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The Early LaRouche< Background to the Citizens Electoral Councils | BEYOND COMMON SENSE | Psycho-Politics in Australia >
Comrade Lyn
“Like the French and Hispanic cultures, the Italian culture is closer to the peasant-like petit-bourgeois world-outlook examined by Karl Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire and Poverty of Philosophy".
LaRouche rejoined the SWP in the late 1960s and lectured on Marxian economics for the SWP on university campuses. He claims his rejoining the SWP was a subterfuge to expose the radical student activist group known as the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and others, whilst “pretending” at the same time to liaise with the FBI. (5)
The Left-Right Intelligence Battle Goes On
“The ADL’s central role in the official Project Democracy apparatus of the Reagen-Bush era was an outgrowth of the ADL’s long-standing position as a major agency within the US branch of the Socialist International, which has always been dominated by members of the old Bukharanite “Right Opposition” to Stalin. This link is typified by Fact-Finding Division headed by Irwin Suall, who was trained by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union of former U.S. Communist Party chairman Jay Lovestone. “ (7)
LaRouche’s Marxist Economics
“Marx’s notion of ‘extended reproduction’ on which his theory of the business cycle depends, is a clever hoax. As Marx himself emphasises repeatedly, his model of investment leaves out of consideration technological progress in the succession of these investments. On this basis, he pretends to show, that as the capital-intensity of production increases, the net effect is an inflation of costs, which lowers profit rates, and thus causes a self-feeding contraction of investment and employment levels in production. This sort of development does appear in economies which inhibit technological progress, but it is not a natural tendency within modem agro-industrial economies.”
"Naturally because of my own discoveries in economic science during that period, it is his centrally thematic feature of Marxs Capital which I recognised most immediately as a fundamental error. “ (12)
Was LaRouche always a hostile critic of Marx as his 1987 autobiography attempts to portray? In the mid 1970s he was a “reformist" Marxist and his political movement was founded on Marxist principles. The seeds of organisation of the Citizens Electoral Councils, are found in LaRouche’s 1970s Marxist writings. At the core is the Marxist debate over a concept known as “extended reproduction.” LaRouche, in 1973, made a great effort to promote what he claims is his own “original” discovery about Marxist extended reproduction.” He believed that this would resolve the problems about impotency in organising the revolution. Readers will find the original LaRouche words in this footnote (13). As late as the mid-1970s, LaRouche still believed in and was working towards his version of a Marxist revolution. He was working for a Marxist revolution despite the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Kruschev’s 20th party Congress denouncing Stalin’s crimes and exposure of the death camps in Russia; the writing of The Gulag Archipelago by Soizhenitzyn. and barely 5 years after the Soviet troops rolled into Prague. LaRouche seemed unaffected by these events, at least he does not mention these events in his autobiography. Instead LaRouche is heavily into Marxism as late as 1973 and brags that he has: “resolved the problem of elaborating the historical-materialist notion of expanded reproduction...
and that: “On this point we have made a fundamental contribution to Marxian economics by resolving one specific problem which Marx himself failed to answer"
The notations used to explain the dialectical process in 1973 are used in his more recent comments on economics in the 1990s. From a 1973 outline on Marxian economics: “The simplest paradigm for the order of conception required by such a definition of transfinite in variance is developed in our treatments of Value for Marxian economic theory, in which negentropy is expressed by a tendency for exponential increases in that ratio, S’/(C+ V).”
After over two decades of orthodox Marxism picked up in the SWP, in 1973 LaRouche was moving towards the idea that psychology and the human mind was what held the key to Marxist revolution and class warfare. This had grown out of his “discoveries” on the Marxist concept of “extended reproduction.” This “discovery” grew from his activities in the fringe world of Marxists, communists, bohemians, cults, anti-cults and intelligence operatives.
