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This article deals with the political and economic ideas of the American political activist Lyndon LaRouche. For a biographical article about LaRouche, see Lyndon LaRouche.
LaRouche and Marxism
Lyndon LaRouche began his political career as a Marxist, and his political ideas retain certain characteristics of Marxism and Leninism, albeit in a very incoherent form. LaRouche no longer opposes capitalism as an economic system, and his analysis of political events is no longer phrased in terms of class. To LaRouche, the main enemy is now the conspiracy of financiers he calls the Synarchy, but this conspiracy shares many characteristics with the traditional Marxist caricature of capitalism. He still expounds a basically Leninist view of imperialism. Although LaRouche is frequently described as a fascist, his politics might better be described as a mutated form of Trotskyism, combined with his elaborate conspiracy theory and based on attacking individuals and groups rather than capitalists as a class.
During and after the period of his break with orthodox Trotskyism, LaRouche's theory was influenced by what he called his "Theory of Hegemony" which was derived from Lenin's view of the role of intellectuals in being a vanguard helping workers develop their consciousness and realise their leading role in society. He was also influnced by Gramsci's concept of a hegemon as an intellectual and cultural elite which directs social thought. LaRouche's theory saw himself and his followers as being able to become such a hegemonic force. He rejected, however, Gramsci's notion of "organic intellectuals" being developed by the working class itself. Rather, the working class would be led by elite intellectuals such as himself.
LaRouche was also influenced by his readings of Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital and Karl Marx's Capital developing his own "theory of reindustralization," arguing that the west would attempt to industrialize the Third World, particularly India, and attempt to solve the economic crisis both by developing new markets in the Third World and using its cheap and surplus labor to increase profits and minimise costs. This attempt would be unsuccessful, however, and would lead to catastrophic economic collapse. To oppose this, LaRouche argued for a "reindustrialization" of the United States with himself at the vanguard of the effort allowing him to personally resolve the crisis of capitalism. Though his arguments have since been stripped of their quasi-Marxist language and citations, his core theories have remained essentially the same since the late 1960s.
Wohlforth writes:
- This scheme, which shaped LaRouche writings and agitation in the late '60s and early '70s, was presented in an increasingly frenetic manner, bolstered by predictions of economic doom. LaRouche was a crisis-monger of the highest order. LaRouche and his followers became increasingly convinced that the fate of the world rested with their group and their great leader. The problem lay with the stupidity of the nation's leaders and the boorishness of the masses. If only LaRouche were in power, all the world's troubles - perhaps even the rats problem in New York City - would be resolved swiftly.
According to research conducted by Dennis King, LaRouche developed an intense interest in fascism in the 1970s, and began to adopt some of its slogans and practices, while maintaining (as he still does) an outward stance of anti-fascism.
LaRouche and feminism
In 1972 LaRouche's second wife, Carol Larrabee (also known as Carol Schnitzer), left him for Christopher White, a younger man who was a member of the LaRouche movement in Britain. Following the personal crisis of his marital breakdown, his writings became obsessively anti-feminist, even to the point of misogynism, and obsessed with sex. In an article, "The Sexual Impotency of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party", LaRouche wrote:
- The classical case is the sexually athletic Macho who regards himself as a successful performer in bed, the Macho who has much to say and think respecting his capacities for various modes of penetration and frequency and cubic centimeters of ejaculations. The ugly secret of the matter is that he is almost totally sexually impotent.
In 1974 and 1975, on the heels of Operation Mop-Up, the LaRouche organization took a further turn towards misogyny and psychological mistreatment of its members. LaRouche issued an article called "Beyond Psychoanalysis" which instituted a regime of "ego-stripping" sessions and social coercion in which individuals would be subjected to incessant group criticism.
In her resignation statement from the executive of the NCLC, Christine Berle wrote:
- The psychological climate that had been engendered by Operation Mop-Up set the stage for a tendency which has since crippled the organization. Since the political content of any disagreement with the policies of the leadership during Mop-Up could be dismissed not on its own terms, but as a pathology . A situation was created in which members were intimidated by peer-group pressure from voicing their own doubts; and indeed the terror of taking such an independent position compelled them to actually begin to consider these doubts within themselves as the consequence of a neurosis. Hence, the transformation of an organization composed of creative individuals capable of collectively synthesizing new concepts by means of a dialectic into an organization of rank-and-file automatons.
- ...Marcus' pseudo-psychoanalytical sessions, begun in Aug. 1975 with the NEC and all people in leading positions of responsibility, provid(ing) the final link in a process that culminated in Marcus' total hegemony over the organization.
