The Old Mole and New Mole Files!)
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1 “LENINST BOOMERS” BUILD “THE FIFTH INTERNATIONAL”: THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE LABOR COMMITTEE (PLUS THE OLD MOLE AND NEW MOLE FILES!) Introduction: This series of FactNet posts provides the most detailed look at the early history of the NCLC from LaRouche‟s leaving the SWP in late 1965 to the major faction fight inside the organization in 1971. The files focus most on the early NCLC in two key cities, New York and Philadelphia. However there is some mention of the NCLC group in Baltimore as well as a detailed picture of the early European organization. As part of the research, LaRouche Planet includes two detailed series of posts by Hylozoic Hedgehog (dubbed “the Old Mole Files” and “the New Mole Files”) based on archival research. Much of the discussion involves the proto-LaRouche grouping and its role in SDS, the Columbia Strike, and the New York Teachers Strike in New York as well as the group‟s activity in Philadelphia. Finally, this series of posts can also be read as a continuation of the story of LaRouche and the NCLC begun by the “New Study” also posted on LaRouche Planet which covers LaRouche‟s history from his early years in New Hampshire and Massachusetts to his relocating to New York City in the early 1950s and his activity inside the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) until he left the SWP in late 1965. WAYBACK to 1966: How it all began The Free University and CIPA: Origins of the SDS Labor Committees. (More notes from the archives) ―For two years, beginning during the Summer of 1966; the Marcus class at a ramshackle New York Free School premises on New York City's 14th Street was the motor for the growth of a tiny group, the hard core of the future Labor Committees.‖ -- From: The Conceptual History of the Labor Committees by L. Marcus in the CAMPAIGNER, Vol.7, n°10, Oct. 1974. In 1966 Lyndon LaRouche (―Lynn Marcus‖) first began teaching his classes in Marxist Economics at the Free University of New York (―FUNY‖) on 20 East 14th Street, just off Union Square. FUNY -- two big rooms in a loft that had been divided into five classrooms -- had begun as part of a broader SDS project to create Free Universities across the United States. It was administered by Allen Krebs, an economics professor 2 close to the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and the PL-dominated May 2nd Movement (M-2-M). PLP – a pro-Maoist splinter group from the American Communist Party would disband M-2-M in February 1966 and return to a more buttoned-down version of Marxism. Jim Mellon -- another M-2-M member who would later be instrumental in founding the Weatherman -- also was involved in running FUNY. [For a brief description of FUNY, see Edward Grossman, ―New York‘s Schoolhouse for the Left,‖ in the April 1966 issue of Harper‟s. Grossman reports that FUNY had come under attack from the right-wing NY press for encouraging draft-dodging. It also attracted the anger of the NY police department as well as the ―reform democrats‖ in The Village Voice who attacked FUNY for supposedly excluding individuals with other points of view that FUNY said were really agent-provocateurs.] The economist Shane Mage, who had gotten his PhD in economics at Columbia, gave a class at FUNY as well. Mage was a member of Tim Wohlforth‘s American Committee for the Fourth International (ACFI) which LaRouche had been affiliated with as well and he may have even decided to follow Mage‘s example. [On Mage and other FUNY speakers, see http://www.antiqbook.com/boox/bibman/25388.shtml.] Despite PLP‘s deserved reputation for 1930s style Marxism-Leninism, FUNY‘s teachers included such New York New Left and counterculture luminaries as the Fugs Tuli Kupferberg, Stanley Aronowitz, James Weinstein, the anarchist poet Jackson MacLow, Paul Krassner, and Robert Anton Wilson among many others. In The New York Left was also further intellectually reenergized after the long years of McCarthyism with the launching of the Socialist Scholars Conferences around the same time. FUNY‘s surprising diversity of teachers stemmed from PL‘s M-2-M attempt to attract a broad ―New Left‖ audience and may have been inspired by Mao‘s initial launching of the Cultural Revolution. PLP‘s leadership eventually turned against Mao‘s attack on leading Chinese CP leaders and reverted to its own peculiar brand of ―worker‖-oriented 1930s style ―short hair‖ politics. The wing of PL committed to the M-2-M perspective bitterly broke with the leadership and embraced not just the Cultural Revolution but figures like Che Guevara as well. Some of them went on to become strong supporters of the National Office faction in SDS that later evolved into the Weathermen. It was this brief accident of history, so to speak, that gave LaRouche his first opportunity to teach his own particular brand of Marxist economics to a group of young radicals. If you had met LaRouche at FUNY you would have encountered a tall man with a thick Karl Marx beard and a New England-Brahman accent. You would also quickly realize that his classes on Marx were nothing like anything traditionally offered before. Along with discussions of Capital and the writings of Rosa Luxemburg, LaRouche discussed the ideas of the ―young Marx‖ and works like The German Ideology and Feuerbach‘s The Essence of Christianity as well as books like Hegel‘s Phenomenology of Spirit. 