The Psycho-Political Program Begins
“Relative to its size, the SWP leadership and general membership was flooded with agents of sundry intelligence organisations, in addition to the FBI’s generous representation. This coincided with the special circumstances of the period of McCarthy’s sideshow. 1 began to develop an instinct for counterintelligence, the art of discovering what people are who are not quite what they pretend to be. In this, I was guided by the certainty, that what people really are is the way their minds work. A person can disguise what they appear to believe and what they do; they cannot disguise the way their mind works under intellectual stress. This aspect of the experience, too, contributed the germ of a skill which developed to some importance to our nation during more recent years. “(14)
LaRouche reviewed the series of lectures that he had delivered on university campuses and concluded that people were obviously “blocking.” LaRouche explains that students who failed to understand his lectures in Marxist economics gave him a clue as to a real problem in advancing the cause of world revolution: “in the effort to solve certain critical problems of pedagogy in the teaching of dialectical method and Marxian economics... Specifically ‘extended reproduction’... Of all well-known Marxian economists, only Rosa Luxemburg attained a credible comprehension of Marx S notion of extended reproduction. From studies of the outstanding secondary literature and experience with well over a thousand students in the writer’s course in Marxian economics, it was possible to isolate the form of the mental blockage which usually prevents comprehension of notions of that order It was clear that remedial methods lay beyond the scope of curriculum design per se. “ (15)
For LaRouche there was a revolutionary potential for this important discovery. LaRouche was preparing to, move into the path of human psychology, taking along with him the Marxist substructure. The thought processes of “blocked” students from the university, students who had failed to understand his lectures would give the clues to the development of a new political organisation, unblocking, mind-plumbing was the future for the LaRouche organisation. “it should be obvious that all talk of socialist organising is merely pathetic chattering unless the organisation involved first settles account with the characteristic capitalist ideology chaining the minds of workers of that sector The cadres must first begin to settle accounts with that same ideology in themselves: the educator must himself be educated ... Strip away the worker’s persona (his ideologized self-estimation) and, if one has done nothing more, one has merely confronted the worker (qua individual) with intolerable objective reality respecting his conditions ... One must be able to give the worker a self-conscious social identity as a person whose existence is necessary to the entire human race... To communicate this new sense of self to the worker, the cadre himself must have a clear selfconsciousness of his own identity in the same general terms.“ (16)
LaRouche forces would save the world from a “new fascist holocaust” by pursuing this approach of purging all his cadres of their middle-class hang-ups. (17)
pic caption In 1973 LaRouche agrees with the Club of Rome about a “biological holocaust”, but claims they are defenders of capitalism “A preliminary period of a several weeks of intensive sessions by member groups in the USA and Western Europe has made the requirements clearer, but has also shown results in the form of discernible qualitative improvements - with an absolute minimum of instances of neurotic episodes in individual participants. Despite the disturbing, although much reduced incidence of neurotic behaviours of the sort which would have occurred in any case, the result of months of successive phases of work on this problem has been a grudging but marked improvement in performance both in the quality of intellectual productions and in organising work.
From Marxist Economist To Marxist Psychologist
[...]
“I conducted a very hard interrogation, but a supportive one. It was like peeling away one layer of an onion after the other.”
The aim was to get “clinical information” to be given to a psychiatrist with expertise in drug-hypnosis cases. LaRouche debriefed and interrogated for two successive sessions over many hours. (20) LaRouche claims to have uncovered further attempts to capture, drug, and brainwash his followers in England. This motivated him further to develop psychoanalysis as a counterintelligence weapon.
“The greater part of the material we introduced to psychology is by no means new in itself, but has long existed as established knowledge outside institutionalised psychology per se. Because the fundamental conceptions were successively developed by Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, we may properly define the specific enlargement we now introduce as the contribution from Marxian psychology- “ (21)
pic caption
It is doubtful if LaRouche would recommend any of these authors on a reading list for his 1990s cadres, indeed, he has condemned some of these writers in uncompromising terms as late as 1994, but nevertheless, the psychoanalytical practices that emerged from the likes of Hegel, Marx, Kant, are still a core practice within the LaRouche movement in Australia. This, indeed, is a profound and irreconcilable internal “contradiction.” The Marxism has been dropped and hidden away, yet the crypto-Marxist techniques remain beneath a veneer of “renaissance” thinking.
