put the article referred to above in context:

So I’ve come across the Larouchies several times while covering the Syrian conflict. While the Larouche organization itself is persona non grata in mainstream political circles, there are several Larouchie and ex-Larouchie organizations and individuals who are very active on the “alt right” and the Assadist pro-Putin “alt left.” There is a lot of spillover with Russia Today as well. it’s notable that during the 2011 Tahrir Square protests Russia Today featured Lyndon LaRouche himself as an expert on the events. Many Larouche affiliated organizations seem to enjoy very active relationships with authoritarian regimes, an alliance that has become more useful to these governments after the Arab Spring created the need for a fresh crop of conspiracy theories to justify remaining in power.

Syrian UN ambassador recently spoke at a Schiller Institute event a few months ago and he appeared very familiar with the individuals and the organization. The Virginia State senator Richard Black, who has raised red flags with his repeated contacts with the Assad regime, including a visit during which he posed in the cockpit of a Syrian government fighter Jet, has been a go to commentator on Syria for the LarochePAC YouTube channel. In a shockingly bizarre incident earlier this year, The Schiller Institute Chorus sang the Russian National Anthem after somehow duping local law enforcement into holding a ceremony with Russian diplomats after the crash of a Tu-154 crash that killed the Red Army Choir. It’s very noteworthy that the ceremony treats the incident as a terrorist attack and tries to draw a parallel to the 9-11 attacks even though the official Russian position is that this incident was an accident.

The Larouche organization has been involved in sending solidarity delegations to Damascus as well as El Sisi’s Egypt for some time and they are somehow involved in a project called “the new silk road“. I’m not sure what relationship this has to the Chinese economic initiative that India snubbed a few days ago but as far as I can tell there is a connection. LaRouchie protestors have showed up to events with signs that say things like “please join China and Mr. Xi on the new silk road.” Indeed Larouche delegations have been sent to Egypt and Syria with the explicit purpose of pushing this concept. This YouTube video from LarouchePAC from last week, hypes the Chinese conference. Apparently Larouche has been devoting a ridiculous amount of resources to promoting an obscure Chinese economic initiative for several years now. I think there is really something to this story because the LaRouche organization has been pushing for a “New Silk Road” for at least 3 years. Here is a video from 3 years ago of LaRouche talking about this were he mentions the Chinese leadership.

Trolls and Dupes

Navsteva

Scott Gaulke is a Wisconsin-based LaRouche follower who has developed quite a reputation for trolling and stalking under his online personality “Navsteva.” At one point Gaulke claimed to have visited Damascus but presented images that were taken by Ulf Sandmark, a Swedish LaRouchie who had visited on a solidarity delegation, which incidentally was named “the new silk road.”

Caleb T Maupin

In this image, Caleb T Maupin, the Russia Today journalist who was described by Trump as his “favorite journalist” can be seen with former Larouche candidate Webster Tarpley, who once notoriously claimed that AIDS was an airborne disease and that AIDS patients should be locked up. Tarpley has also been a fixture of Assadist circles for a while, this 2015 video from a bizarre meet up of Assadists features Tarpley and is absolutely hilarious to watch when the crowd turns on the speakers.

I’m sure if you follow the money there is something going on with the “New Silk Road” talk.

I hope this is useful and let’s stay in touch

It is my intention now to post three articles about LaRouchism, with this one leading off the series. It will cover LaRouche’s political evolution up until the point when he abandoned Marxism in the mid-70s, even of the most aberrant variety. Next I will review the heydays of the movement that coincides with Dennis King’s time-line and that will be based to a considerable degree on his exemplary investigative journalism. Finally, I will cover the period from 1990 to the present day with particular attention paid to the affinities between LaRouche’s movement and the Red-Brown movement coalescing around Vladimir Putin, Breitbart News, Infowars, Alexander Dugin, et al.

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr., was born in Rochester, New Hampshire on September 8, 1922. His father was a French-Canadian immigrant and Quaker. After developing an interest in philosophy in high school, he grew to question his parents’ beliefs.

He was drafted into the army in 1944 and send to India where he came in contact with Communists. When he urged them to lead an uprising in Bengal, where the British had caused a famine, they rejected his proposal. This led him to say in a 1974 memoir to become a Trotskyist. Nine years later, after he had become a full-fledged fascist and a presidential candidate, he told a different story. He said that the love of Indians for American capitalism left him gratified.

In January, 1949 Lyndon LaRouche joined the Boston branch of the SWP during the height of the Cold War witch-hunt. He went to work on the assembly line in the GE plant in Lynn as part of the party’s “colonization” of industry, a strategy that was relaunched nearly 30 years later and with the same degree of success: none.

In 1954, LaRouche moved to New York and married a party member named Janice Neuberger that I met at a get-together at Cynthia Cochran’s apartment in 2005. Janice and Cynthia were long-time friends, bonded by their affiliation with the Murray and Myra Tanner Weiss grouping in the party that LaRouche gravitated to as well. It was around this time that he became interested in cybernetics and began a career as a management consultant with the George S. May Company, “often making a thousand dollars a week or more helping corporations reduce labor costs” as reported by King.

In 1965 LaRouche hooked up with Tim Wolforth, the leader of the tiny sect that supported Gerry Healy’s version of the Fourth International. Apparently LaRouche was impressed with the authoritarian and cultish environment of Healy’s sect in England that exercised the kind of bullying mind control over his own membership. He also valued the violence Healy resorted to against those outside his movement, including my friend Ernie Tate.

By 1966, he decided to reorient to the New Left and particularly its largest and most influential group, the Students for a Democratic Society. And within SDS, he oriented to the Progressive Labor faction that was Maoist at the time. He found a small band of followers within PLP organized as the Worker-Student Alliance. A number of the faction were students at Columbia University at the time and found his arcane interpretations of Marxist economics irrestible.