- According to Marcus, the purpose of the sessions was to create a new kind of leadership based on the capacity to withstand psychological terror; but in reality the content of the sessions themselves was pure psychological terror. What the leaders were asked to withstand was described by Marcus as the stripping away of the persona before the entire group; but in actuality what was stripped away was their very identities.
Further, she wrote:
- It is scarcely surprising that the participants of the sessions should have been prey, to all, sorts of deep-seated feelings of self-hatred and worthlessness. Or that Marcus could have been able to manipulate those feelings to the point that any allegation, and particularly one that diagnosed a neurosis, would have to be believed. Moreover, Marcus was extremely skillful at turning the group on an individual who had been selected on the basis of rumors that he had failed to perform politically during the week, so that, from a congress of leaders, the group was transformed into sniveling informers vying with each other for Marcus' approval.
Similarly, following his resignation from the NCLC, Fred Newman who is a pychotherapist by training wrote in his open letter to the NCLC: "With each passing day it becomes more and more transparently obvious that the National Caucus of Labor Committees' minimal understanding of psychosis and psychotic behavior derives not from its "electrifying" theoretical breakthroughs but rather from its capacity to produce psychosis and to opportunistically manipulate it in the name of socialist politics."
(Newman has been accused of similar psychological abuse and of copying LaRouche's methods in his own group, the International Workers Party.)
LaRouche's theories of sexual dyanamics and female domination of men resulted in a breakdown of relations between the sexes and the break up of dozens of relationships as women were attacked for being "sadistic bitches" and "witches," and for "mother-dominating" men.
Berle commented:
- Women were hit particularly viciously with this form of reductionism even to the point of tracing their sexuality to the proximity of the anus and the vagina with only the thin strip of the perineum distinguishing between the two. Marcus claimed that this anatomical peculiarity was the origin of women's feelings of degradation, since it gave rise to their confusion of the sexual act with the act of excretion.
LaRouche's conspiracy theories
During this period, LaRouche steered the NCLC further away from the Marxist left, while retaining some of the slogans and attitudes of the left. The Marxist concept of the ruling class was converted by LaRouche into a conspiracy theory, in which world capitalism was controlled by a secret cabal including the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Henry Kissinger, the Council on Foreign Relations and other standard villains of the extreme right, many though not all of them Jewish.
In the 1960s and 1970s, LaRouche was particularly focussed on the supposed danger posed by liberal Republicans such as Nelson Rockefeller believing that he was attempting to rescue international capitalism through aid schemes and, domestically, through antipoverty programs as a means of coopting the working class and Black underclass.
LaRouche developed some novel variations on the standard conspiracy theories of the day. The heart of the conspiracy, according to LaRouche, was the financial elite of the City of London. LaRouche has always been violently anti-British - a trait shared by many American isolationists - and has included Queen Elizabeth II, among others, in his list of conspirators.
In the 1980s LaRouche's political rhetoric and accusations grew more detached from generally accepted reality. Hitler had been a British agent. Menachem Begin was a Nazi. The Beatles were "a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division specifications." Both Communism and Fascism were facets of the great overarching conspiracy of the "Synarchy," an oligarchical network of financiers and manipulators who rule the world. Only LaRouche and his "humanist elite" fully understand this vast conspiracy, and possess the willpower and knowledge to withstand it. LaRouche's personal egotism is a significant force driving his politics. In 1979 he wrote: "My principal accomplishment is that of being, by a large margin of advantage, the leading economist of the twentieth century to date." Some of LaRouche's conspiracy theories appear to border on self-parody, "Who is pushing the world toward war?" he asked in "An Open Letter to President Brezhnev" (June 2, 1981). "It is the forces behind the World Wildlife Fund, the Club of Rome, and the heritage of H. G. Wells and the evil Bertrand Russell."
LaRouche claims that there is also a conspiracy by the "Establishment" and the press it allegedly controls to deny him coverage and prevent his views becoming known. He cites as evidence for this a September 24, 1976 opinion piece in the Washington Post, entitled "NCLC: A Domestic Political Menace," and written by Stephen Rosenfeld, a senior editor. Rosenfeld wrote: "We of the press should be chary of offering them print or air time. There is no reason to be too delicate about it: every day we decide whose voices to relay. A duplicitous violence-prone group with fascistic proclivities should not be presented to the public unless there is reason to present it in those terms." In fact LaRouche has continued to receive considerable press coverage, more in fact than the real importance of his organization might seem to warrant, although most of this coverage has been hostile.
