An international political tendency that first began to crystallize some fifty years ago is most likely coming to a close: the movement created by by the self-proclaimed genius and elder statesman Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr, who died Tuesday.

The seeds of LaRouche’s “movement” first took root in New York City and Philadelphia in the mid-1960s, when student radicals began to attend courses on Marxist economic theory by a lecturer known as Lyn Marcus. This had been LaRouche’s pen name for many years in the Trotskyist movement.

It has often been said that the pseudonym derives from “Lenin Marx,” though there is no evidence for this, and “Lyn” is simply a familiar contraction of his first name. LaRouche joined the Socialist Workers Party in Boston in 1949 and remained in it until 1965. Throughout his years of membership LaRouche followed in his father’s footsteps as a “time-motion” (efficiency) engineer hired to speed up production on assembly lines; he also worked as a consultant to companies on how to use computers to manage their accounts. His work left LaRouche plenty of time to write letters and documents on Marxist theory. The Trotskyist leadership seems to have ignored him, and various accounts by longtime members suggest that he was regarded as peculiar or perhaps mentally unbalanced.

LaRouche himself saw things differently, of course. He wrote in 1970 that no one in the SWP could serve “as a qualified revolutionary leader.” He “viewed them as rather a custodial staff keeping premises warmed and aired out for the arrival of actual revolutionary leaders.” Only he had the command of Marxist theory to train them, and beginning in 1965 he attempted to assert his authority among disgruntled members and ex-members of the SWP.

He managed to attract a few, but in the process began exhibiting a knack for writing poisonous denunciations of opponents, often using bits and pieces of psychoanalytic terminology he had picked up in his reading. Perhaps the most striking testimony to this habit came from the British Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy — a figure who often subjected his own comrades to brutal verbal and even physical abuse.

Responding to LaRouche in 1966, Healy wrote: “In all our experiences of polemics and discussion with political opponents here and internationally, we have never read a letter or document which included such vicious subjective characterizations of one’s opponents.” Perhaps it gave Healy something to which to aspire.

In any case, LaRouche decided that he would need to build a whole new movement to his own specifications. McCarthyism had effectively destroyed any Marxist presence among professors in the United States, and this put LaRouche in an opportune position.

He started teaching a course on Marx’s Capital at the Free University of New York (an important “counterculture” institution appealing to the milieu of young people being radicalized by the struggle against racism and the Vietnam war) and by 1967 he had attracted an enthusiastic following. He was by most accounts an effective speaker and began lecturing to members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at Columbia University and elsewhere. At Columbia, LaRouche’s supporters formed a faction called the Labor Committee which played an important role when students occupied the university president’s office during a mass protest in 1968.

By the following year, the LCs existed on a number of campuses, and LaRouche began to build a small following in Europe. The formal statement of principles put forth by the National Caucus of Labor Committees in 1971 shows a definite strain of Hegelian Marxism combined with bits of psychoanalysis; it also has a certain technocratic quality, surely reflecting LaRouche’s experience as a computer enthusiast. But there are also moments when the theory follows quite strange tangents:

The revolutionary intelligentsia is thus the embryonic representation of a new human species, a Promethean species which seeks to reproduce its own kind from the ranks of the working class. This includes, in part, the development of individuals as such, but more general and essential is the work of calling the new species of humanity into being through every possible approximation of political class for itself forms. It is those forms of struggle-organization around approximations of socialist program which transform the consciousness of individual working people and thus transform a majority of the working class (ultimately) into revolutionary socialists with the same world-view and principled commitments as the founding group of revolutionary intelligentsia.

The LCs attracted a number of graduate students and young faculty, including some with scientific training. In the early years of the movement, its theoretical journal, The Campaigner, published translations of Rosa Luxemburg’s Anti-Kritik and Georg Cantor’s “Foundations of a General Theory of Manifolds.” In this respect, it was quite different from the philistine anti-intellectualism typical of the rest of the American left. But LaRouche himself constantly made apocalyptic predictions of an impending global economic collapse, and he rallied his membership around manifestos with titles such as “Our Direct March to World Power.”