Lyndon LaRouche

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (born September 8, 1922) is an American political activist and founder of various political organizations in the United States and elsewhere.

1948–1968 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.

Related Topics:
1948 - Socialist Workers Party - Pseudonym

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LaRouche obtained work as a management consultant in New York City, 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.

Related Topics:
Management consultant - New York City - 1954 - 1961

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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.

Related Topics:
1965 - 1950s - FBI - National security - Pacifica Radio - Cuban Missile Crisis - Vietnam War

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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.

Related Topics:
Economics - Cybernetics - Psychoanalysis - 1963 - 1956 - 1960s - National Organization of Women

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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:

Related Topics:
1964 - Revolutionary Tendency - British - Gerry Healy - Socialist Labour League - Catastrophism - Tim Wohlforth

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: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.

Related Topics:
New England - Communist Manifesto

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: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. http://www.publiceye.org/larouche/Wohlforth.html

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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.

Related Topics:
1965 - Spartacist League - Fourth International

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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.

Related Topics:
1966 - New Left - West Village - Free School - Dialectical materialism - Columbia University - Maoist - Progressive Labor - Students for a Democratic Society - 1988 - Autobiography - Counterculture - Ford Foundation

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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:

Related Topics:
1968 - Strike - Harlem - Mark Rudd - Weather Underground - New Left - Counterculture

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: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.

Related Topics:
Georges Sorel - Rosa Luxemburg

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