Lyndon LaRouche

Lyndon LaRouche was an American reactionary who claimed to be a socialist. He was born on September 8, 1922 in Rochester, New Hampshire and died on February 12, 2019.

LaRouche's wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, was inspired by her husband's ideas and founded the Schiller Institute to continue their work.

LaRouche amassed a community after him, whose followers are known as LaRouchites. Affiliated personalities and organisations include Daniel Burke, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and the Schiller Institute. Patriotic socialists also have ties to LaRouche: the Infrared collective, Jackson Hinkle and Caleb Maupin.

Background

Early life

Lyndon LaRouche was born in a far-right Quaker family. His father was reportedly a paranoid right-wing figure who accused the Quaker movement of being communist agents (as Quakers were heavily involved in the peace movement).

LaRouche rebelled against his upbringing by becoming a Marxist after meeting communists in Calcutta, India during his time in the army. It was there that he suggested to his comrades that they should stage a revolution right away against the British colonial government, to which he was told that this was ultra-communism as they were only a handful of soldiers. This made LaRouche disillusioned with the Marxist left and was a factor towards his appeal for Trotskyism.

Trotskyist phase

After the war, he joined the Socialist Workers Party, which was the main Trotskyist party in the United States of America at the time. One of the main activities of this party was to send their members to work factory jobs to recruit among the industrial proletariat. LaRouche did not agree with being a factory worker and ended up taking a job as a management consultant for corporations as a freelancer.

Eventually, he split from the SWP with 19 other members which became the first incarnation of LaRouche's cult but fell apart soon after.

In the late 60s, he started teaching Marxism classes at the New York City Free School. He rejected the trend of the New Left (Che Guevera, Mao) and remained interested in the roots of Marxism such as Rosa Luxemburg, Marx's book Capital, Hegel, Kant, etc. This built up his reputation as a very theory-oriented and intellectual Marxist in the Free School.

This reputation allowed him to build his own organisation. The Sino-Soviet split was going on at that time and, combined with the SWP's legacy of sending recruits to work industrial jobs, LaRouche was able to find students who did not agree with those positions to join his more intellectually-oriented organisation.

National Caucus of Labor Committees

This is around the time LaRouche formed the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), his own organisation which soon became his very own cult. It was reportedly a very centralised, bureaucratic and elitist organisation. They believed revolution was imminent and that the NCLC would be the intellectual vanguard of revolution, seizing leadership of strikes and labour movements. At this point, LaRouche did not identify as a Trotskyist any more but just generally as a Marxist.

In 1969 (early on in the NCLC's lifetime), a teacher's strike took place in New York City (called the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike) to allow POC communities control over their own schools. LaRouche's group made its mark by supporting the counter-strike, which was the first event that cemented their reputation as a racist group.

Cult leader

LaRouche ran the NCLC like a cult. According to Donald Parkinson from Cosmonaut Magazine, appearing on Revolutionary Left Radio's episode on LaRouche, he isolated members from family and friends and made them work on raising donations by phone for up to 12 hours a day, sometimes more.

CIA ties

LaRouche's organisation also had ties to intelligence agencies. LaRouche willingly surrendered information to the CIA at various points in time, despite also believing his self-proclaimed communist activities put him at risk with intelligence agencies.

Controversies

Conspiracy theories

LaRouche is well known to be a conspiracy theorist and actively uses conspiracy theories as justification for criticism of ideologies.

Homophobia

LaRouche called anyone who he disliked as a "faggot" and believed that homosexuality would destroy the United States:

According to a variety of very authoritative sources, Henry A. Kissinger is not a Jew, but a faggot…The problem with Kissinger is like that of that flaming, fascistic faggot Roy M. Cohn, who is justly hated by most of the ordinary homosexuals of the United States, and a number of those from other nations. Similarly, Henry A. Kissinger is no ordinary, common, garden-variety of homosexual. His heathen sexual inclinations are merely an integral part of a larger evil…To understand the kind of faggot Henry Kissinger is, what Roy Cohn is, think back to the Emperor Nero and his court…That is the kind of faggot Henry Kissinger is. That kind of faggotry destroyed Rome. Will you permit it also to destroy the United States?

Anti-Marxism

LaRouche is also a staunch anti-Marxist because he believes Marxism is Satanic. He also claimed that he was sent by God to destroy Marxism and other socialist tendencies:

Why not destroy the common author of Walpole liberalism, Jacobinism, anarchism, Marxism, fascism, and Bolshe­vism? Why not kill that Satan whom such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Aleister Crowley worshipped? Better, why not destroy that Whore of Babylon, that Shakti, that Ishtar, who is the great whore-mother of all such Satans and Mol­ochs? Can we not do those necessary things? Kill Satan? Kill his mother, the Whore of Babylon? Obliterate such Holy Scriptual figures? Is such business of God the business of man? Are we not the Creator’s Right Arm, endowed with that reason which no other earthly creature possesses, that we, as dutiful creatures of Providence, might do precisely such awesome deeds when the time came we must do so? That is no word-play with symbolisms. The words touch the essence of the most concrete grand strategy required for resisting and defeating the forces of the threatened New Dark Age. The Creator beckons us to kill that evil “Whore of Babylon.” To obey that command, first we must track that foul mother of Satan to her lair…As Benito Mussolini referenced this, Fascism and Bolshevism are twins born of the same, Venetian Party moth­er. At the time Mussolini made that reference, he professed that the Fascist Romulus had triumphed over the Bolshevik Remus. Since Yalta and Potsdam, it appears that Remus has prevailed. No matter, the point is that they are twins, skunks of the same stripe and satanic aromas…The real, ultimate enemy, Satan's mother, has residence much closer to your home, perhaps the office of your favorite daily newspaper.

Malthusianism

LaRouchites typically misuse the word "Malthusianism" to mean anyone who supports climate change reduction, even going to the extent to call it "green fascism".