"The bulk of the present writer’s literary productions and lectures on economic theory and economic analysis is essentially a replication of the Marxian point of view as summed up in Volumes III and sections of Volume IV of Capital,
and LaRouche claims to have made a “fundamental contribution to Marxian economics, "The Sexual Impotence of Puerto Rican Socialist Party” The ultimate purgative for killing anti-working class witches “and thus he personally has given the entirety of Marxian economic theory an applicability as scientific economics to an extent not previously feasible.”
And, ... it becomes our responsibility to recognise and treat the pedagogical problems arising from our initiative in reviving the Marxian revolution in human knowledge.
LaRouche writes in the 1970s that it is important for revolutionary development to understand how an economic surplus can emerge in an economy, and how it can be used by a society and its workers. He discusses at length in his writings, how the creative process occurs. The economic notations LaRouche uses in his 1970s writings are similar to the economic notations he has used in his small book, So You Wish To Leam All About Economics.
“we may properly define the specific enlargement we now introduce as the contribution from ‘Marxian psychology' ^(24)^'
According to this program, through productive co-operative labour, and through “expanded reproduction” the worker is to go through a profound mind change. By “actualising” of the human quality in producing goods and through technological advances, he becomes a real human, for: “Universal labor, expanded reproduction, and sexual potency are one and the same at root. “ (25)
Thus, it appears, if you attack the perceived sexual hangups of the would-be proletarian vanguard, then you will alter the other two and have a revolutionary process in the making.
“Mum” And “The Family” Are The Enemy
“show him his miserable childhood swanning with the sadistic mother”
The unconscious process had to be probed deeply to revea, this ‘Possessive, sadistic mother'. This “petitbourgeois” attitude had, according to LaRouche, led people to pathetic ideas like wanting national independence. These ideas had to be “ripped out” of the cadre’s mind so that the dialectical revolution could proceed in “the interests of the working class.”
“no human being has the right to believe or feel anything except that which impels him to act in the historic interests of the world’s working class."
If you are not in the “working-class,” what ever that is, then apparently you have no rights!
“irrational feelings ... ripped out and replaced with appropriate human beliefs and feelings... This in fact is not in the least cruel but an act of potent loving."
In 1973 the “appropriate human beliefs and feelings” that LaRouche wished to cultivate were Marxist ones, in 1994 a new set of “appropriate human beliefs and feelings” had been discovered but the class warfare psychology is still deemed appropriate. Could it be that “appropriate human feelings” are only what LaRouche deems them to be, and that these can change in the space of a decade?