LaRouche's economics
Although he has no academic qualifications, LaRouche has written extensively on economic subjects. Since he is not taken seriously by mainstream economists, there is no academic literature analysing his economic ideas. He claims that his economic ideas are descended from the "American System," a slogan originally associated with Alexander Hamilton (Secretary of the Treasury under George Washington and the main critic of the policies of Jeffersonian liberalism), and later with Henry Clay. LaRouche also says that his ideas are based on the the economic policies of Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln's advisor Henry Carey, as well as those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In practice this amounts to advocating centralised, though not socialist, state control of the economy, with heavy state investment in industry and science. Economists would classify these ideas as mercantilist, some of his opponents call them reminiscent of Mussolini's corporatism.
LaRouche's theory is that the principal subject of economics is the ability of the cognitive powers of the individual human mind to make new "discoveries of universal principles." These discoveries, LaRouche says, lead to revolutions in technology, which re-define man's relationship to nature in a "non-linear way." Such revolutions, he says, are contingent on the "viability of the culture," on its capacity to absorb and transmit new ideas: LaRouche asserts that the most historically successful variety of culture is what he terms the classical culture of Ancient Greece during the time of Plato, or the culture of Europe in the centuries following the Renaissance.
LaRouche claims to draw upon the ideas of mathematicians Carl Friedrich Gauss and Bernhard Riemann to describe the "non-linear" effects of the technological revolutions he describes, and he uses the term "potential relative population density" to describe a measure of the success of a given economy or society. According to LaRouche's followers, a Russian scientist, Pobisk Kuznetsov, proposed that the unit for measuring this parameter be called the "La" (for "LaRouche").
In practical rather than theoretical terms, LaRouche's economic policies are not particularly radical or original. He opposes deregulation, free trade, NAFTA and globalization. He advocates government-issued credits for infrastructure projects, and claims to be an admirer of the New Deal economic policies of Franklin Roosevelt. He calls for greater federal investment in science and technology, particularly the space program and nuclear energy (with a special emphasis on nuclear fusion.) Most of these are staples of both the traditional left and the modern anti-globalization movement.
LaRouche maintains that supranational financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, which he sees as controlled by the London financiers and therefore agents of the "Synarchy," are committed to a policy of looting the living standards of the world's populations through austerity and speculation, while contracting the actual productive base of these economies -- a policy that he claims is a revival of the economic approach of the German central banker Hjalmar Schacht, who held office both before and during the Nazi government of Adolf Hitler.
Despite LaRouche's rhetorical skill in presenting them as revolutionary, LaRouche's economic ideas are hardly original: they are similar to the policies of Germany under Bismarck and the corporatism of Spain under Franco and Portugal under Salazar. What makes LaRouche's ideas distinctive is his belief that capitalism is not, as Marxists argue, the principal enemy of progress. Instead he has developed the elaborate conspiracy theory described above, in which he claims that a secret elite called the Synarchy really rules the world. This elite conspiracy, he says, predates and transcends both capitalism and socialism.
LaRouche and the Jews
LaRouche has been regularly accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Jewish organisations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith have devoted much time and energy to documenting LaRouche's various writings and speeches on these subjects. LaRouche for his part has denied these accusations.
The truth about LaRouche's attitude to the Jews is not easy to determine. Indeed it is likely that there is no single truth, since many of LaRouche's statements on this as on other subjects have been obscure and contradictory. From the early 1970s LaRouche regularly used the word "Zionist" as a term of abuse. The use of "Zionist" as a code word for "Jew" is a common practice among anti-Semitic groups (see for example and ). In the 1970s also, according to Dennis King, LaRouche developed connections with the Ku Klux Klan and the Liberty Lobby, a leading extreme right group, both well-known for anti-Semitism.
In NCLC publications during the 1970s, some Jewish individuals were accused of running the slave trade, controlling organized crime, and the drug trade. LaRouche also claimed that the "Zionist lobby" significantly influenced the U.S. government. Any American professing "Zionist loyalties" was, he said, a "national security risk."
In The Case of Ludwig Feuerbach (1973), LaRouche (under the pen name L. Marcus) said that "Jewish culture... is merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim." In an editorial in New Solidarity in 1978 he wrote: "America must be cleansed for its righteous war by the immediate elimination of the Nazi Jewish Lobby and other British agents from the councils of government, industry, and labor."