3 Yet what made LaRouche‘s presentations so compelling to many young New Left intellectuals is that he didn‘t just stop there. Instead, he attempted to incorporate works like Emile Durkheim‘s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life into a discussion about alienation or discussion of concepts like ―negative entropy,‖ the mathematical critique of Kurt Gödel against Bertrand Russell and the psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie‘s book Neurotic Distortions of the Creative Process as part of a course on Marxism. Having been inside the world of the Socialist Workers Party for some 15 years, LaRouche also had a grasp of the Marxist classics as well as a good knowledge of the history of both the American Left and the labor movement. Yet none of his ideas were simply limited to a ―Trotskyist‖ interpretation of the world. Instead his ideas were very much in the spirit of the heady intellectual world of the New York New Left of the time, best exemplified by the phenomenal growth of the Socialist Scholars Conference (SSC). Given the highly intellectual nature of his arguments, LaRouche‘s classes attracted some young radicals from Columbia and CUNY. As the ―SDS Labor Committees‖ branched out to Philadelphia, he found new followers at Swarthmore and the University of Pennsylvania as well. LaRouche seems to have attracted a certain group of middle- level PLP members and other ―red diaper babies‖ who were uncomfortable with the overtly countercultural positions represented by M-2-M but who also felt that PL‘s return to Stalinist-style ―orthodoxy‖ was intellectually and spiritually deadening as well. This self-selected core group instinctively felt that LaRouche‘s new conceptualization of Marxism was far superior to the ―diomat‖ versions promoted by the old sects or the amorphous ever-alienated ―young Marx‖ so beloved by a certain strata of the New Left in part because of his ability to make his ideas credible and in part because they were themselves desperately seeking a path to Marxism that avoided the extremes of both recycled 1930s radicalism on the one hand and the excesses of the New Left counter- culture on the other, a worldview that wrote off the white working class in particular. In their view, LaRouche managed to combine a serious Marxist economic analysis that challenged the notion that capitalism has forever escaped major economic crisis by welfare-state Keynesian measures with a deeper view of society and culture that drew on people like Eric Fromm and others but didn‘t limit Marx to being just a ―humanist‖ but also stressed Marx as revolutionary. At the same time, LaRouche – like PL and to a degree like the wave of American Maoism that would bloom in the late 1960s – also rejected the rock drug counterculture symbolized by the Yippies, Herbert Marcuse, and the Weatherman in their own way. Yet behind all this there was also a fundamental belief that the Labor Committee took ideas ―seriously.‖ And LaRouche had some dazzling ideas indeed. In essence LaRouche was a unique merger of Old Left and New Left ideas. In his famous ―Letter to the New Left‖ published in the September-October 1960 issue of New Left Review, C. Wright Mills called for the abandonment of the ―labor metaphysic‖ which he labeled a hangover from ―Victorian Marxism.‖ Naturally such an idea was anathema to ―Old Left‖ sects such as the SWP, CPUSA, and PLP and the smaller Marxist sects such as the Workers League or Spartacist League. 4 LaRouche too was very much committed to the ―labor metaphysic‖ in the ostensibly ―Old Left‖ sense. However what made him so different in his appeal was that he viewed the working class far less from the cultural and ideological prism of the 1930s and far more from the view of the 1840s and Marx‘s original notion of why the working class was so important in terms of social reproduction of society as a whole and not because workers per se had some organic unique quality. In fact it was just this view that alienated many on the Left who viewed the Labor Committee as ―elitist‖ just as the overwhelming majority of members of the SWP didn‘t ―get‖ LaRouche either.