Since the 1980s, however, LaRouche has moved close to the Catholic Church on moral and social issues. Why are such actions by LaRouche now “appropriate”? In 1974 The Virgin Mary was the enemy. By 1994 a more ecumenical approach was adopted by LaRouche. Could LaRouche have been wrong in 1974? “Ripping Out” Bourgeois Thoughts
LaRouche warns that suicide is a possibility if the interrogation process is pushed too far: “Ordinarily, outside the Labor Committees, there are dangers in exposing a person to such an overwhelming emotion. The program is safely undertaken in the NCLC, where it could not be so with laymen, since the LCer has a self-conscious identity in the world, which the ordinary layman lacks. Under some unfortunate circumstances, this experience, absolutely the most terrifying the human mind can know, can prompt suicides, or provide the impetus for psychotic collapse.“ (28)
People undergoing such therapy will attempt to be devious and evade it all: “Typically, the affected member is able to formulate the problem to be conceptualised in ample scholarly, statistical, etc., terms. The result of these preliminary exertions is to locate the notion to be conceptualised, not directly but by a process of circumnavigation of the idea to be seized. Then, the member attempts to leap mentally directly into the middle of the circle or ellipse he has defined, to seize the subject the has circumscribed in that way It is just at this point that various sorts of blockages occur, usually with definite physiological correlatives: sleepiness, fainting, choking sensations, etc. Where these physiologically-linked phenomena are clinically explored, the block proves to be a block caused by the threatened onrush of the fundamental emotion.” (29)
From these initial observations a concerted plan for “cleansing” the thought processes of their cadres was developed This was preparatory to moving into other nations. Essentially, the cultural problems of each national group would have to be analysed and worked upon: “Over the period since September 1972, organisations of the Labor committees in North America and Western Europe have been given preliminary exposure to techniques more advanced in some aspects than have so far been known to professional psychology. These approache sare being developed as indispensable auxiliary means for directly overcoming the fatal internal flaw of all socialist organisations, Lenin’s included, up to this time.” (30)
Thus by 1973, LaRouche had established a full program for thought reform for his entire political movement. The Psychologist As Cadre
“in each national sector, the general task of the socialist working-class organs . ser remand . ns fundamentally the same. His essential task is to strip away the bourgeois persona of the worker, making it possible for the worker to tolerate that awful objective truth thus confronted by offering the worker a new, positive basis for his personal identity in the political classorganising process. “ (31)
It was to be a: “revolutionary means to possess the unbound power of Prometheus, who has broken his chains ... Equipped with this weapon we will fight what really blocks the consciousness of human beings in this society, those neuroses that are the deepest foundations of ideology-. Sado-masochistic social relations, degraded libido structures make everyday life into hell. Envy, greed, distrust, sexual fantasies, lowliness, meaninglessness and bitterness, an unending sequence of human, alienated feelings, e.g. around with himself and which everybody is carrying with himself and which everybody has paid for his neuroses. "
LaRouche had previously identified an impending “fascist holocaust and now saw an impending Ecological Crisis," about to emerge. For proof of this approaching ecological crisis he turned to evidence from the Club of Rome: ”Now the Club of Rome announces the cynic terrible capitalist truth., we are in the midst of an ecological crisis which if not counteracted will bring a catastrophic end to human existence within a century. (32)
The imperative was to “assembly linen produce cadres to lead the world into socialist revolution: “A remark on the history of the socialist movement gives the necessary focus. The socialist organisations have been characterised by handfuls of actual mass organisers around which the general membership otherwise operated as apparatus functionaries or as unskilled aides to the actual mass organisers ‘in the field’. These handfuls of qualified organisers develop as such more or less spontaneously, ‘and the socialist movement, up to this time, had developed no_systematic notion of practice by which it could wilfully (self-consciously) increase the incidence of such persons within its membership. At the same time every socialist organisation has depended for its effective political leadership on the spontaneous incidence of a handful of such rare persons, to the effect that the ‘decapitation’ of that group in terms of the loss of one or at the most several such figures meant the effecfive destruction of the continued effective development and tactical direction of the organisation. ln both instances, the basis for these critical limitations on such forms of creative development has obviously been the same neurotic problem examined in this paper. Viewing such problems in the context of the brief period available to establish socialism (before an otherwise inevitable fascist holocaust), and considering the tiny nucleus of viable organised socialist forces available at this very late phase of the process, without the wilful production of an increased ratio of qualified mass organisers and political leaders from ‘mere ordinary ‘socialist cadres, there would not appear to be much hope for the continued existence of the human race during the remainder of this century.” (33)
The Organisation Goes Psycho
“Projects in the French, Italian, English, Latin American, Greek, and Swedish ideologies today are in various stages of maturity.