In 1968, there was a student rebellion at Columbia led by SDS. In addition to Mark Rudd, another key leader was Tony Papert, a PLP/SDS member who was a follower of LaRouche. That summer LaRouche gave classes in Marxism at a fraternity house that had been turned into a “liberation school”. By this time Papert, who had been expelled from PLP and become totally committed to LaRouche, launched the SDS Labor Committee that essentially marked the beginnings of LaRouchism as a movement. Like some other SDS Labor Committee members from that period, Papert remains in the movement’s leadership.

After the split in SDS precipitated by the clash between Mark Rudd’s Weatherman faction and the PLP-led Worker Student Alliance, the organization began to leak demoralized members, some of whom were willing to join the National Caucus of Labor Committees founded by Tony Papert. By 1973, the NCLC had 600 hard-core members totally devoted to Lyndon LaRouche who would soon exploit a disciplined and politically experienced cadre as a battering ram against the left.

Was there anything in LaRouche’s Marxist economic theories that could explain his evolution into a supporter of the capitalist system based on a fascist state? To understand this, I strongly recommend the pseudonymous Hieronymous’s article titled “Capitalism and productivism in Lyn Marcus’ dialectical economics”, which is an analysis of LaRouche’s “Dialectical economics: an introduction to Marxist political economy”, a 481 page tome written in 1970 but only published by a vanity press 5 years later. In the lead paragraph, Hieronymous reduces it to a call for capitalism based on planning—a concept that clearly overlaps with the classic definition of fascism as a kind of corporatist state.

While much of “Dialectical Economics” is a fairly conventional presentation of the basic principles of Marxism, including the falling rate of profit, there are signs that LaRouche was veering off into the kind of techno-optimism that runs through his entire ideological edifice. He writes:

[it] is the wildest presumption imaginable to calculate the space and resources available for human existence solely in terms of the earth. Since there is no possibility that human existence will continue beyond this century without the massive conversion of our technology on the basis of thermonuclear fusion, and since that realization means the most ex- plosive scientific advances in the history of mankind, it is the wildest delusion, a literally pathetic delusion in every respect, to doubt that man will soon be populating the moon and Mars. Entering solar space on the rocket of thermonuclear revolutions in technology, man will — as no responsible specialist doubts — instantly begin to bring the massive energy output of the sun under his control. What lies beyond that may be relative speculation for the moment, but it would be the wildest speculation to imagine that anything less than the most explosive and titanic advances in man’s mastery of the universe are not unfolding for our species once we have safely negotiated the difficulties just ahead.

There are also indications that LaRouche’s prior career as a management consultant prompted him to offer suggestions that would make the capitalist system work better. They include forcing capitalist firms to include “externalities” such as water pollution into the costs of production, something that Hieronymus regards as useless under the capitalist system since it is unenforceable as should be obvious from Trump’s naming Scott Pruitt to head the EPA, an agency he has fought for decades.

He also advocates investment in infrastructure, including urban mass transit, railroad systems, and roads. This must explain his website’s breathless endorsement of the Trump presidency: “And now in the United States, a President has emerged who rejects the Imperial divide of the world, who rejects regime change, and who promotes friendship and collaboration with Russia and China, both to defeat terrorism, and to cooperate in the Belt and Road Initiative to meet the common aims of Mankind.” (The Belt and Road Initiative is a reference to China’s Silk Road economic development project that people like Pepe Escobar regard as benign globalization.)

Back in my days in the Trotskyist movement, I used to hear references frequently to one of the main goals of socialism: overcoming the breach between intellectual and physical labor. This was how Marx put it in Critique of the Gotha Program:

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

And this is how Lyndon LaRouche, a 20 year veteran of the Trotskyist movement who moved on to a career as a management consultant before morphing into a dangerous fascist leader, considered the relationship between intellectuals and those who do physical labor according to Hieronymus:

From all this, one gets the following sense which is difficult to doubt: Resting on this unrelenting development of productive forces, Marcus’ [LaRouche’s “party name”] vision necessarily entails a “leadership,” a regime of specialists (political economists, accounts, actuaries, scientists, architects, administrators “and others” not the least of which would be Marcus himself). In their “mediation” as “’experts’ on each category of human need” and in “using concrete professional skills to mediate its [the working class’] comprehension of technology and other phenomena”, they inhabit an institutionally distinct space, that of “centralized planning.” Their activity is crudely that of counting and calculating and on this basis creating a plan and whatever options it affords. We consider these very much bourgeois “activities” in the narrow sense of engaging economic rationality. Meanwhile the mass of workers would discuss this plan which is simply presented to them fully formed. According to Marcus, this means an “interchange” between leaders and workers occurs “within the class as a whole.” It signifies an “extended debate about economic problems” transpires between two groups. But it is only one which “thinks” and in so doing generates (even if only in the bean counting, numerically manipulative fashion of the bourgeoisie) the fabled plan. The other discusses the options or ready-made alternatives presented to it. Marcus calls this discussion about the economic programs” “a kind of organic celebration.” He appears to believe that human creativity does not of necessity immediately and directly involve generating the alternatives. Instead, it is a matter of having it done on workers’ behalf by “experts,” “professionals” and “leaders” who pursue “socialist accumulation” as the “centralized agencies of the class as a whole.”

In my next post, I will address the question of how this repellent but fairly conventional technocratic/elitist formula helped to lead LaRouche and his followers to become allies with the KKK and neo-Nazis, meet with officials of the Reagan administration, build up a treasury of millions of dollars, and run hundreds of campaigns around the country including Lyndon LaRouche’s periodic run for President.