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- This article is a biographical article about LaRouche. For a discussion of LaRouche's political views, see Political views of Lyndon LaRouche.
Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (born September 8, 1922) is an American political activist who leads political organizations in the United States and other countries. He is a perennial candidate for President of the United States, having set a record for most consecutive attempts at the office by running eight times. However, he and his followers have never gained significant electoral support. Although he has no formal qualifications, he has written extensively on economic, scientific, political, and cultural topics, and is noted as a theorist of conspiracies.
He is frequently described as an extremist or a cult leader, and is accused of being a fascist and anti-Semite. He denies these charges. He is regarded by his followers as a brilliant and unfairly persecuted individual.
In 1988 LaRouche was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment for conspiracy, mail fraud, and tax code violations. He continued his political activities from behind bars. He was released in 1994 on parole after having served five years.
As of 2003, he acts as director and contributing editor of the Executive Intelligence Review News Service, which is controlled by the LaRouche movement.
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Early life
LaRouche, the son of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Sr. and Jessie Weir LaRouche, was born in Rochester, New Hampshire and grew up in Lynn, Massachusetts, where his father, an immigrant from Quebec, was a shoe salesman. He was raised as a Quaker and grew up speaking French and German, as well as English. He enrolled at Northeastern University in Boston, but dropped out in 1942. As a Quaker, he was at first a conscientious objector during World War II, but in 1944 he joined the United States Army, serving in medical units in India and Burma. During this period, he read works by Karl Marx and became a Marxist. While travelling home from India on the troop ship SS General Bradley in 1946, he met Don Merrill, a fellow soldier, who was also from Lynn. Merrill won LaRouche to Trotskyism on the journey home. Back in the United States, LaRouche attempted to resume his university education, but again dropped out of Northeastern.
LaRouche and Trotskyism
In 1948, LaRouche returned to Lynn after dropping out of college and began attending meetings of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)'s Lynn branch. He joined the party the next year, adopting the pseudonym Lyn Marcus for his political work.
LaRouche obtained work as a management consultant in New York City, which included advising companies on how to use computers to maximise efficiency and speed-up production. In 1954, he married fellow SWP member Janice Neuberger. By 1961, the LaRouches lived in a large apartment on Central Park West. His activity in the internal life of the SWP was minimal due to his preoccupation with his career.
LaRouche remained in the SWP until his expulsion in 1965. He now maintains that he was soon disillusioned with Marxism, dropped out of the SWP in the mid-1950s, and only resumed his activism at the prompting of the FBI citing national security concerns. In an interview on the Pacifica Radio network, LaRouche claims that he returned to the SWP because he believed that only the Left was likely to combat what he calls the "utopian" danger coming from the Right, typified by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. His ex-wife and other SWP members from that time dispute this. During these years LaRouche developed his interests in economics, cybernetics, psychoanalysis, business management and other subjects. Janice left him in 1963 (they had one son, Daniel, born in 1956) and, in the late 1960s, she became a leader of the New York City branch of the National Organization of Women.
In 1964, while still in the SWP, LaRouche became a supporter of a faction called the Revolutionary Tendency, which had been expelled from the party and was under the influence of the British Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy, leader of the British Socialist Labour League. Those familiar with the Left in this period believe that LaRouche was heavily influenced by Healy's catastrophism. For six months, LaRouche worked closely with American Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth, who later wrote:
- LaRouche had a gargantuan ego. Convinced he was a genius, he combined his strong conviction in his own abilities with an arrogance expressed in the cadences of upper-class New England. He assumed that the comment in the Communist Manifesto that "a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class ..." was written specifically for him. And he believed that the working class was lucky to obtain his services.
- LaRouche possessed a marvelous ability to place any world happening in a larger context, which seemed to give the event additional meaning, but his thinking was schematic, lacking factual detail and depth. It was contradictory. His explanations were a bit too pat, and his mind worked so quickly that I always suspected his bravado covered over superficiality. He had an answer for everything. Sessions with him reminded me of a parlor game: present a problem, no matter how petty, and without so much as blinking his eye, LaRouche would dream up the solution.