... what we are chiefly reflecting in the present series of papers is a fundamental discovery which implies the launching of a worldwide socialist intellectual renaissance. “ “As we have reported earlier, the immediate short-term objective of this program within the Labor Committees is principally twofold. Firstly, to launch a program of independent task-orientation and psychoanalysis through which a plurality of the Labor committee members proceed toward developing wilful powers of creative mentation - what the layman would be obliged to term the deliberate development of ‘geniuses.’ Secondly, to immediately use the progress in the Labor Committee program as a lever for quickly developing black and Hispanic ghetto teenagers - often high school ‘dropouts’- into their potential as a working class intelligentsia. Although the benefits .realised so far are merely preliminary, what has been accomplished already suffices to demonstrate what we have now begun, the rapid spread of exactly that intellectual renaissance essential to socialist transformation during the period immediately ahead. This series of reports ha@ thus begun to account for the origin of those secondary features of the Labor Committees which have already created terror among certain North American and European Communist Party leaderships, and have evoked awed reaction from such other circles as the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, the Urban Coalition, and the New York Times.
LaRouche was confident that the enemy would sit up and take notice of his new powerful discoveries: "A new force is now unloosed in the world, a force imminently more terrifying to the Philistines than any opponent on which they have speculated before this time. “ (34)
LaRouche describes the process; it was to develop his organisation on the fringe left of politics and in the 1970s did not attempt to hide it, namely to force people to recognise the leadership of the NCLC in the communist movement, to distribute socialist pamphlets and recruit cadres and then “unblock” them.
“...the Labor Committee and NUWRO organisers weekly ‘bombard’ thousands of workers in key industries across the nation. In this process, tens of thousands of workers recognise the NCLC as “the communists” of the 1970s. Tens, twenties, or even fifties in each of various locations are regular readers of New Solidarity and The Organiser. Out of each hundred or so such readers there are several active contacts. Out of each dozen or so contacts, there are one or two individuals who are or will shortly become NCLC or NUWRO organisers. “As new organisers become active in this way, their activity increases the impact of the work on the contacts in that locale. New contacts develop, out of which new organisers become active. At the same time, this process among workers affects the politically conscious persons drawn to the NCLC from other social strata.
“This begins to explain why the Labor Committees are developing while the rest of the Left is demoralised and moribund .. The Labor Committees have been the first to determine the underlying laws of the organising process goveming this problem. The differences in method and superior effectiveness of the NCLC are the result of applying this discovery.” (35)
LaRouche continues his organisational strategy and highlights the need for “provocations.” Provocation was to develop as an instrument within the psychoanalytical sessions and also within the wider community. The socialist revolutionary aims to get people to a higher mental state, and to do this you have to “provoke” a response, for an enraged response is “the most positive symptom of a conscience aroused. “ Provocations hence become a tool of psychological warfare against backsliding cadres and also the enemy in the wider community. (36) Larouche “Durnps” Marx?
This sentiment is echoed in The Science of Christian Economy, that Marxism was “common worthlessness and consequential folly, of those ideas associated with... Kari Marx. “ (38)
In that work, Marx was now a Freemason in Mazzini’s’ Young Europe’ association (page 274), a “terrible grandchild” of Adam Smith, a “knuckleheaded” populist, and a “physiocrat”. (Page 287) LaRouche insinuates that he had always been a critic of Marx. The whole Marxist formula, LaRouche now argued, was reduced simply to a: “set of simultaneous linear inequalities, purporting to represent a linear mathematical model of what Marx terms ‘extended reproduction.
He states in his 1980s autobiography (page 64-5): “My issues with Marx and Engels are much more important than my differences with the 1949-1954 SWP, and much more relevant to my development over the years. Since I had already completed the initial form of major disco venes in economic science, I thought it useful to attack Marxs economics in a different way.
“There were differences philosophical outlook, but no visible differences of any more importance than I was accustomed to in most day-to-day associations with friends and others, earlier or then.”
In the 1990s, with the renewed LaRouche movement’s push intoAustralia, potential recruits are sold the message of a Christian-Platonic crusade and the need for a new Golden Renaissance. But skulking in the shadows, waiting for the naive recruit, is the thought reform program from LaRouche’s communist days. A program that is both dangerous and counterproductive.
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