LaRouche has been regularly accused of Holocaust denial, widely seen as a hallmark of anti-Semitism. In 1978 LaRouche wrote (in "New Pamphlet to Document Cult Origins of Zionism," New Solidarity, December 8, 1978) that "only" 1.5 million Jews died during World War II, and that their deaths were not the result of a deliberate campaign of extermination by the Nazis.
- It is argued that the culmination of the persecution of the Jews in the Nazi holocaust proves that Zionism is so essential to "Jewish survival" that any anti-Zionist is therefore not only an anti-Semite, but that any sort of criminal action is excusable against anti-Zionists in memory of the mythical "six million Jewish victims" of the Nazi "holocaust."
- This is worse than sophistry. It is a lie. True, about a million and a half Jews did die as a result of the Nazi policy of labor-intensive "appropriate technology" for the employment of "inferior races," a small fraction of the tens of million of others - especially Slavs - who were murdered in the same way Jewish refugee Felix Rohaytin proposes today. Even on a relative scale, what the Nazis did to Jewish victims was mild compared with the virtual extermination of gypsies and the butchery of Communists.
These statements are sufficient to convict LaRouche beyond any reasonable doubt of Holocaust denial. Not only does he place "holocaust" in inverted commas and refer to the "the mythical six million Jewish victims", his assertion that Jews died only as a result of forced labour can only be read as a denial that the extermination camps existed, a denial of the fact that the Nazis directly and deliberately killed millions of Jews, both in these camps and by means of the einsatzgruppen.
Whether LaRouche can fairly be accused of anti-Semitism is a more complex question. Neither Dennis King nor LaRouche's other critics have cited any statements in LaRouche's writings of hostility towards or condemnation of the Jews as a race or of the Jewish religion, or any assertions that the Jews as a people are guilty of any of the crimes that classical anti-Semitism ascribes to them. LaRouche should therefore be acquitted of being an anti-Semite of the traditional or classical type.
But anti-Semitism assumes different guises in different circumstances and at different times: thus the anti-Semitism of Hitler differed in form from that of Torquemada while being equal in intensity. LaRouche's critics say that he is a "disguised anti-Semite," in that he takes the classical anti-Semitic conspiracy theory and substitutes the word "Zionist" for the word "Jew", and ascribes the classical anti-Semite's caricature of the evil, scheming Jew to particular, named, Jews and groups of Jews, rather than to the Jews as a whole.
The 1978 article quoted above would seem to corroborate this accusation. In this article, LaRouche acknowledges that he accepts the classical anti-Semite conspiracy theory, with the caveat that he ascibes it to groups of Jews rather than to all Jews.
- The Czarist Okhrana's "Protocols of Zion" include a hard kernel of truth which no mere Swiss court decision could legislate out of existence. The fallacy of the "Protocols of Zion" is that it attributes the alleged conspiracy to Jews generally, to Judaism. A corrected version of the Protocols would stipulate that the evil oaths cited were actually the practices of variously a Paris branch of B'nai B'rith and the evidence the Okhrana turned up in tracing the penetration of the Romanian branch of B'nai B'rith (Zion) into such Russian centres of relevance as Odessa..."
(B'nai B'rith is a Jewish service organisation. LaRouche's animus towards it is connected to the fact that it is the parent organisation of the Anti-Defamation League, which has been assiduous in researching and documenting LaRouche's activities since the early 1970s. "The ADL," says LaRouche in the same article, "is literally the Gestapo of the British secret intelligence in the urban centers of the United States.")
LaRouche's principal target in this article is "Zionism." Zionism is a Jewish political movement supporting the creation and (since 1948) defence of a Jewish state in Palestine. For LaRouche, however, it is an underground conspiracy, existing since the 16th century. "Modern Zionism was not created by Jews, but was a project developed chiefly by Oxford University," LaRouche says.
Today, LaRouche says, Zionism is controlled by the financiers of London: "Zionism is the state of collective psychosis through which London manipulates most of the international Jewry", and "Zionist cultism is among the most important of the levers through which British criminality and miscalculation is plunging the world towards ." LaRouche attributes to "Zionism" the various crimes which the classic anti-Semite attributes to Jews: conspiracy, manipulation, treason and secret control of international finance, media and government.