In 1965, LaRouche left Wohlforth's group and joined the Spartacist League, which had split with Wohlforth. He left after a few months and wrote a letter to the SWP declaring that all factions and sections of the Trotskyist Fourth International were dead, and announcing that he and his new common-law wife, Carol Larrabee (also known as Carol Schnitzer), were going to build the Fifth International.
In 1966, the couple joined the New Left Committee for Independent Political Action and formed a branch in New York's West Village. He began giving classes for the New York Free School on dialectical materialism and attracted around him a group of graduate students from Columbia University, many of whom were involved with the Maoist Progressive Labor (PL) group, itself very prominent in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In the 1988 version of his autobiography, LaRouche writes that he was not really a Marxist when he gave his lecture at the Free School, but that he merely used his familiarity with Marxism as a "passport" in order to win students away from the New Left counterculture which, he claims, was financed for nefarious purposes by the Ford Foundation.
LaRouche's movement was heavily involved in the 1968 student strike and occupation of Columbia and was able to win control of the university's SDS and PL branches by putting forward a political program linking student struggles with those of Blacks in Harlem. His growing following allowed him to create a third tendency within the SDS competing with the two dominant tendencies, the "Action Faction," led by Mark Rudd (which soon became the Weather Underground) and the "Praxis Axis," which saw students as the vanguard of the revolution. LaRouche organized his faction as the "SDS Labor Committee". He criticized SDS, and the New Left in general, for being too oriented toward the counterculture and not enough toward labor. He held meetings in the Columbia area. Wohlforth attended one and writes:
- Twenty to 30 students would gather in a large apartment and sit on the floor surrounding LaRouche, who now sported a very shaggy beard. The meeting would sometimes go on as long as seven hours. It was difficult to tell where discussions of tactics left off and educational presentation began. Encouraging the students, LaRouche gave them esoteric assignments, such as searching through the writings of Georges Sorel to discover Rudd's anarchistic origins, or studying Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital. Since SDS was strong on spirit and action but rather bereft of theory, the students appeared to thoroughly enjoy this work.
LaRouche and the NCLC
After its expulsion from the SDS in 1969 the SDS Labor Committee became the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). Despite its name, it had no significant connection with the labor movement and viewed intellectuals as the revolutionary vanguard, rather than workers who were to led by the intellectuals.
According to Dennis King, NCLC's internal life became more regimented. Members gave up their jobs and private lives and became entirely devoted to the group and its leader. The LaRouche organization developed an internal discipline technique, called "ego stripping," which reinforced conformity and loyalty to LaRouche.
The Move Away from Marxism
Conflicts with the Left
According to articles in the Village Voice and other publications, under LaRouche's direction, the NCLC adopted violent and disruptive tactics, physically attacking meetings of the Communist Party and later of the SWP and other groups, who were classed by LaRouche as "left-protofascists." NCLC members allegedly engaged in a series of physical assaults on members of the Communist Party, called "Operation Mop-up." According to Dennis King, some ex-NCLC members who left the group at this time say that LaRouche was studying the career of Adolf Hitler and consciously adopting the tactics of the early Nazi Party.
The NCLC claimed that they acted in self-defense, even though all other accounts say that it was the NCLC that initiated the violence. LaRouche writes that "the FBI was orchestrating its assets in the leadership of the Communist Party U.S.A., to bring about my personal 'elimination',", citing a document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
Some of LaRouche's most outspoken opponents are to be found among those who remained in the Left, after LaRouche and his followers had departed it. According to Tim Wohlforth and Dennis Tourish:
- The parallel between LaRouche's thinking and that of the classical fascist model is striking. LaRouche, like Mussolini and Hitler before him, borrowed from Marx yet changed his theories fundamentally. Most important, Marx's internationalist outlook was abandoned in favor of a narrow nation-state perspective. Marx's goal of abolishing capitalism was replaced by the model of a totalitarian state that directs an economy where ownership of the means of production is still largely in public hands. The corporations and their owners remain in place but have to take their orders from LaRouche. Hitler called the schema "national socialism". LaRouche h