LaRouche denies equating "Zionism" with the Jews. "You cannot be a Zionist and also a Jew," he writes. LaRouche can be acquitted of the charge of anti-Semtitism only if this premise is accepted. But since the great majority of Jews are in fact Zionists, the statement that "You cannot be a Zionist and also a Jew" is ridiculous. When LaRouche accuses "Zionists" of treason and conspiracy, he is therefore seen by Jews, and many others, to be levelling those accusations against most Jews. When he accuses organisations such as B'nai B'rith and the ADL, and many individual Jews, of various crimes, he is seen to be attacking the great majority of Jews who support those organisations and those individuals, particularly since he attributes to them the classic crimes of the sterotypical Jew of the anti-Semitic imagination.
In this sense LaRouche can fairly be described as having been an anti-Semite in 1978, when this article was published. He has never explicitly repudiated the views expressed in this article. In the 1980s, the Supreme Court of New York state ruled that calling LaRouche and anti-Semite was "fair comment".
In recent years, however, LaRouche appears to have modified his views on these subjects - without of course conceding that he has done so. In a 1999 LaRouche published an article called "A Personal Statement from Lyndon LaRouche on Music, Judaism, and Hitler." In this article he several times refers to "the Jew," a usage typical of anti-Semites and one which he must have known is offensive to Jews.
Nevertheless, in the course of a discussion of Moses Mendelssohn, LaRouche acknowledges the contribution made by Jews to European civilization. He says: "Germany can never be truly freed from the legacy of Hitler's crimes, until the contributions of German Jews, in particular, are celebrated as an integral part of the honorable history of Germany." The article contains several other statements in similar vein. There is even a word of praise for Walther Rathenau, an archetypal Jewish business figure.
In this article also LaRouche acknowledges that the Holocaust is not mostly mythological or a Zionist swindle. He says: "We can not allow 2,000 years of Jewish survival in Europe to be buried under the faceless stone epitaph which speaks only of a bare 13-odd years of Hitler's Holocaust." He explicity states that "Yes, Hitler killed millions of Jews," a direct repudiation of his 1978 statement that only 1.5 million died and those not as a result of a deliberate plan of extermination. This article can be seen as a significant (if unacknowledged) retreat by LaRouche from his statements of the 1970s and 1980s. Whether LaRouche can be fairly described as an anti-Semite today is thus an open question.
Is LaRouche a fascist?
LaRouche is frequently described by left-wing writers and orators as a fascist. Dennis King used this thesis in the title of his book Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism. However, fascism is an extremely difficult word to define, and has been debased since World War II by its frequent use of a term of general abuse by political activists of various kinds. LaRouche himself frequently describes his enemies indiscriminately as fascists or proto-fascists.
Most definitions of fascism, however, agree on a number of elements: nationalism, militarism, contempt for democracy and the advocacy of some form of authoritarian rule, and economic corporatism. Organizationally, fascist movements are characterized by the use or advocacy of violence, lack of internal democracy and regimentation in the service of charismatic personal leadership. Racism and specifically anti-Semitism are often characteristics of fascists and fascist parties, but are generally not held to be essentials elements of fascism: Italian fascism under Mussolini, for example, had no theory of race, and there were a number of Jews among its early leaders.
On most of these tests, LaRouche is not a fascist and his organisations are not fascist parties. LaRouche does not advocate American nationalism or militarism - in fact his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy are similar in many respects to those of the left, except that he blames its deficiencies on Zionist conspirators rather than on capitalist imperialism (marking a similarity between his views and those of right wing American isolationists such as Patrick Buchanan). His sole nod to militarism is his advocacy of space weapons. He does not advocate, at least in public, the abolition of democracy or the imposition of authoritarian rule. For the past 20 years he has devoted much of his energy to competing in democratic elections. He certainly advocated and practised violence in the 1970s, but at that time he was still a Trotskyist, and the violence of Operation Mop-Up should be seen as part of a feud between factions of the extreme left, rather than as part of the program of a fascist movement.
On the other hand LaRouche's political organization is certainly built entirely around his own personality and the promotion of his words and ideas. This, however, is a characteristic of all cults, religious or secular, and not just of fascist groups. Most of the Trotskyists sects from whose milieu the LaRouche organization developed share this characteristic.
The aspects of LaRouche's politics that most expose him to accusations of fascism are the violently abusive and demagogic nature of his political rhetoric (a characteristic of all fascist leaders from Mussolini and Hitler to Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jörg Haider), and the widely held belief that he is or was in the past an anti-Semite. As noted, anti-Semitism is not necessarily a defining characteristic of fascism, but as a result of the experience of Nazism it is almost universally associated with it, and indeed it is frequently a tenet of modern fascist groups.